Ministry At Scale

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.

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.

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. 

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 International
• The Poisonwood Bible
• Less Chaos, Less Noise by Ken Meyers
• Creativity Inc.
• Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me Podcast

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.