End Of Year

The Marriage Hub is instituting its 45-day fundraising blitz! We are so blessed to continue our mission of saving marriages on the brink of divorce, and our time doing so has shown great success. However, we have been working through some “systemic challenges” that necessitate this special fundraising effort. 

Here is a quick overview with more details below:

Quick Overview:

• We have a cashflow crisis at the Marriage Hub.
• We need to raise $80,000 by September 1, 2024, to ensure we can meet our obligations and sustain our ministry to couples.
• This was caused by our website “breaking”, leading to a dramatic drop in the number of couples attending our intensives.
• Couples attending our weekends provide a significant source of the revenue we need to minister to hurting couples.
• We have built a new website and hired a marketing company to help remedy our problem.
• We are seeing a positive number of inquiries and couples signing up!
• But we are left with an $80k ‘hole’ that needs to be filled immediately.
• If we fail to meet this need, we may be forced to lay off staff and do some restructuring.

More details:

How is the ministry doing?

As we assembled our budget for 2024, we were coming from 7 straight months of record numbers of couples attending our intensives. We have been growing about 20% per year for the last several years. So, we created plans for continued growth and added several new full and part-time staff to help us keep up with our need to serve more couples.

What happened that you have this need?

1. In late January this year, we became painfully aware that, due to the age and obsolete programming language it was created with, our website security was out of date and could not be repaired. We were receiving unwanted robot generated spam e-mails, contact requests and malware to our site. Our tech security was threatened.
2. We worked quickly to get our “new” website up and running; but soon discovered another problem! All of our Google “reputation” vanished when we took down our old site. In essence we lost our high ranking in Google’s search engine. Lower “reputations” are a double whammy. It means 2-3x less organic traffic and 3x more ad cost to get the same placement we had before. 90+% of our couples find us on Google!
3. The result of this “broken” website was a 28% decline in the number of couples attending our intensives from January to June. This sharp decline has created a substantial shortfall in our budget.

What have we done to “fix” these problems?

1. Due to the complexity of Google Ad Word campaigns, we have hired a marketing company to help us restore our status on Google and bring us the number of inquiries we need to make our 2024 plans a reality.
2. We have created 3 “Contingency Plans” that our Board of Directors will be signing off on this week Worst Case Scenario: assumes our marketing doesn’t grow and we experience a significant drop in revenue due to lack of couples attending our intensives. This would lead to some significant budget and staffing cuts but will allow us to continue to serve the couples who find us.
3. Best Case Scenario: assumes that our new marketing efforts are effective and will bring us back to our projected growth for the ministry. (We are pleased to say we have seen a positive bump in our inquiries and the number of couples signing up for our weekends!)
4. Most Likely Scenario: assumes a gradual come back to the number of couples attending that may take the rest of the year to get back to previous levels. Which would result in some less severe staffing and budgeting issues.

No matter which of these plans is enacted we have an $80,000 shortfall from our loss of revenue from January through June.

What can You do to help?

1. Join us in prayer for these vital needs to be met and for the future of our ministry.
2. Please consider a special gift towards this immediate need. If a donation is not feasible now, a pledge with a clear amount and timetable would be immensely valuable.

We are deeply committed to our mission of giving couples in crisis the help, healing and hope in Jesus they need to thrive. We are seeing God do amazing things in the lives of the couples that we have served this year! Here’s a recent testimony from a couple that was separated:

Words cannot express our gratitude for you leading us down the right path. God definitely worked wonders this past weekend and we cannot be more grateful!! My husband moved back in and things are good! We’re having lots of conversations and finished our first “Heavy Lifting” (part of our 15-week follow-up program.) I hope and pray that our lives are blessed with many, many more years together. Thanks again

THANK YOU for your support in helping us help couples. Your investment in the Marriage Hub is changing lives and legacies. Thanks too for considering this urgent request and for your prayers, they are greatly appreciated.

Because of the seriousness of this issue and the potential impact on our ministry, we began tracking our progress weekly. Here’s an update:

Averaged – 3 couples per week Jan 1-Jun 30, 2024 (needed 4 couples per week to hit budget)

• July 7-13, 2024 – 6 couples signed up
• July 14-20, 2024 – 5 couples signed up
• July 21-27, 2024 – 5 couples signed up
• July 28-Aug 3, 2024 – 1 couple signed up
• Aug 4-10, 2024 – 5 couples signed up
• Aug 11-17, 2024 – 4 couples signed
• Aug 18-24, 2024 – 3 couples signed
• Aug 25-31, 2024 – 9 couples signed up!!! (Record week for sign-ups!)
• Sept 1-7, 2024 – 2 couples signed up
• Sept 8-14, 2024 – 3 couples signed up
• Sept 15-21, 2024 – 4 couples signed up
• Sept 22-28, 2024 – 5 couples signed up

Averaging – 4.3 couples per week since July 7

While we’d love to see a straight line of consistent couples signing up to our program, we continue to see some higher weeks and some lower weeks.

Our new marketing company shared it will take at least three months before their efforts will be fully maximized.

Our financial shortfall from decreased intensive revenue was $147,992 throughout the first half of the year. We’re praying and trusting that our marketing recovery continues, and that number doesn’t grow.

As a non-profit, a significant amount of our funding typically comes from End of Year giving. We built our budget on charitable end of year giving of $219,250. With this loss of revenue our new End of Year need was $367,242. Praise the Lord … we already raised $80,000 from our initial appeal …

So … our current End of Year financial need is $287,242.

That’s a God-sized number for us to raise. In 2023 and 2022, we raised $216,820 and $218,957 respectively.

To meet this vital need, we must raise about $70,000 more than our average. It’s a God-sized ask but we’re so thankful we have God who can provide, and friends like you who are willing to pray for and invest in marriages!