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Jeff Kliewer is the founder of ViewSpark. He has worked in fundraising for over 30 years and brings much experience to this episode. Jeff has taken his experience with fundraising and, through ViewSpark, has put a powerful way to connect with your donors right at your fingertips. In this episode, Jeff shares a variety of topics, including:
Why Customer Feedback is Critical for Innovation
Jeff shares how ViewSpark customers started using the product in ways he had never imagined and how those experiences have helped shape their product development.
How Real-time Information Matters
It is one thing to tell your donors what their funds are doing to make the world a better place. It is an entirely different thing to show them firsthand. Jeff shares stories about rescue missions in Maui using ViewSpark to give real-time impact updates.
Showing Impact Means Being Authentic
Ministry work can be messy, yet we often feel like everything we produce must be polished and shiny. But donors want to see the impact they are having firsthand. Jeff shares a story of how one customer shared a video during a massive snowstorm about the need to help their homeless neighbors living in that very storm. Simple and real wins over polished messaging every time.
Why Video and Text is a Winning Combination
As a digital communicator, you know how hard it is to get your message seen and heard. Jeff shares tremendous response rates made possible by the video and text message combination. He also shares why these rates get amplified when you send the content your recipients have been waiting to watch.
This episode is full of powerful stories and practical tips on how to better serve your donors with authentic, timely video updates from the field.
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During this talk given at the Digital Ministry Conference in 2022, Aly Hammond & Chip Johnston from Virtuous provide 8 responsive mindsets that ministries and organizations can utilize to solve some of the big problems that many non profits are facing today.
Personal For All
How do we treat all donors the way we treat major donors? This doesn’t mean you’ll have the capacity to take all your donors to dinner, but it does mean you can send every donor a personal thank you email, call and text. If you have hundreds of thousands of people in your database of donors, you can followup with all your donors in a highly personalized way based on what they’ve done.
Innovate, Experiment and Embrace Failure
It’s important to try new things and get really comfortable with failing.
Focus on Trust
Relationships thrive on trust and accountability. Donors have rightful expectations that whoever they’re donating to will do what they say they will do. Jennifer McCrea from the Generosity Network puts it like this:
“Resources will tend to flow naturally towards you when you focus on the most important aspect of the fundraising process: creating human connections”. Donors tend to continue giving when they feel connected with and have confidence in the organization they are involved with.
Value Motivational Insights Over Behavior
It’s incredibly important to understand somebody’s intent. What’s their connection? Why are they giving? What’s their motivation for giving? The first thing to find out is “why”. Listen so you can understand the intentions of your donors so you can serve them in the most effective way possible.
Breaking Down Silos
Combining your people, platforms and processes to work in harmony together will help build deep, authentic donor relationships at scale.
Be Abundantly Thankful
Generosity breeds generosity. Don’t lose sight of the sacrifice that your donors are making with their time and money. Rather than treating donors like an ATM, lead with gratitude and provide highly personal and meaningful experiences.
Design Plans, Adapt, Stay Curious
Write out your plans in pencil. Be willing to fail and learn from your failures. “Some organizations will thrive from this increased chaos, some will be unprepared and some will merely fight it and lose.” as Seth Godin put it.
View Generosity Beyond the Transaction
There are often so many transactions, it’s hard to see beyond it. Ask questions like:
What was the mindset behind that donation?
Why did it take place?
Take steps to focus on personalization in order to best serve donors based on who they are as a whole.
To listen to the entire talk, listen to episode #74 of the Ministry at Scale Podcast.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Anthony Elliot is a senior software developer at Five Q. On today’s episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, Anthony joins Chad to talk about conversion tracking and why it’s so important.
For many people unfamiliar with conversion tracking, there’s one big question: what are conversions?
As Anthony put it, it has similarities to a spiritual conversion. Much like how a spiritual conversion involves a person on a journey through life interacting with something that causes a change, a conversion on a website happens when a user comes to a site and interacts with the site in some way. This could include signing up for an email list, engaging with articles, posting on social media or even donating.
Conversions are important because they provide data in order to more effectively use advertising in ways that actually work. You can start testing and optimizing based on how you know people interact with your online presence.
In order to track conversions, you need to know the journey that a user takes. Asking questions such as these can help you to understand how people interact with your site:
What are they doing on your site?
How long are they on each page?
Are they a recurring donor?
The process to set up conversion tracking can be done many ways, but the way that Anthony and the 5Q team have done it successfully is to set up Google analytics to track conversions. It can be a daunting task to begin understanding this process, but Anthony gave an example about how it works. If you wanted to track donations, for example, you can create a “thank you” page that users are taken to when they donate. You can set up google analytics to track how many people visit that specific url each day, thus tracking the number of people who donated in any given day. Another way to track this is to link your Google ads account to Google analytics in order to capture which ads are most successful and which ads need adjustment.
To learn more tips about conversion tracking and how to do it well, listen the the entirety of episode #74 of the Ministry at Scale Podcast.
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In this session from the Digital Ministry Conference, Pete Marra, the Vice President of Innovation at the Colson Center discusses how to get started with risk mitigation for your ministry.
Your Ministry is Like the Three Little Pigs
In the story of the three little pigs, each pig picked different materials to build their house, one used straw, another used sticks and the last pig used bricks. When the Big Bad Wolf stopped by and began huffing and puffing the results were often disastrous for the little pigs. Your ministry is likely built on straw, sticks or bricks as well, though it is most likely a combination of materials and risk assessments will help you identify the areas your ministry is being held together by straw.
Building Resilience Through and N+1 Mindset
N+1 comes from network administration. It stands for Node plus 1 which means you have your main node (server, channel, means of communication etc.) plus an alternate or backup in case something happens to the main node. When thinking about this in your ministry you need to think beyond just your data, you need to think about N+1 in terms of people, processes, and technology.
The 4 A’s of Risk Mitigation
Assessment - What is it that you are going to measure to assess the risk score of your ministry. This will be based on probability and impact.
Alignment - This is about bringing agreement across your team as to what your risk is and how you will handle it.
Assignment - This is where you decide who will head up your risk mitigation plan.
Action - This is where you put your plan into action and start building resilience into your ministry.
Resilience Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive
One simple way to ensure you don’t lose your data is to download it from the cloud and store it offline somewhere. For example you could get a backup of your email list.
Bottom line Pete, wants to make sure that the biggest takeaway you have from his talk is to get started, anything you put in place is better than having nothing in place to mitigate risk. Pete shares many more practical ideas so be sure to listen to the full episode, but whatever you do, get started now.
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John Cobb is the Vice President at Ligonier ministries. He started looking into Web3, Blockchain and the Metaverse simply as a way to understand what they are and how they could impact ministries going forward. What he found is that there are three main buckets he thinks ministries should be considering. The three categories are community, content and censorship.
Community
When he first began he discovered NFTs since he has an interest in art and photography but found that it goes beyond the art, NFTs can also be used to build community and show membership in a specific community. When building a community one thing that is important is owning the community so that it is not fully dependent on a platform that you don’t control. Many people think of this in terms of collecting email addresses or other contact information so you can still reach them if the platform goes away. Blockchain and decentralization take this one step further by allowing the platform for communication to be secure and resilient.
Content
When it comes to content there is the possibility of censorship and deplatforming coming in America, but there are many places around the world where censorship is already in place, and there is a real risk for those who spread the Gospel in those areas. Blockchain in particular could provide a secure way to distribute content digitally.
Censorship
This topic dovetails nicely with the other categories. Making the world virtual (as in Web3), decentralized and secure (via blockchain and NFTs) enables you to build security and resilience within your systems. This is also a way to future proof your digital ministry.
This is a high level overview of the types of things you should be thinking about for your ministry. John takes some time to answer specific questions and dive into details, so if you have questions you’ll want to listen to the full episode.
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Marketing Communications can be a critical part of your ministry. It ensures your message is presented effectively, all of your resources are consistent so you can stand out in a sea of other organizations and that your materials are engaging your audience. In this episode we speak with Cheryl Brunkow, the Marketing & Communications director at Bethany International, and she shares her five C’s for building an effective communications strategy.
The five C’s for effective communications are clear, clean, concise, consistent and creative. Be sure to listen to the full episode as Cheryl gives very practical advice on why these are important and how to implement them within your organization.
Clear
It’s critical that people can understand your messaging if they are going to get excited about the mission of your organization. All too often in ministry we design things around our own personal experiences which require a significant amount of explaining for others to understand. When you’re creating your messaging make sure it will be meaningful to your audience.
Clean
Reviewing for things such as typos, or grammar and spelling errors, will go a long way in showing that you value quality, and are a professional organization. Taking the time to make sure all of your resources and materials are clean will go a long way toward building credibility with your audience.
Concise
It takes time to build the right messaging, but If you can not clearly communicate what you’re about in a very concise way, then your message is going to get lost, and likely misinterpreted.
Consistent
There are a lot of moving parts in any organization and keeping consistency in your branding and messaging throughout all departments and channels is important for building your brand identity. Your audience wants to know that your whole team is working toward the same mission and vision rather than a collection of individuals doing their own thing.
Creative
The world around us is filled with amazing creative and engaging things that pull our attention in a lot of different directions. As ministries we need to be on the same level as the secular world in terms of both quality and creativity. Designing creative materials and experiences will not only get people’s attention but it will also keep them engaged over the long term.
This summary is just scratching the surface of what Cheryl shares in the podcast, so whether you are in the middle of rebranding, building a new communications department, or just need to breathe new energy into your communications you won’t want to miss this episode.
Resources:
Bethany InternationalThe Poisonwood BibleLess Chaos, Less Noise by Ken MeyersCreativity Inc.Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me Podcast
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Shae Bynes is the Chief Fire Igniter and founder of the Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur movement. On this episode of the Ministry at Scale Podcast, Chad sits down with Shae to talk about what a kingdom culture looks like and how to focus on using a kingdom approach to business.
In 2009, God told Shae to quit her corporate job at IBM.
She originally started out as a software engineer and had continued to work her way up in the company, but she knew it was God telling her to move on because it wasn’t in her plans. Less than a year later, she quit her job at IBM with little guidance on what to do next but continued to trust in God’s faithfulness along the way. After some time, she got connected to a woman who would eventually become her cofounder of Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur. She knew that it was a God-given friendship and since then, she has worked to help others take a kingdom approach to business.
What does a kingdom approach look like? Shae breaks it down into 5 categories.
The first piece is identity, which the other 4 pieces are built upon. You need to be able to trust that you can hear God’s voice and allow him express Himself through you. It’s very much a discipleship process as you learn to build an identity based on how God sees you.
The next is assignment. What’s your assignment? Does it match up with God’s assignment for you and your business? Financial ROI is important, but we also need to focus on eternal ROI.
The next is assets. We have an unlimited God that we are in partnership with. What does it look like to operate out of Heaven’s economy? It’s not about operating for provision, but rather from provision.
The next is culture. How does your kingdom culture affect your company, self, and your business ecosystem along with all the people that you touch with what you do in business?
The final part is operations. When we take a look at marketing or any other aspect of a business, we need to be asking what we can learn from Jesus. How can we avoid the ways of the world when it comes to marketing or staffing or any other part of our business?
The whole point of all these is to help people align with the King of Kings to let God influence the world around us through our work and through our businesses.
To learn more from Shae Bynes about how she uses social media and how she focuses on efficiency in her work, listen to the entirety of this episode Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
https://kingdomdrivenentrepreneur.com
Grace and Grind by Shea Bynes
A Catalyst for Change by John Bost
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During his time at Bott Radio Network, the director of marketing Sam Rinearson came to speak at the Digital Ministry Conference in 2022. He taught how to personalize your user's experience in a way to build connection and to increase your number of divine appointments every day.
Personalization is defined as “the process of tailoring a message or an experience to each individual which speaks directly to their needs, interests, and concerns.” In today’s day and age, we’ve come to expect personalization. On Netflix, we expect to be told what to watch based on our watch history. All throughout the tech industry, we expect someone else to know what we want.
Sam breaks data down into two categories: readily available data and actively collected data. Readily available data collection can only tell you what has already happened such as Google analytics and Mailchimp. Actively collected data is the information you can get from your current users. Sam has had success collecting this type of actively data with surveys and questionnaires. He tends to go straight to analytics, but has learned that sometimes data collection is as simple as going straight to users to ask simple questions.
Of the data that you acquire, you have to be able to sort through what’s useful to you and what’s not. It can be helpful to first ask “What do I want to know?” then go and find the data that answers your question, rather than going to the data first without having a clear idea of what you’re looking for.
Data tagging is an important aspect of personalization as well. Within the audio world, audio transcription is something that Sam highly recommends people to do if they don’t already do it. It’s useful for categorizing content and for helping people find exactly what they’re looking for. According to Sam, you’re not going to be able to make good connections with users if you don’t have good tagging
To learn more from Sam about the power of personalizing your user’s experiences, listen to this entire episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
Journity
Finney Media
Bott Radio Network
This talk on YouTube
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Ken Coleman is America’s Career Coach, the #1 national bestselling author of The Proximity Principle and From Paycheck to Purpose, and host of The Ken Coleman Show. Ken helps people discover what they were born to do and provides practical steps to make their dream job a reality. During this talk given at the Digital Ministry Conference in the spring of 2022, Ken spoke about the 6 rules of employee engagement and gave lots of practical tips about how to ensure employees feel valued, cared for, and passionate about their work.
The Purpose Rule: Your people should be using what they do best to do work they love to produce results that matter to them. This rule can be broken down into three parts. First, “using what they do best” talks about talent, then “work they love” deals with passion. Third, “matter to them” is about mission. According to this first rule, talent, love and mission are all an integral part of discovering purpose in the workplace.
The Expectation Rule: Your people will know what to do, how to do it, and how their results will be measured. After you show people how to do it, the most important step in this rule is that people know how results will be measured. People want to know if they’re winning or losing. Stop coddling them.
The Relationship Rule: Your people must feel cared for by their leader and connected to their team. There are two simple questions that can be used to build relationships in the workplace: How are you doing? How can I help you win in your role? If these questions are asked genuinely and with intentionality, it can help people to feel cared for and valued by their leader.
The Recognition Rule: Your people must be recognized publicly and privately for their attitude, effort and contribution. Private recognition deals with the one-on-one part of a relationship. Public acknowledgement of people’s achievements and successes is what happens in front of the rest of the team. One way that public recognition is done at Ramsey Solutions is during leadership meetings, they will do popcorn shout-outs as a way to encourage one another and point out the areas where they see others winning.
The Growth Rule: Your people must be challenged to learn new skills and step into new roles. This rule is not about promotion, it’s about giving people an opportunity to progress. If you don’t give people a ladder, they’ll leave and advance their life on their own
The Crusade Rule: Your people must see how their work is part of a cause greater than themselves. This is one of the most important rules and ties closely with the first rule. When people can see the value of their work, they can understand the bigger picture.
To learn more about each of these rules of employee engagement, listen to the entirety of episode #68 of the ministry at scale podcast.
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Chris Martin is the content marketing editor at Moody Publishers. From his talk at the 2022 Digital Ministry Conference, Chris shares some practical tips for maximizing your reach using social media.
Just a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to reach a high percentage of your followers on social media with just a single post. Reaching 50% of your followers was not unheard of. Today, however, the average organic Facebook post reaches about 5% of followers. The best way to use Meta is to free yourself from Meta. If we learn to use social media as a means to an end, it will have less of a hold on how we reach our audiences. One practical way to do this is to focus on driving your audience to email lists or other forms of intimate off-social media communication. If social media is the front porch of our ministry or nonprofit, we need to invite users through the front porch into the living room; a more inviting place where we can engage more effectively.
When creating content for social, we also need to also consider the fact that going viral is not always as great as it seems.
“Can you help us go viral?” That’s one of the most common questions that social media managers get. According to Chris, it’s not as great as it sounds. It seems like the most common way to go viral today is to do something that makes a lot of people mad. In many cases, going viral could lead to controversy in a way that you did not intent. Rather than focusing on trying to go viral, the best way to use social media to maximize your reach is to just make good content. In order to do this, Chris outlines three steps:
Isolate your audience. Investigate their needs.
Identify the gifts God has given you to steward for the good of his kingdom.
To learn more about how to take practical steps in order to isolate, investigate and identify, listen to the entirety of episode #67 of the ministry at scale podcast.
Resources:
Terms of service book
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Tabitha Kapic is the Director of Innovation at the Chalmers center. In this talk from the 2022 Digital Ministry Conference in Nashville, she talks about design thinking and how teams can be better at innovation.
Be the solution
What if teams started asking the question "What do people need?" rather than "What can I give people?"
Get uncomfortable
Design thinking can be uncomfortable if you’re not used to it. Tabitha uses drawing in the creative innovation process with the Chalmers center and many times, teams don’t feel comfortable drawing out their ideas but in her experience it can be a very effective tool.
Be Emotional
You’ve got to be emotional and relatable when using design thinking. Emotion is a shortcut to innovation.
Be asset based
Use what you already have. Be fast and cheap for as long as you can until you’re ready for a big investment. You don’t have to build the perfect thing before you’re ready to launch. It’s ok to learn and grow as you go.
Get out there
Design thinking is active. Do testing, get out there, talk to people, and be ok with getting uncomfortable.
Design to the edges
Who do you need to listen to? Are there people that you aren’t designing for that you should be? Be ready to design to the edges. Find extreme users at both ends of your target market and design for them and everybody else that falls in the space between.
Limit yourself
Gather together with your team and turn off your computer. Many times, giving yourself limitations can really stretch your design thinking and help your creativity.
To learn more about using design thinking to innovate better, listen to the full episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
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On this episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, we hear a talk given by Chad Williams from the 2022 Digital Ministry Conference held in Nashville. Chad is the founder and CEO of Five Q and gave this talk on the opening night of the conference based on the theme of the conference: Embrace the Race.
Chad used the story of his son Josiah’s high school running career to teach about some deeper principles. Since Josiah started cross country his freshmen year, he grew to love the sport and really wanted to push himself to improve and become a better athlete. One year he ran 1,000 miles in just one year as a part of his own personal training and through determination and perseverance, Josiah completed his goal even when it meant running outside in below freezing temperatures. He put in the effort to accomplish the goal which is a large part in what it means to “embrace the race”.
Another aspect of embracing the race is having a character of integrity to do the right thing even when no one is watching. In Josiah’s case, when his coach would tell the team where they would be running for that day, many of the other runners would take shortcuts so they wouldn’t have to run so far. Even though the coach would have never known, Josiah still chose to run the assigned route and even began leading others to do the same.
The third part of embracing the race involves measuring success by God’s standards rather than by the world’s standards. Throughout his entire running career in high school, Josiah wanted to make it to state. He worked hard, put in the effort, did the training and pushed himself to do his best, but in the end he was seconds away from achieving a fast enough qualifying time. Although the world might view that as a failure, Josiah character and leadership abilities grew during his running career to a point where he eventually became student body president at Moody Bible Institute. He achieved success in much more important areas than a state qualification.
To hear more about embracing the race, listen to the entirety of episode #65 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
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Heather Heuman got her start in the digital marketing space 22 years ago. After working as a special education teacher, she switched career paths and began work at a digital marketing firm. After beginning a business of her own, she began to grow that business using her digital marketing experience and started helping other businesses do the same. For the past 7 years she has been helping businesses grow using social media with her digital marketing firm called Sweet Tea Social Marketing.
In this interview, Heather shares about how you can do social media well and how can you use it to assist your business or clients. Heather uses the acronym S.O.C.I.A.L. to help her clients grow their businesses and organizations.
Strong Foundation
Who are you, who do you help, and what do you do? These are the foundational questions to ask when synthesizing your organization’s core beliefs. Think about it like this: if you were brought onto your local news station representing your business, what’s the one thing that will be listed on the screen underneath your organization’s name? In five words or less, it should explain who you are and what you do. If this strong foundation is not clear, it makes everything else on social media much more difficult.
Optimize Relationships
Relationship building can really make businesses stand out. Reaching out and making connections, even digitally, is a great way to build relationships on social media and connect with people in your industry. Many people think of social media as a feed curated for themselves, but it can be a great way to cultivate relationships and make connections.
Choose the Right Platforms
Spreading out your content across many social media platforms is usually not the best strategy. While it’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket, it’s best to identify which platforms you get the most engagement on and focus your time and energy on those platforms that are working. It’s more valuable to emphasize quality content on fewer platforms, than to publish mediocre content on many platforms. Pick your top two platforms and spend 80% of your time on those platforms, spending your remaining time on the other platforms.
Influential Content
You need to be adding content that adds value to the conversation. It’s important to be adding your genuine thoughts on things as well. Don’t share sensationalized content for the sake of getting engagement and attention, but don’t be afraid to add your opinion and thoughts into your messaging. If you want to amplify what your organization thinks and stands for, you need to add something personal rather than simply following the crowd and sharing what everyone else is sharing.
Automation and Smart Systems
Rather than trying to figure out what to post day by day, scheduling out your posts can save time and energy. It’s also important to be interacting with commentors or posting extra content on top of the scheduled posts so it doesn’t seem like the business is completely hands off. Work smarter, not harder, and don’t complicate things that don’t need to be made more difficult. This may mean sitting down and scheduling out a bunch of posts for the following month or setting aside some time to film 5 pieces of content at once, and schedule them all out for the future. Just remember that organic content is equally as important as scheduled and automated content.
Legacy and Kingdom Impact
If you can focus on communicating in a way that will help humanity or work to make the planet a better place, it can create more passion for what you are doing among your team. If you are not a faith-based organization, are you creating a legacy? If you are a faith-based organization, is your social media presence having...
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For several years, Rick Boxx worked as a bank executive. After he was called to follow the Lord, his business practices began to change for the better. One instance of this was when he bid on a foreclosed house before finding out it was going to be worth much less than he initially thought. He was given the opportunity to change the agreement that he signed but knew it would have been wrong and from that moment on, the people he worked with knew where Rick stood on moral issues. As time went on, he wanted to find a way to combine his love for business and his love for Jesus in a way that could help others do business according to biblical principles.
Rick wanted to follow the will of the Lord and be obedient to His calling. One year he had two radio executives contact him separately and ask if he wanted to do a radio show on integrity in the workplace. Having no experience in radio, he began writing 90 days’ worth of content at the advice of the executives. He figured that since he was writing them, he might as well send it out in an email to a handful of people. Eventually, he was getting emails from people in Spanish and Portuguese about his writings even though he sent out his emails in English. He eventually found out that his emails were picked up by an international company, translated into 8 languages, and were sent to over 1 million different people.
After completing 90 days of writing for his potential radio show, he discovered that both executives had resigned, and the radio show would not end up working out without a large fee. Eventually, someone else reached out and offered to host his show for free.
Since that time, he has learned how many different forms one piece of content can take. From reading plans on the YouVersion bible app to a podcast to daily 1-minute snippets on radio stations across the country, one piece of content can be used in a variety of different ways.
Rick and his team have been able to reach an international audience as well. One man in France had been reading Rick’s daily emails for 10 years and was able to take those emails to his business and share them with other leaders in order to spark a dialogue about the Bible. He has seen a lot of growth and change in his life from these daily emails and God has been faithful to change people’s lives through the daily emails because of Rick’s obedience and diligence to God’s calling.
To learn more about Rick and his ministry, listen to the entirety of episode #60 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
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On this episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, we hear a talk from Josh Kashorek of 5Q. Josh gave this talk at the 2021 Digital Ministry Conference and shared about the impact that metrics can have in ministry.
If we look at the story of when Jesus fed 5,000 people with only 5 loaves of bread 2 fish, we see that even with a small amount of food, Jesus clearly accomplished a miracle. If the small quantity of loaves and fish were not given, there would be a good chance we would miss the miracle that Jesus performed. Using metrics in our own ministries, how can we ensure we are not missing the miracles that God is doing?
There are two questions to consider when sorting through data.
What is your mission?
What does it look like when that mission is accomplished?
It’s easy to look at metrics as simply a list of numbers and stats such as the number of donations received in a month, or how people have visited a website. However, Josh encourages ministries to take those metrics and try to answer the question, “How can we know we’re accomplishing our mission?”
For the Bowery in New York, whose goal is transforming poverty and hopelessness to hope, 429,000 meals served, and 104,000 nights of shelter is their indicator of keeping accomplishing their mission. For GotQuestions.com, whose mission is to answer questions about the Bible, 670,000 Bible questions answered is the metric that shows the accomplishment of their mission. The context of a ministry’s overall goal and mission should drive the way that it engages with its audience.
To learn more about the impact of metrics in your ministry, listen to the entirety of episode #59 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
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Learn, Grow, Go. This is TJ Tison’s motto when it comes to helping faith-based organizations develop a culture of learning. Growing up, she always loved learning and has since found a way to help institute learning management systems for nonprofit organizations. To do this, TJ and her team use the E5 system: Engage, Establish, Equip, Empower, Expand
At the core of almost every type of non-profit is learning and when it comes to faith-based ministries, that usually comes down to some kind of disciple making. The question is now “how do you multiply?” rather than “how do you add?” and that’s where the power of digital comes into play. TJ mentioned that she views the paradigm shift from COVID as a beautiful thing, because ministries can reach a much larger group of people. The key is to shift how we use digital tools God has given us to use them more effectively. It’s also critical that we don’t lose the community aspect that comes with in-person communication.
Another way that TJ encourages learning and growth within her organization is by implementing a rule that if a few people go to a conference or seminar, they are required to teach some of what they know to the rest of the team. This way, they are sure to listen well enough that they could teach on the subject, and the rest of the team can benefit from some practical knowledge as well.
TJ is also an author, and her book Killing Wonder Woman is written to combat societal expectations, and to help set weary women free through Jesus to win at work and soar in faith.
To hear more about TJ Tison and her passion for learning, listen to the entirety of episode #58 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
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On this episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, we hear a talk from the 2021 Digital Ministry Conference from Ben Martin of 5Q. He shares about the Google Ads grant for nonprofits and how ministries can use this to increase engagement and clicks to their website.
The Google ads grant gives the ability to run up to $10,000 in Google search ads for free. It’s part of Google For Nonprofits and it’s a great resource for driving new users to a website. Anyone who qualifies for Google for nonprofits can have access to the free ads and it allows ministries to run text ads within Google search results.
These ads are prompted by keywords. With search ads, you input your budget, add your content, define your keywords, and then wait. It’s a unique type of advertising because it requires waiting to see if the content is relevant, if your keywords are being searched, and if your landing page is relevant to your keywords. For these reasons, it’s important to watch your impression and engagement results so you can see if any content or keywords need to be edited or changed.
There are a lot of rules and requirements for your keywords as well. Some of these rules state that it’s necessary to have at least a 5% clickthrough rate, keywords that are relevant to your website and non-plagiarized content.
How is that going to help increase awareness?
These ads are more than likely going to be shown to people who are not already familiar with your content or ministry. The people that will find your ads are searching for a topic and want to find content that aligns with your ministry intent. If able to fully utilize all $10,000 of free ads each month, that could mean between 50,000 and 161,000 clicks per year. For more information about the Google ads grand, listen to this full episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
Digital Ministry Conference
Five Q's Ads Grant Guide
Video of this session
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On this episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast we hear from Natchi Lazarus. Natchi is the co-founder and chief consultant of Open Minds Agency and works with churches and nonprofits, teaching them how to use social media to grow their impact.
Many years ago, Natchi had a life-changing experience walking down the street. He saw a series of three individuals, each sharing something of value, but nobody stopped to listen. Nobody acknowledged the street preacher, enjoyed the melodies of the musician or listened to the pitch of the salesman. Natchi believes that the Holy Spirit told him that the ears of this generation are already occupied. Most people had their earbuds in while walking down the street that day and Natchi realized that in order to share the gospel message more effectively, churches and ministries needed to get into the digital space.
When Natchi begins working with different churches and ministries to reach people for the gospel, he believes it needs to begin with a shift in mindset. It’s important to think about your audience as a singular person. Although you may want to reach a large group of people when individuals are on their phones they are by themselves. Once you can shift your mindset to think of your audience as a large group of individuals, Natchi believes you can minister more effectively.
He’s also come up with the acronym S.P.I.R.I.T. to serve as a framework for ministries in the digital space. It stands for structuring, packaging, integrating, releasing, igniting, and tracking.
Structuring involves giving a foundation and shape to your digital ministry such as God did to Adam’s body as He created man.
Packaging has to do with presentation and how messaging and formatting are put together. For example, what formats do videos require, where is it shown, and how long should it be?
Integrating addresses the need for each church or ministry as a whole to work together and think about the extended audience. Integration of your brand and voice needs to be cohesive and consistent throughout each department of the church or ministry.
Releasing is all about distribution. How is your content spread? It’s important to think about how, when, and where content is released.
Igniting is a key factor in expanding your reach. It can be extremely useful to get technical and light your content on fire by using promotion to give your content an extra push.
Tracking is where you continually look at the data and measure metrics so you can learn what works and what doesn’t work. It’s not exciting, but it’s a vital part of this digital framework.
To learn more from Natchi Lazarus, check out the entirety of episode #56 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
https://www.natchilazarus.com/
Natchi's Instagram
The Connected Church
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Many people have good intentions when it comes to downloading and consuming the content that you provide, but many times they never get around to it. In this episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast from the 2021 Digital Ministry Conference, Laura Hatcher explains how she and her team at Love Worth Finding have been able to increase their engagement up to 300%.
Love Worth Finding is a legacy ministry that uses the teachings of the late pastor Adrian Rogers. In order to increase engagement and help people find and consume content, the team at Love Worth Finding began using bite-sized email challenges to encourage people to make a difference in their own lives. The content that comes from the email challenges is provided day to day and helps to build trust with the users.
Before implementing email challenges, Love Worth Finding saw 450 PDF downloads per month. Once the email challenges began, the team saw engagement increase up to 2,200 downloads per month. Simply by changing the format of how content was shared, they were able to increase their engagement by over 300%.
If you and your team are wanting to implement email challenges, where is the best place to begin? Laura suggests starting small. Once you start to figure it out, then you can start to create larger or longer challenges. You will begin to see the number of subscribers grow and ultimately it will provide valuable content for your subscribers and will provide an easy way for them to consume it.
To hear more advice on using email challenges to increase engagement, listen to the full episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
Love Worth Finding Ministries
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In this episode, we bring to you another session from the 2021 Digital Ministry Conference. Jan-Willem Bosman explains the strategy of Jesus.net. Through the use of personalization, their goal is to lead people to the center of the Gospel and help them grow in their spiritual journey.
In the commercial world, personalization is already happening. On Netflix, for example, your suggested movies will most likely differ from your spouse’s suggested movies. The team at Jesus.net wanted to take that idea of personalization and apply it to the Gospel to help people right where they’re at.
The first step is finding a good methodology. How do you know where people are in their spiritual walk? Jan-Willem and his team created a survey to solve this problem. When people visit Jesus.net they can fill out the survey and it will put them in one of five stages of a spiritual journey.
In the second step to personalization, you need to create a match between content and the needs of the people. To make that happen you need to create an algorithm. One main purpose of this algorithm is to guide people through the content in order to help them grow in their walk with Jesus. The ultimate goal is to bring people one step closer to Jesus every day. Finally, you need to come up with a plan to identify what the best technology is to get these things done.
Jan-Willem really believes that this is a revolution in internet evangelism and discipleship. With all the data that is collected, you can see the impact that it has had. The team at Jesus.net has been able to see many people grow in their walk with Jesus, in their spiritual activity, church involvement, and in the fruits of the spirit. As they continue to grow the platform, they hope to help people know God, grow in Jesus, and share their faith easily.
For more information from Jan-Willem, you can listen to the entirety of episode #54 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.
Resources:
Jesus.net
Session Video
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