3 Tips for Creating Your VBS Budget
It’s VBS season for kidmin. It’s one of the biggest events of the year and for me always takes the most time. I’ve written a lot about VBS over the years. You can see those posts here.
Because VBS is one of the biggest events it’s also the most expensive. The church I grew up in did a giant VBS every year. Their budget was close to thirty thousand dollars! I’ve never spent that much. Most of the churches I served required me to stay around $5,000 for a VBS of one to two hundred kids.
I often see questions from people asking their VBS budget. How many kids? How big is your church? How much do you spend? Those are all great questions because your budget will depend on those three things, the size of your church, the size of your event, and how important it is to the church’s outreach strategy.
I served at one church of 400 with a VBS that grew from 100 to 250 kids. My budget was pushing $10,000, but the entire church was involved. Over half the adults volunteered and the entire staff helped make it happen. I served at another church of 1500, and my budget was fixed at $5,000. Even though my VBS attendance was about the same, this event was just one of many outreach events throughout the year. It was mainly a kidmin event and relatively few adults and staff helped make it happen. As with all budgets you make it work with the money that’s provided.
When designing your VBS budget, there are two types of costs you need to consider.
Fixed costs
Fixed costs are things that no matter how many kids you have coming to your event, these numbers will be the same. Some examples would be advertising, decorations, training events, and the after party. As my VBS grew over time, I noticed that these numbers didn’t really change with the size of the VBS. I still had to decorate the same rooms, advertising was about the same, and I ordered the same amount of inflatables year after year.
So, when making your budget, think about what you’d like to spend on these things and set a budget. For advertising, I spend between $500 to $1000 on banners, google ads, Facebook ads, website, invite cards and more. For decorations, I spend from $500 to $1500. That number really depends on my curriculum. Each one emphasizes decorations differently. When I did Group VBS they wanted every room, the halls, and the stage decorated to the max. Orange and Mega Sports Camp only talked about decorating the stage.
Personally, I’ve decided to create several large set pieces for the stage and have a smattering of other things down the halls and in the rooms. I’d rather save my cash to spend on the kids than making the room look like a medieval castle by covering everything in gray butcher paper.
My stage for Power Up VBS used a lot of large statement pieces instead of decorating everything.
Variable Costs
Variable costs are the items you need to buy based on how many kids and/or volunteers you’re planning to have. A lot of the items you buy from the company are one per crew (read small group), one per crew per station, or one per kid. You have to figure all that out when making your budget.
To set your variable costs months before the kids show up, pick a number of kids you plan to have. If you’ve done VBS before, you can look back at your previous attendance and add a little based on faith. Through my experience, I’d suggest no more than 10%. You don’t want a bunch of extra supplies laying around afterwards.
If your church has never held a VBS or it’s been a long time since your last one, then look at your kids average Sunday attendance and double it. Not every kid who comes on Sunday will come throughout the week, but there will be other kids in your town who will make up the difference. Make sure, however, if you’re doing just an elementary VBS that you only count your elementary average attendance. If you count the nursery kids too, your number may be way off, and you’ll have a lot of things to return.
Some variable costs are crafts, snacks, wristbands, t-shirts, and other give aways. For every additional kid, that’s another cost to consider. Whenever I considered adding something new to my VBS, I always tried to figure out how much it cost per kid. Breaking your costs down to just one kid makes sure you don’t go overboard with one item while neglecting another.
Budget Saving Tricks
VBS can get expensive quickly, but there are some things you can do to save some cash.
Ask for Donations
One thing I’ve done every year is a donation wall. I’ll figure out what supplies I need and how many and then come up with a cute way to display the needs. One year, I did a video game theme, and the donation tags were the dots Pac Man eats. Every week, he got closer to clearing the board and every week, I collected more supplies I needed for VBS.
These supplies helped my overall kids budget as well. I never had to ask for crayons, markers, or scissors for my Sunday morning small groups, because we always resupplied at VBS. I saw one church that would take all the VBS craft supplies, put them in a box, and store them for next year. Don’t do that. Share your supplies and don’t be afraid to ask for more. You can read more about how I made the donation wall in this post.
Borrow from your kidmin budget
Speaking of your kidmin budget, sometimes there’s a lot more room there than in your VBS budget. I used to look at all those kids from other churches wearing their fun VBS shirts and wish I could make that work for my church. But my VBS budget didn’t have the room. That’s when it occurred to me. I have room in my kidmin budget for shirts. So instead of trying to do two shirts in the year, I just made one generic kids shirt that I gave out at VBS. My kids and volunteers all had our church’s shirt, and I charged a different account.
Partner with other churches
Finally, my favorite way to save on the budget and practice generosity is to share decorations. Most likely a church in your area is doing the same VBS you are. Instead of both of you creating your own décor, share them!
One year, I partnered with another church about 45 minutes away. Months before the event, we made décor plans and split up responsibilities. Her VBS was a week before mine, so I had to get everything ready a little early, but she had great items I would have never thought to create. It made both of our VBSs better.
When our VBSs were over, we found another church and donated all of our décor. A lot of people in your church (maybe even you) say you can save it and use it again another year. I’m going to free you now. You won’t. It’ll just sit in a storage room for a couple of years and then you’ll throw it away. Let it have more life and give it to someone else. My favorite piece of décor I ever created was a four foot by eight foot NES controller. It was amazing and I was sad to part with it. But that one piece made it to four other churches before the summer was over. That’s kingdom minded.
We made this NES controller out of insulation foam. We added sides and a cord so it could stand on its own. You can see the whole thing in the stage picture above.
Making a proper budget for your VBS is essential to its success. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does take some detail work and a little math. You don’t have to pay for everything new. Reuse items, ask for donations, share with other churches, and hold fundraisers. All that work will help you achieve your ultimate goal of reaching more for Jesus.
Related Posts
With the end of the summer, we start to look at all the things we did and ask if they were effective. One of the biggest questions I see this time of year is “What are churches doing other than VBS?”