And that raises an interesting question: Which is more important – growing your ministry or growing your impact? The first is internally focused while the second is externally focused. If your goal is to grow a large ministry because you want to lead a large ministry, I’d suggest you take a hard look at your motivation.

• If you could achieve much greater mission impact but with no growth and even less visibility than you have today, would you do it?
• Is leadership driving you or is your mission driving you?

Here’s what I learned on Day One.

Achieving Transformative Scale

Jeff Bradach of The Bridgespan Group gave us nine pathways to scaling up for impact.

1. Distribute through existing platforms. You don’t have to build everything yourself. Many other organizations have developed assets you can use to get your messages and programs out in public. Think about cooperation and collaboration. Or at least think about using them as a supplier.
2. Recruit and train other organizations. This goes beyond simply using someone else’s platform. Here you actually give them a packaged program that they can then run (and even adapt) themselves.
3. Unbundle and scale for impact. Perhaps it is too challenging to think about scaling up everything you do. Why not take a complex program and break it down into pieces that are easier to scale? Scaling a small thing is better than not scaling at all.
4. Leverage technology. Research shows that for profit companies spend double the amount on technology than what nonprofits do. Social media, apps and other technologies can greatly broaden your audience.
5. Strengthen the field. Find ways to lift the performance of all the players in your field. What can you do that would enable others who are working on the same mission (or closely related aspects of it) to do better? For example, could you develop shared measurements of mission performance? That way, everyone can try their own methods, but have a basis for comparing results and seeing what works best.
6. Examine the ‘system’ you are all working within. Could you change a critical part of it so that everyone wins? Jeff said that bad systems trump good programs every time! Change the system and maybe your programs will work better.
7. Influence policy change and you’ll change the playing field.
8. Consider for profit models. If you can, minimize your reliance on donations and grants. A good example is the micro-credit sector that has become a viable, standalone business.
9. Change the attitudes, behaviours and norms that work against mission success. Are there negative communal habits that should be changed? Smoking and drunk driving are two examples where bad habits became socially unacceptable.

Jeff reminded us of a few important strategies not to forget while scaling up:

• Keep replicating what’s working. Don’t just do new things.
• Cost matters. Innovate to drive costs down (but not at the cost of effectiveness)
• Money matters. You need large capital for new capabilities, so rethink your funding model and see where you could generate additional revenue
• Constituent engagement matters. Sometimes we rely on experts instead of grassroots wisdom. Instead of either/or, think both/and

 Building networks and movements for social impact

Heather McLeod Grant of Open Impact said that the best nonprofits work outside of themselves, engaging business, government and other nonprofits with their cause. Here’s her definition of scaling:

Scaling is a leader building an organization that can build a network to grow a movement.

NFPs (Not For Profits) often stifle movements by saying “Here’s all that could go wrong.” If we don’t support movements of creativity, we will be sidelined as irrelevant organizations.

Design Thinking and Rapid Innovation

David Viotti, CEO of Smallify, talked about how to attack a really big goal. To smallify something is to get to the root cause of a challenge and then take quick action. It is to break something down to a small piece that can be worked on.

To smallify is to make small bets with relatively low risk and an affordable loss if it doesn’t work out. The attitude needs to be, “What can we do this Monday?” Do something, anything, NOW!!

Viotti gave five tools for rapid innovation:

1. Experiment more and fear less. Don’t wait for the perfect idea, just start testing and don’t be afraid it might go wrong. You’ll learn something and move forward.
2. Empathize and show up. Approach the challenge from other perspectives. Talk to people and discover what they think about. Be an actor – do something – and not just an observer.
3. Generate and say “Yes”. Be creative and be open to trying new things out. Think of options. “How could we…” is a great question.
4. When you are up against constraints, take them as gifts. They force you to be more creative, and that’s always good.
5. Your mindset is a choice. Do you believe that intelligence is fixed? If you do, then you will give up more easily and achieve less. If you believe that intelligence grows, then you will embrace challenge and achieve more. Choose to believe that intelligence grows. Every time you try something, you learn something, and then you are closer to achieving your goal.

Viotti taught us “the innovator’s bow.” Say “I am [name] and I have failed.” Then take a bow. Well done! You did something even if it didn’t work. That’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.

He also warned us that people who say, “Let me play the Devil’s advocate” are really saying, “Let me kill your idea!” Turn the “Yes but” answers to “Yes and”. Ask “So how can we do it?”

Scaling up Excellence

Bob Sutton of Stanford University said that when you have a pocket of excellence, the challenge is how to spread excellence from the few to the many without “screwing it up.”

Scaling isn’t just about the numbers, numerical growth and so forth. It really is about spreading a mindset – getting people to get on board with a new way of getting real world impact. Organizations that spread excellence have people who feel they own the organization, and the organization owns them. They share a mutual accountability for each person living up to the ideal and getting the job done well.

Scaling isn’t about getting more resources to do more. It’s about doing more with less. You start by cutting out all the ineffective things – those things you do only because everyone else does them.

Scaling is about getting others to help you accomplish your mission. That means that you will have to address the issue of whether you will enforce a cookie-cutter approach or allow for local variation on a theme. Allowing variation may encourage better employee engagement or it might lead to delusions of uniqueness. Some people want to change a program just so that they have exercised some control over it. Variation because of real variations in the local areas are quite okay, but don’t let people reinvent what doesn’t need to be reinvented.

How to Spread Excellence

• Start by firing up contagious emotions first. Trying to enlist people by making a rational case for their work just doesn’t work. Get their emotions in high gear over your cause!
• Then guide people to do the desired tangible behaviours. Get them active, doing what needs to be done right away. Research shows that strong beliefs are created and maintained based on what we do, not what we are told or what we say. Action builds commitment to the mission. Leaders need to live the mindset they want staff and volunteers to have, not just talk about it. Excessive talk and thinking keeps us from doing what we know and believe we should do.
• As organizations get larger, you need more structure and process. Many people think this means having a bureaucracy, but the purpose of hierarchy is to defeat bureaucracy and organize people to work together effectively.
• Keep teams small. Once a team gets to about six people, it starts to have problems. If it has more than ten members, the system gets clogged.
• Cascade excellence by putting people with the right mindset in positions to influence those who don’t.
• Start with a small team of diverse people, so when they go back to their own diverse groups, ideas will spread faster.
• When it comes to attitudes and performance, bad is stronger than good. Bob says “one jerk cuts performance by 40%,” so get rid of the bad fast!
• When you can say “We don’t have time to do it the way we should,” you are doing great scaling. The point isn’t to wait for perfect conditions and processes, but to do something now and make progress. However, balance this by remembering that sometimes the best advice is just to stand there and do nothing but think about it. You’ll have to decide when stopping to reflect is the right thing to do.
• There will be times when scaling will not be enjoyable. The staff may start to lose their happiness about working on the mission. Disney knows that its guests are least happy when they are actually in the park. Anticipating and remembering the park experience are when they are happiest. That’s why Disney makes sure you know where the best places are to take pictures and why they provide photo ops with their characters. When your staff is unhappy, talk up both the past and the future. We are going from somewhere to somewhere. Let’s remember the progress already made and anticipate achieving the vision.
• Scaling up is a manageable mess. It isn’t neat and tidy. So clean up the best you can and keep muddling forward!

I highly recommend Bob’s book: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling For Less.

That’s it for the first day.

God bless!

The post At Stanford University: Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

“God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that,” Laura Silsby, one of 10 Americans accused of trafficking Haitian children, said Monday through the bars of a jail cell.  “Our hearts were in the right place.”

A short-term mission team went to Haiti to rescue children and instead wound up in jail suspected of child trafficking. This is a horror story for any mission team. Nine of the ten team members were subsequently released, but they are still facing charges. Laura Silsby, however, is still in jail as well as still facing charges, and all are in need of prayer support. But we also need to learn from this fiasco. These good-hearted people were apparently very naive, and the fact that they got as far as they did is, in my opinion, the result of a leadership failure that I’ll explain in a moment. I don’t know this situation firsthand, so I’m basing all of my comments on published news reports. Even if some of the details or assumptions later turn out not to be correct, there are lots of other examples that could be used and the point of this post remains valid.

There are conflicting reports about what their intentions were, but what is clear is that two churches did this project on their own [the report has been removed from their website] and with no apparent expertise. According to the NY Times article linked to above, “the group is not registered as an adoption agency in Idaho and does not appear to be registered as a federal nonprofit. The group also did not appear on a list of accredited international adoption agencies on the Web site of the State Department.”

Without the help of either a Christian agency or a denominational mission department, either of which could have provided badly needed expertise in the complexities related to emergency relief, child welfare and adoption, the success or failure of this project depended upon the quality of leadership these two churches could provide. Unfortunately, the leadership apparently was not up to the task in this instance.

Leaders Are Responsible!

Leaders are responsible for organizational achievement of their respective missions from start to finish. They need to ensure quality control, risk management, applicable standards and regulations, and all other factors related to organizational success are taken into account when launching a new endeavour. Such planning is thoroughly biblical, as Jesus explicitly assumed that good planning would take place before acting on good intentions (Luke 14:28-32). It is irresponsible for leaders to send people out without doing their homework.

Good Planning Questions

Planning must include two aspects which were apparently missed by the churches:

• an objective organizational assessment that assesses the ministry’s expertise to do the project, and
• a due diligence investigation to discover the project’s risks and obtain full knowledge of everything that is required to complete the project successfully.

Based on the news stories, the organizational assessment would have shown that the churches had motivated people and lots of money, but no apparent expertise (other than the expertise of the team leader, which appears to have been accepted at face value). Due diligence would have uncovered the need to work with the Haitian government and to be properly accredited as an adoption agency.

Having Resources is Dangerous

Having the people and the money to do a project is a potentially dangerous scenario because once you have the resources to act on your own, it is quite tempting to just go ahead and do it and not bother with a reality check. When you can do it yourself, it is all the more important to validate your assumptions and plans.

Validating Plans

Validation requires at least some external input, because on your own you don’t know what you don’t know. You need to protect yourself from overestimating your competence and capabilities (otherwise known as hubris). Outsiders see things more objectively and their experience will be different from yours, so they add different perspectives to yours and identify issues that you may have overlooked. “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors they succeed” (Prov 15:22).

Validation for new and existing programs can include:

• External secondary research (books/journals, seminars/conferences)
• Primary research (program reviews, surveys, pilot projects)
• Consultation with experts/consultants or with other ministries in your field asking for their critique and suggestions
• Mentally walking through the entire project and fact-checking each part of the plan
• Doing a joint project with an experienced ministry as a learning experience
• Reviewing similar programs run by others

Ministries can also take advantage of many forums that facilitate more intentional inter-ministry cooperation and sharing of specialized information. Here is just a sampling of the many umbrella organizations that bring ministries together:

• The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s roundtables for many types of specialized ministries
• Canadian Christian Relief & Development Association
• CrossGlobal Link (for mission-sending agencies)
• Christian Higher Education Canada
• and of course, the Canadian Centre for Christian Charities!

Conclusion

I wonder how many ministries have wasted precious resources because they rushed into a program or mission trip without understanding the complexities of an issue? How many have acted in a way that left experts who have laboured for years scratching their heads over their doings? How many have made the problem worse because of their misguided efforts? How much more could be done well simply by asking other ministries or experts for advice or help, or by getting behind an initiative that someone else already has in place?

Good intentions are great, but on their own they can be dangerous. Good intentions do not always result in good deeds. Leaders must take good intentions and add planning and organizational support to transform good intentions into good deeds with good results.

The post The Danger of Good Intentions appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The Chapel served more meals in a week than any restaurant in Akron. They had a feeding program for everyone it seemed. They had an entire three storey WING just for youth ministry. They didn’t have a singles group; they had singles groups for single and widowed, single and divorced, single and looking, and single and happy to be single. They didn’t just have a support group for people dealing with issues. They had support groups for cancer (three different kinds of cancer, as I recall), for grief, for broken families and on and on. And the library! They had a very large, impressive library, but then in an adjacent room were all the resources a pastor could ever want, including a rare book collection with at least one first edition of a 200 or 300 year old commentary. It was AMAZING.

Large Ministries Are the Minority

Regional churches such as this one are large enough that they can specialize and provide programs that few smaller churches could possibly provide. (In 2003, 74% of all Canadian evangelical churches had fewer than 150 attendees.) The large concentration of people enabled the church to move beyond providing basic services to offering very specific, targeted services that met specialized needs. It is, in fact, a resource to all the churches in Akron. And that is an advantage to being big. I never again felt that large churches were out of place. Large churches and agencies help the church fulfill its mission in ways that smaller organizations can’t. Large and small churches both have their places.

Very few Christian ministries in Canada are large. In my last post I gave some statistics showing how small most Canadian ministries are. Based on the 22,000 T3010’s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC, here are some stats for the larger ministries:

• Only 1,179 ministries (6%) report more than $1 million in total revenue, and only 96 (0.6%) have more than $10 million.
  • As a matter of interest, about half of the ministries with more than $1 million are members of CCCC (and all but 14 of the ones over $10 million are members)*.
• Only 6.5% report 10 or more employees, and only 317 (1.4%) report having more than 30.
  • I’m highly suspicious of this number because a huge number of charities leave the line for employees blank. Do they have no employees or are they not filling the form out correctly? Nevertheless, the stats are what they are.

Advantages of Large Ministries

Here are some of the advantages that large ministries provide to the mission of God and some of the responsibilities that go with their size. It is possible that some smaller ministries may have some of these benefits too, but it is not likely that very many would.

• A small ministry works hard just to run its programs, but then it also has to fundraise, do all the administration and look after the myriad of other things that have to happen to make the ministry work. (This is one reason why the CCCC exists—to help charities of all sizes with these supporting functions so they can concentrate more on their core missions!)  A larger ministry not only has the staff to do all of that, but it can also have staff who work on the ministry rather than in the ministry. I got that idea from a secular business writer, Michael Gerber, who wrote The E-myth Revisited—required reading for any entrepreneur, including ministry entrepreneurs. I’m not completely sold on everything he writes in the book, but I do think he’s got a gem of an idea as it applies to organizational leadership! Larger ministries can have people with the time to think deeply about their mission and become thought-leaders in their fields. In a ministry that overlaps with the secular sphere’s interests (such as relief work), they can speak out and be respected in the public sphere.
• Larger ministries have the capacity and infrastructure to take on a leadership role in much larger projects than most ministries could handle. In overseas development work, for example, their ability to handle large, comprehensive projects that cover a region and not just a neighbourhood gives them credibility that may open doors to leverage Christian donations with government funding. Rather than dealing with fifty small organizations, government funding agencies can deal with one or two large ones.
• Not only do large ministries have the people to handle larger projects, they also have the ability to raise significantly more funds than a small ministry can, and therefore can respond to more complex, expensive opportunities than a small ministry can. There are a number of very large inner-city missions across Canada that I’ve toured that have developed some very exciting and comprehensive programs, but they required millions of dollars to implement them.
• While large ministries undoubtedly have more management overhead, good management results in more efficient operations. And since there are more programs to allocate the overhead to, a large ministry is likely more efficient than a number of small ministries each running just a few programs, especially when one evaluates outcomes rather than simply outputs.
• Beneficiaries benefit from large ministries too. Looking again at a large inner-city mission, it can provide its beneficiaries with a complete solution, such as a shelter combined with training for job skills and addiction counselling.
• With size comes responsibility (Luke 12:38). Their size makes large ministries a highly visible witness to the world of Christian love and compassion at work. This may be a side of Christianity that many people aren’t aware of, and these ministries may be the only Christian witness these people encounter. Large ministries should make sure their Christian identity is known.
• A corollary of the last point is that since they do have such high public visibility, they will be seen by the public as representative of Christian ministries. This means that all the more care must be taken by large ministries to protect the reputation of our faith. If their practices are unbecoming a Christian ministry, all Christian ministries are discredited to a degree because of our shared identification with Jesus Christ. So for this reason alone, even if there were no biblical basis for accountability to the body of Christ (which there is), they are accountable to us (and, of course, to the Lord himself!).
• Christian agencies provide a means for people to work together across denominational boundaries. They provide “neutral territory” based on a common belief in the essentials of the Christian faith. They are therefore a powerful witness to the unity of the people of God. The large ministries, which are more likely to have a broad cross-section of the church represented among their staff and volunteers, should be sure to add to their primary mission a secondary mission of demonstrating the unity that can be achieved while respecting the diversity of denominational distinctives. At every opportunity, I tell reporters and others that the CCCC membership reflects a broad cross-section of our faith and not just a few particular denominations.

So both large and small ministries have something to contribute to the work of the church. This begs the question, if I have an idea for a new ministry, should I start my own or try to get an existing ministry to take it on? I’ll address that in the next post.

*I revised these stats after looking at the actual list produced by the database. There were, in fact, a number of non-Christian charities included in the stats as originally published in this post.

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