I’ve been recommending for years now that ministries should be telling their stories. Some ministries are pretty good at telling stories to their supporters, but they could be telling some of their stories to the public too. Not only does public storytelling promote a particular ministry, but it also increases awareness of the value of the Christian ministry sector to the public. When people wonder what good Christian charities produce, your stories are powerful answers that not only support our public benefit (and therefore our charitable status), but make our faith more attractive to potential believers as well!

I just came across a publication of the Bible League of Canada (a CCCC Certified Member) called One Dominion, which tells the story of how the Word of God shaped the Canada we live in today. I’m bringing the book to your attention as an inspiring example of how a story for the public might be told.

Here’s why I think the Bible League’s way of telling this story is effective:

• It is topical: The softcover coffee-table quality book was published to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, so it has a connection to an event that the general public is currently interested in. They are more likely to read the book now than they would at some other time. Kudos to the Bible League for a timely publication!
• It builds on the familiar: They’ve successfully connected the story of Canada to the story of their cause – the Word of God – by showing how Scripture has been publicly or quietly behind key events in our history. It takes facts that should be familiar to the public and weaves in the not-so-familiar facts, leaving people feeling that the Canada they know has been explained to them and they now understand it better. Some of the connections with the Word of God are written in stone (such as on the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill), and other connections are in the way the Word of God has motivated people to live out their faith in a public way, such as by creating an educational institution or a hospital.
• It has a through-story: The Bible League crafted the story well. Its structure reminds me of the structure of Luke-Acts, which has a trajectory from the remoteness of Judea to the centre of the world, Jerusalem, and then travels away from Jerusalem to the outermost parts of all the world. In a similar way, One Dominion starts with the entire nation of Canada and our place in the world, then zeroes in on individual people of faith throughout our history who did something good, and finally projects outward exploring how individuals today might affect the world tomorrow. It seems to come full circle, leaving the reader to wonder, “I know what individuals did to make my world so great, so now what can I do to make the world of the next few generations great as well?”

The story’s point is that Canada was shaped by Christians for a purpose, and Christians today should still do what they can to support that purpose. 

Although the book’s distribution isn’t all that wide (primarily sold from the Bible League’s website and a few Christian bookstores), it presents our faith well to those who do not yet believe, and who may even question what good Christianity has done for Canada. It presents Christian faith in a way that others can appreciate what it accomplished, and perhaps might even give it some consideration for themselves.

My only suggestions for improvement, if there is a second edition, are:

1. Indicate where the gorgeous pictures were taken! There are many places I’d love to go based on the beautiful photos, but where are those locations?
2. Since it is essentially a picture book with commentary, put a picture on the front cover.

Thanks to the Bible League for their investment in such a worthy project! It is a well-crafted book that all Canadian Christians can be proud of. Through this project, the Bible League of Canada is inspiring other ministries to creatively tell their stories in the public realm. Well done!

“The book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.”

The post How One Ministry Is Telling a Story appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Day two started with a great presentation from Lisa Kay Solomon of Innovation Studio. She says that scaling is about leading the design of better futures. Scaling includes designing the conditions within the organization that are needed for change.

Start the scaling process by defining the response you want to trigger in other people that will lead to mission success.

When it comes to your own staff, the people whom you want to be successful in their work every day, Lisa says that people who believe they’ve had a good day are more successful than those who don’t. And the most significant factor in judging whether or not you’ve had a good day is whether or not you feel you made progress that day. So leaders, design your organization and its work so that staff and volunteers can know they made progress every day. Her book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change describes how to do this.

The key points are:

1. Create conditions for discovery. Exploring always involves risk of failure, but the key is to fail productively. Others have said that when you fall, “Fall forward.” Encourage curiosity, zest and optimism among your staff. Have strong ideas to give clear direction, but hold them loosely to encourage creative thinking. Have fun exploring. If everything has been reduced to a Powerpoint presentation, she says little can go wrong, but then little can go right too. Risk exploration.
2. Be an ‘otherish’ giver. Collaborate and set your partner up for success. Engage others outside the organization to think and imagine with you.
3. Think visually. This really helps you to break away from linear thinking and it is much more creative. Dan Roam has two great goods about thinking visually: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Blah Blah Blah: What to Do when Words Don’t Work. She also recommends Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers because you can’t scale anything if your don’t know its business model. I have this book and it is outstanding! And yes, charities have business models just as much as for profits do!
4. Act like a television or movie producer. They are the people who steward the vision for the show and make sure that it gets produced. You need to ensure that everyone is creatively working on the vision. Don’t let the organization drift away from what you are trying to achieve!! Sometimes we get bogged down in process and perfectionism and lose “the fire”. We lose urgency. Keep the organization stoked, active and committed.
5. Create a culture of hope. This will help everyone get through the tough work of scaling up.
6. Move beyond the “Yeah, but” people. They need to develop a more adaptive way of thinking. They are stuck in a rigid perspective and can’t see past their reservations. So when you hear “Yeah but”, ask “So how can…?”

Some Lessons on Scaling That Were Shared

Michael Smith of the Social Innovation Fund shared some lessons he’s learned over the years about scaling up.

• One in eight American NFPs (Not for Profits) spend no money on evaluation, and more than 50% have no theory of change. Their typical success measures are either simply a story about a person who was a success for one of their programs (was that person the only one?) or a statistic about the number of people served (yes, but did anything actually change for them?). Evaluate results! A template for how to do evaluations (a step-by-step guide) is available for free.
• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.
• The three ingredients for scaling are: 1) collaboration, 2) a fierce sense of urgency, and 3) plans for sustainability.
• A really hard, demanding mission. A mission that is hard to figure out how to do is better than an easy mission you already know how to do. Aim high, think big!
• You must know what the system is that you are working within. What are all the parts? How do they relate to each other? You must bring all parts into alignment with your desired end result. A great book to help you define systems is The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. This is another one I have and it is well worth reading for several reasons.

Collective Impact

Lalitha Vaidyanathan of FSG spoke about getting results at scale. She defined collective impact as having the commitment of actors from different system subsectors holding a common agenda to solve a problem at scale. To build collective impact, you must first know within what system(s) you are working. If you were to work with others across this system, who would be involved and what work would you be doing together?

Here are the elements for effective collective impact:

• Five conditions for collective impact
  • A common agenda
  • Shared measurements (for learning and accountability)
  • Mutually reinforcing activities (no duplicate effort)
  • Continuous communication
  • Backbone support. The backbone is the people who are dedicated to making the group work effectively.
• The mindset and disposition for collective impact
  • Shift from technical solutions to adaptive solutions.
  • Shift from focus on evidence to focus on evidence and relationships
  • Shift from looking for the silver bullet to using silver buckshot
  • Shift from taking credit to sharing credit. Ask “Who can we blame the good results on?”
  • Be willing to take risks. Nothing happens by staying safe.
• Structure everything for collective impact
  • The old way of structuring has predetermined solutions to implement.
  • The new way of structuring has predetermined rules of interaction from which the solution will emerge.
  • Be intentional about impact and uncertain about solution

Conclusion

This two-day conference really was all about working with others in a spirit of open-handed generosity to get a common mission accomplished. The key concept woven through everything was creativity. I really liked something that was said at the end of the day:

Imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions!

The post Stanford Day 2 – Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The second threat to our corporate witness is careerism, in which career advancement is a person’s chief aim in life. Making the most of your gifts and talents for service to God is good stewardship, but it becomes a problem when people are consumed with personal advancement. The more that ministry staff obsess over advancing themselves, the less authentic our corporate witness will be, because God often wants us to do something for someone else’s benefit, not ours. In fact, he wants us to love sacrificially and unconditionally, and this may impact our careers.

Have you ever felt a sales person had no interest in your welfare, just their commission? You can tell when they genuinely want to help you and when they see dollar signs instead of you.

“Oh, that looks so beautiful on you!”

“You deserve the best!”

If that degree of self-interest comes out in a ministry employee, it disheartens everyone else who wants and expects ministry staff to be passionate about their mission more than themselves.

I talked with a church secretary a few weeks ago and she couldn’t stop singing the praises for her church, her board, and her pastor. She was so exuberantly enthusiastic as she told me how she just loves coming to work as a church secretary because it is so fulfilling to be doing important work every day for God. I loved her passion for her job and her commitment to it. Does she make her church attractive to me? You bet! And if I didn’t already know Christ and she told me about him, I would pay serious attention because of her passion.

In fact, if you feel the same way about your ministry workplace as this secretary does about hers, please make a comment as an encouragement to others.

Ministries don’t have careers, but they do have a corporate existence that they’d like to maximize and sustain into the future. This makes it possible that ministries could behave in similar ways as careerist individuals, and have similar negative effects on their own corporate witness and on the welfare of the community of Christian ministries.

Negatives of Careerism

When most employees are working for a cause, careerist employees can have some negative effects on the ministry and its team:

• They tend to focus on themselves rather than on mission, which for them is a means to an end, not something they are passionately engaged in as an end worthy in itself. Their dampened enthusiasm for the mission could be a drag on everyone else’s motivation.
• Their loyalty is to themselves, so their employment relationship is transactional. They are invested in the ministry they work for only to the extent that it helps their career.
• A person who is in it for themselves can’t help but give out signals to teammates that they are not all in it together. Team spirit will suffer when someone is more concerned with their own welfare rather than the team’s welfare. They are unlikely to sacrifice for the benefit of the team.

The Truth

This threat can be overcome with the truth that your ministry is called by Christ to do something great for him. And that means we have a high calling worthy of our greatest aspirations! Replace careerism with response to a call. It makes a big difference whether you focus on what you do as a means of furthering your career or as a means of accomplishing a mission you passionately believe in.

At CCCC, for example, we are not called to provide information and services, we are called to equip Christian ministries as organizations so they can do what God has called them to do. We do that by providing information and services, but we are working for something much more important — the accomplishment of our members’ missions. Your mission! The church’s mission! I want people working at CCCC who are jazzed by that! I want people who are passionate about the mission, who are sold out on making it happen! I know you want the same for your ministry too.

Whether someone feels called to vocational ministry or to secular work, when they know they are serving God in the place he wants them to be, they don’t have a career, they have a calling. And that makes all the difference because, as Paul says, we are working for the One who called us, Jesus Christ.

All Christians share a general call to serve Christ. In the absence of a personal call to a specific ministry or task, they have the freedom to discern for themselves where and how to fulfill their general call. What’s important is that they know they are fulfilling God’s call to service in what they are doing. They are pursuing God first and career second. They engage with mission because it is how they serve God.

Some Christians also have a strong personal call. This is my experience. As I wrote in Discerning Your Call, I knew from my preteen years that someday God wanted me to serve the church, something I didn’t know how to do, so I did not pursue it.

But on May 25th 2001, I asked God a question while driving home from an early morning prayer meeting, “Why have you given me so much vision for my church, for my clients, for everyone around me and nothing for me?” The answer was so clear that I pulled over to the side of the road in shock. I knew instantly that God had given me a call and that the call was still valid this many years later! I didn’t know what ministry God wanted me to do, but I did know I’d have to prepare for it, so I went home and told my wife I was going to go to seminary. She instantly agreed without reservation (now that’s confirmation!).

My personal call is to serve the church, and CCCC lets me do that. Does that affect how I see my job? Absolutely it does!

Benefits

The benefits of having a sense of call, whether a general call or a particular call, are significant.

• We will have great passion for our work because it is more than a job, it is a calling. My self-identity includes my call, so my job is part of my self-identity.
• Our work has great meaning and is very fulfilling because it is a call.
• Our sense of team will be heightened as we work with people who have an equal call to the ministry and together we become part of something bigger than ourselves, a ministry serving God’s mission.
• We will work with excellence because that is what our high calling demands of us.

Special Warning to Employers

It is all too easy to abuse someone’s sense of call. We can pay too little because we know they believe God wants them doing this, and after all, aren’t we as Christians called to a sacrificial lifestyle? Not quite! As an employer, you are caring for God’s sheep and you will be held to account for the level of care you gave. Pay the worker the wages that are due. Be fair. Christian workplaces should be the best workplaces. You are a workplace, not a workhouse!

I don’t want someone working at CCCC because they can make more money here than anywhere else. I want them here because they believe in our mission. But I do want to be able to stand before God and the public and say that we paid fair wages to everyone. Not too low, and not too high.

So don’t abuse your staff’s sense of call.

Building a Shared Call

Here’s what you can do to prevent careerism from hampering your ministry:

• When interviewing people, ask:
  • Why do you want to work with us?
  • What has God been doing in your life in the last three months?
  • How does this particular job fit with your career aspirations?
• Constantly talk with staff about how the work you do ties into the church’s mission
  • Keep the vision in sight, not the activity. For example, you might
    • Provide meals (activity) to relieve hunger (immediate outcome) so that everyone experiences God’s provision (long term outcome) and ultimately is able to be the whole person God made them to be (vision).
    • Provide church services (activity) so people can praise God and learn from the Word (immediate outcomes) so that they become mature believers (long term outcome) and become the image of Christ (vision).
• Bring theological discernment into your decision process, and encourage theological reflection at leadership and staff meetings.
• Encourage people to talk about how they feel about what they do. What makes them feel significant? Fulfilled? In a mission-driven organization, this should bring out stories that are a springboard to talk about God’s call on the organization.
• Talk with staff about how God is leading them now. God may be laying something on their heart that relates to your corporate call.
• For an organization, you could think of your vision, End statement, or Social Value Proposition, as a call. What is the end good you are working to achieve? Keep that in mind as your call and it will lift you up to the greater purpose you are serving.

The post Organizational Calling appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

That was the opening question at my Harvard Business School course on Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management. How many times a day do you get asked this question? I had already answered it at least 20 times today as I met the other students in the class. As part of the registration process we had all described what our charities do, and now the prof had gone through our answers and pre-selected who he wanted to ask this question of, “What do you do?” Most of the people answered with a description of their services or programs.

You’ll remember the story often told of a person walking by a construction site and asking three workers what they are doing. One says, “I’m cementing these stones together.” Another says, “I’m building a wall.” And the third says, “I’m building a cathedral!” The story is always told with the point that the correct answer is the third one.

“That depends!”

The surprising thing I learned today was that you need several answers to the question “What do you do?” because the answer depends on who’s asking. It turns out that all three answers from the construction site are quite okay. Here’s how you decide how to describe what you do.

A logic model helps

Start with a logic model, which shows how you move from inputs to activities to outputs to outcomes to impacts. This chain, stretching from inputs to impacts, has some characteristics as you move along it:

• You move from the present into the future
• The descriptions at each stage become less concrete and more abstract
• It becomes more difficult to measure the effects of what you are doing
• It becomes much harder to prove that you had a causal effect on whatever it is that you can measure, and on a positive note
• What you say becomes more motivational and inspirational.

The key point the professor made was that before answering the question, “What do you do?”, you must decide where you want to be in the logic chain with the person asking the question.

• An activity-based answer might suffice for a potential supplier trying to understand how they can help you.
• A donor might want an outcomes-based answer because they want to have some way of evaluating what their donation accomplished. While they want to impact society, most donors cannot wait a few generations to see what the impact will be. Even if they did wait, how can they (or you) know whether your charity had a causal linkage to the results?
• A potential employee, however, by choosing to work in a ministry, is devoting his or her life to doing what they can to contribute to changing the world. They will be highly motivated by an impacts-based answer. Just as donors do, employees want to know that what they are doing is making a difference, but their commitment to the cause is based on the impact that working for you will have on the world.

So, you might think about at least a few different answers to the question, “What do you do?”

The post “So, what do you do?” appeared first on CCCC Blogs.