Eleven years ago Andy wrote a thesis to complete his MA in Evangelism Studes and the purpose of the thesis was to find the best methods for evangelism for GVYFC.  The situation and results that he describes at the ministry are quite out of date today, so please keep that in mind.  After completing the thesis, he used it to refresh and renew the ministry at GVYFC and the results have been great.  By taking a hard look at their practices and results his team built a much more fruitful ministry!

You can download Harrington’s thesis and use it to stimulate ideas for how you could review your own ministry.  While the content will be helpful to anyone with a youth ministry, the process he used is applicable to any ministry.  Here’s what he’s done so well in this 90 page thesis:

• He documented the program rationale that governed the design of their many programs.  I don’t think that had been done before so he had to look at what they were doing and then reverse-engineer the theoretical foundation that justified their programs.  That meant he had to create both a theory of change and a logic model.  Although he doesn’t use those terms or build a diagram, he does document them in narrative form.  I wrote about how to do this at a the program level, so this is a good example at the organizational level.  You should have a theory of change and logic model at both the organizational and program levels.
• Andy does a great literature review to ensure he is right up-to-date on the latest thinking in youth evangelism.  He researched general shifts in culture, particularly from modern to post-modern world-views, and the agents that are driving youth culture.  Again, I wrote about doing literature reviews at the program level, and Andy has shown how to do for the organization.  You should do both.
• He addresses the issue of how to define success for their ministry and then found a way to measure it.  I’ll be writing about this topic later in the CCCC strategic review that is currently underway.
• After doing all the analysis, Andy then addresses the “So what?” question and develops several strategies that will take GVYFC to a new level of effectiveness.  He suggests that YFC and other movements adopt a new embodied apologetic, rather than relying on a programmatic approach. This apologetic incorporates five factors; the cultural desire among young people for authentic relationship, their openness to spirituality, the importance of story, the concept of journeying together and the formation of community.

Thank you Andy for sharing your thesis!  May we all learn how to look hard at our own ministries and enjoy benefits similar to what you have experienced.

An article by Dr. John Jefferson (“The Role of Theology in the Life of the Church“) makes a strong case for why theological training is critical for church leaders, and I believe his arguments apply just as well to agency leaders.  I believe theology helps us understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, how we should do it, and how we should evaluate both our options and our results.

Dr. Jefferson writes that theology:

• provides the grounding for a vision that will not let you get off-track.  It will ensure you approach your mission holistically.  Always remember that we are not just trying to solve problems (hunger, people not in relationship with God, guilt, etc.) but we are helping bring this world into God’s kingdom where everyone can experience the fullness of God’s love and peace, and truly be the people God made them to be.  So our vision must be bigger than overcoming the problem; it must incorporate God’s intended result.  Theology should broaden and elevate our vision for the work God has called us to so that we always have God’s end in mind.
• keeps ministries healthy.  Based on some research, Dr. Jefferson states that denominations that have “tolerated doctrinal erosion” have suffered great membership losses between 1965 and 1999 while denominations committed to a strong biblical theology have grown and shown great vitality.  Staying true to your theological foundation gives workers and supporters something solid to commit to that fully engages them.  Taking action based on a strong theology puts your ministry in a place where it is most likely to enjoy God’s many blessings.
• provides a standard against which to measure your success.  How are you doing, really?  How would God assess your results?  Thinking about your performance from God’s perspective will likely lead you to include some additional performance criteria such as the manner in which you achieved results, and it will almost always lead to little niggling questions such as “Who did we overlook?” and “Did we do anything that really required faith?”  I think it will also keep the leadership team humble as they analyze their own performance in light of God’s standards.

If you’d like to find a Bible college or seminary to take a course or two, or even to get a degree, a pretty comprehensive listing of them can be found at Christian Higher Education Canada’s website.

However, in spite of numerous cautions expressed in the ratings article, which I think are fully warranted, the rating system gives a final grade as an overall assessment.  The existence of a final grade undermines an otherwise fine attempt at rating charities.  Few people will have the inclination to do any of the more nuanced follow-up work that MoneySense suggests, because (human nature being what it is) they will take the path of least effort and simply rely on the final grade. (How’s that for a pessimistic assessment of humanity!  Sorry, but I think it’s true.)

Here are some ideas for improving the rating system:

• When examining fundraising costs, use a multi-year period instead of a year at a time.  While direct mail fundraising, for example, should raise immediate dollars, major gifts and deferred gifts can take a year or sometimes decades (in the case  of bequests) to materialize.  Capital campaigns usually take 3 years to convert pledges into cash receipts.  So while the revenue comes in over an extended time, the costs to get that revenue tend to be incurred upfront.  This makes older charities look better than younger charities because they are now receiving donations from work that was paid for years before.  Using a 3 year rolling average would be a more realistic way of determining fundraising costs as a percentage of money raised.  It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than using only one year.
• For both overhead costs and fundraising costs, any rating system assumes that all charities allocate their expenses the same way.  While I think charities are getting better at this due to changes in accounting rules and CRA guidelines, I suspect there is still a wide variation in how costs are allocated and therefore the percentages that raters are so eager to calculate are not likely as solid as they believe.  Even if everyone reported based on the same allocation criteria, a number is just a number until it is compared to something useful. When assessing charities, the focus should not be on inputs such as administration and fundraising, but on the outcomes that those expenditures generate.  A higher administration expense could lead to better oversight or even better quality staff, potentially achieving much greater social good.  The real evaluation of a charity should be based on its ability to use its inputs for the greatest possible social good.  So shift the focus from inputs to outcomes as the primary focus (effectiveness), and leave the cost of achieving those outcomes as an important but secondary consideration (efficiency).  I’m not taking the time to hit the books while writing this post, but there is a good literature available on measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of intangible missions such as many charities have.
• Sarah Efron, the originator of this particular rating system, acknowledges quite correctly that there are complicating factors that make it impossible to do a pure number-crunching exercise alone:
  • Some causes are more popular than others, so it is easier to raise money,
  • Some charities are household names while others are brand new and have to do a lot more promotion to get noticed, 
  • Some charities make greater use of volunteers and thus have lower overhead costs,
  • Some charities work only locally and others nationally or internationally, adding to their oversight costs,
  • Some fundraise nationally, incurring greater costs, while others are closer to their donors because they only fundraise locally, and
  • Some charities operating in the same ‘business’ receive government funding and some do not.
  • Therefore it makes sense to highlight these differences in the report. 
• It would be more helpful if, in the governance rating section, the report mentioned whether or not a charity responded to the survey.  They may have poor governance or they may not respond to inquiries like this.  Both reflect negatively, but they are very different from each other.  Poor governance is much more of a concern to me than not disclosing information.  (I can think of no good reason, but the way, why the information should not have been provided.)  
• To be fair, charities should be sent a draft report and given a chance to add their comments to explain any results that they feel do not fairly reflect their operations.
• The underlying assumption of a rating system for charities is that donors are interested in the ”return on investment.”  But when investment analysts assess corporate investments (stocks and bonds), they do not rely only on financial reports and checklists, they also visit the companies, interview their CEO’s and dig into their strategies.  Without this sort of analysis (suitably adapted for the charitable sector), any charity rating system is deficient.  But who would pay for such a system?  Foundations normally do their own due diligence that includes these extra assessments, but they only work with so many charities.  Is it practical to think that 85,000 charities can be rated?  If you only rate the largest ones, are you penalizing the smaller charities? 

Maybe we wouldn’t need a charity rating service if we combined the external validation that comes from having standards such as CCCC provides for Christian ministries with greater transparency by charities who would make information freely and easily available on their websites.  Our Seal of Accountability ensures donors that a third party has validated a charity’s compliance with a set of standards, and by posting information on a website, donors can find out for themselves if what the charity is doing is effective, efficient, and what they want to support.   Christian charities should speak for themselves rather than depend on rating services and post the sort of information that the public wants on their website, including:

• complete financial statements,
• annual reports,
• policies such as privacy, fundraising, executive compensation, etc.,
• governance issues such as requested by MoneySense,
• a logic model that supports their mission statement,
• a definition of success, and
• a discussion of outcomes, effectiveness and efficiency (if not covered in the annual report).

It seems to me that providing this information is something a charity would want to do because if they are performing well, the information will be a persuasive communication to current and potential supporters.  Doing the work to produce the information would also be very beneficial for the charity.  For example, I am thinking a lot about effectiveness and efficiency at CCCC and by getting stuff written down, I am forcing myself to rigorously think the issues through.

A lot of the information that MoneySense wants to see is posted on our website (financial and governance info here, and some sample program evaluations here), but I haven’t posted a logic model or definition of success yet.  We’re in the process of rethinking our mission statement, which will determine our logic model, definition of success, and our outcomes measurement criteria, so those will be posted once we have done that work.

So, those are my thoughts.  I’m especially interested in hearing from charity staff what they think of charity rating systems and how they think they can best be transparent with the public.  If you don’t like the rating systems, what do you suggest instead?  Please contribute your ideas!

When a leader requires without relating, the leader is seen as autocratic, demanding, hard-nosed and a bunch of other not-so-nice attributes.  When a leader relates without requiring, not much happens, but everyone has a really good time as the ship goes down.

I suspect that some leaders feel the tension between requiring and relating and struggle with doing both.  Some leaders may have difficulty with the relating part, believing that if things get mushy and touchy-feely the organization will fall to pieces.  And other leaders may not have the intestinal fortitude and confidence to insist on performance, so they avoid confronting poor performance in a misguided attempt to be nice.

This leader made two points about R&R that should help you lead with both strategies.

1. Don’t settle for an either/or approach to the two Rs.  The concept of requiring and relating, of demanding performance while at the same time showing care and compassion, is thoroughly biblical.  John 1:14 says that Jesus came “full of grace and truth.”  Randy Alcorn, in The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance, shows how Jesus demonstrated grace towards other people while at the same time not compromising the truth at all.  He welcomed the woman caught in adultery, but also said, “Go and sin no more.”  Grace is like relating, and truth is like requiring.  Jesus showed how grace and truth work together seamlessly to produce his desired result: they drive people to a decision point – will they, or will they not, live for God?  Requiring and relating can likewise co-exist in your leadership style to produce your desired results – accomplishment of your ministry’s mission.  So don’t be squeamish about insisting on performance, and don’t be shy about building strong relationships with your staff.
2. Requiring performance by clearly setting out the expected activities and results is simply good stewardship.  I thought this was a brilliant insight, connecting performance with stewardship.  After all, if you had a program that did not perform well, you’d either cancel it or redesign it to perform better.  You wouldn’t knowingly continue a program that was inefficient or ineffective, would you?  Of course not.  So why would you knowingly put up with inefficient or ineffective performance?  Both programs and salaries are funded by donors who expect you to make good use of their hard-earned donations.  And as a leader in ministry, you are accountable to God for good stewardship of everything entrusted to you.

But employees are accountable for good stewardship too.  Any paid worker in Christian ministry has two kinds of stewardship to think about with respect to their incomes.  First, in their personal capacities, they are to be good stewards of the cash they receive.  That is the normal way to think about stewardship.  But second, in their work capacities, they are to be good stewards of the time they traded for their income.  I don’t often hear people talk about stewardship of their work time.  Most often when stewardship of time is discussed, it is in the context of volunteer service.  But every person should think about how they are using their work time and ask the question, “Am I right now being a good steward of the time I have sold to my employer?”

And if leadership needs to help some people become better stewards of their work time, then that too is good stewardship on the leader’s part.  If we don’t address performance issues in order to be nice, well, just hear what Randy Alcorn has to say about that!  According to him, we’ve redefined Christlike to mean “nice” and with that definition, Jesus himself wasn’t always Christlike, because he confronted people with their sin.  Requiring that work standards be met may not always be seen as nice, but done well it is good stewardship.

In Shepherds After My Own Heart: Pastoral Traditions And Leadership In The Bible, Tim Laniak discusses the protection, provision and guidance that the Lord gave to Israel while he led them through the wilderness.  These three words are a pretty good description of leadership responsibilities, but it is the word guidance that I think is most closely related to the R&R style of leadership.  There are three Hebrew verbs used in the Bible that are translated ‘to guide.”  The three nuances Tim gives these words are:

1. gentle leading (which is shown in several verses as the Lord carrying Israel in his arms, or leading the nursing ewes of his flock);
2. leading, even against the will of those being led; and
3. capable, visionary leadership guiding a group toward its destiny.

Perhaps the best way to encapsulate what is meant by Require and Relate is that leaders should provide gentle leadership guiding people towards their common destiny, even when some prodding is required.

By the way, on a completely different topic, Alcorn’s book has a statement that just leapt off the page at me.  As a bonus thought, here it is:

“Most sinners loved being around Jesus.  They enjoyed His company, sought Him out, invited Him to their homes and parties.  Today most sinners don’t want to be around Christians.  Unbelievers tore off the roof to get to Jesus.  Sometimes they crawl out the windows to get away from us!  Why is that?”

Alcorn asks a great question that we all should carefully consider.

I remember that as the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony orchestra took their seats in the pit my wife expressed surprise at how small it was (about thirty people I think, a lot fewer than the number in the You Tube performance I linked to above).  She imagined that unmic’d orchestras must have a lot more people to get the rich sound that was on the record.  And then, only a few bars into the overture, she whispered in amazement “That sounds just like the record!!!”  Yes, a small group of people produced a very large sound.  In fact, they sounded just like a ‘real’ orchestra!

It’s amazing what a small group can do that is out of all proportion to their size.  Think about the dozen apostles.  About Paul and his missionary team.  A small group can change the world!  One of my staff members said that at CCCC, “we are a small team doing big things.”  I love that thought!

The dream of many small ministries, while often not stated, is to become a big ministry.  At CCCC, we have close to 10% of all Christian ministries as members, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be 100%!  Thinking like this, though, focuses your attention on how small you are now.  And then you run the risk of wondering if you are really accomplishing anything as a small ministry.  This angst could become an impediment to your current success.  I’d like to say a few encouraging words to the smaller ministries of Canada (next post I’ll say something to the larger ministries).  What I’m going to say could apply to larger ministries too, but they have to work a lot harder than smaller ministries to get these advantages.

The fact is that Christian ministries in Canada are very small.  Based on the 22,000 T3010′s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC (and assuming they are correctly filled out):

• 80% have less than $300,000 in total revenue, and about half have less than $100,000
• 80% have 4 or fewer employees, and about half have exactly one staff member
  • 105 report no employees at all (just volunteers)
  • 16% say they have two employees
  • 93.5% have 9 or fewer paid staff

Given our small size, here are some things to remember:

• God delights in working through the unlikely, which means he likes to work with the small group that the world might not pay attention to.  In Deut. 7:7-8 Moses says to Israel, “The LORD did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you….”  God did not take the larger nations of Egypt, Assyria or Babylon as his people; he took a people and made them his people, not because of their might, their size or their importance in the world, but just because he loved them.  You don’t have to be big for God to work through you.  Work at your ministry with all you’ve got, knowing that God works through underdogs like a young shepherd boy, a group of country-bumpkin Galileans (at least according to the priests of Jerusalem), and a timid young pastor named Timothy.
• God likes to work in ways that make it clear it is him who is the source of success, not humans.  The best example of this is in Judges 7, where the LORD says to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands, for Israel would become boastful, saying, ‘My own power has delivered me.’”  The group of 22,000 men gets whittled down to 300, an appropriately small number to prove that they are fighting under the power of God and not under their own strength.  Although a small ministry, and maybe because you are a small ministry, God may use you to demonstrate his activity in our world.  When the job is so big that you can’t do it, then you know that your accomplishments are God’s.  So work hard, knowing that God is working beside you and around you in ways you may not even know, but be assured he will accomplish his purposes for calling you into ministry.
• Being a small ministry, you are much more likely to think carefully about which programs and services to continue offering.  You can’t afford to carry anything forward just because it’s part of your routine.  You can’t throw money or people at your opportunities, since you don’t have the capacity to do that, so you must choose carefully how to use the precious resources you have, pruning old programs to make way for new programs.  By always focussing on the best use of your limited resources, you will likely have a very effective and efficient ministry.
• You are more likely to find creative ways to stretch your influence, by partnering with others or drawing on volunteers, because you have to.  My first boss, Richard Adair, believed the secret to success as a small entrepreneur is to ride the coat-tails of a larger company.  They do the heavy work of acquiring the customer, for example, and you simply provide the add-on to the sale.  As a small ministry, your calling might be to serve specialized, small niches that the larger organizations have missed while focussing on the more general and broader needs.  You might be a specialty add-on to the services provided by larger organizations.
• Small ministries don’t have the resources to develop a bureaucracy, so it is easier to have a creative entrepreneurial environment.  Small ministries can be the ‘skunk works’ of Christian ministry, the testing ground for new ideas.  Encourage innovation.
• As a small organization, you will probably be able to respond quicker to issues or changes in the environment.  You can be fast on your feet and quick to exploit new opportunities.  Create an organizational culture that supports change.
• In a flat organization, you can communicate easier with your staff than a large organization can, and you can also involve them in decisions and planning that they might not experience in a large ministry.  Staff will likely have greater variety in their work because the jobs have to be broader in scope to make up for the limited number of employees.  In addition, you will likely empower your team more and delegate more to them (out of necessity), thus giving you an advantage in hiring people because they will be able to use more of their talents and have more influence over their work than elsewhere.
• The environment of a small ministry is very motivational in and of itself for your team members because all of them are very close to the ministry’s results and they can see the fruit of their labour for themselves.  There is nothing like appreciative feedback to spur you on.  It is astonishing how many compliments the CCCC gets, and I make sure that all the staff share the compliments with the team so that we can all be encouraged by them.

As with any ministry, don’t measure your success in terms of growth or size, but in terms of how well you are fulfilling your mission.  God created your ministry to assist with his mission, so progressively fulfilling the specific part of his mission that you are called to serve is the way you should assess your success.

Finally, when you feel you are small and struggling along by yourself, remember God’s promise that is so important that it appears not once, but four times in scripture (Deut 31:6, 31:8, Josh 1:5 and Heb 13:5): “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

May God richly bless your ministry!

Values are important because the CCCC team developed them on the basis of which behaviours and attitudes cause team members to raise or lower their respect for a teammate as a productive contributer to accomplishing our mission.  The team’s values ended up defining the qualities of a very high-performing team.  As a result, our performance reviews are based on adherence to the values, not activity levels or results.  Activity and results are natural consequences of working by the values.  Since we evaluate performance by our values, it only makes sense that they should also be the selection criteria.

My main concern about hiring to our values is to preserve the integrity of our high-performing team.  I am proud of the team and the quality of its work and don’t want to insert a new person who does not live by our values.  I think that would be setting them up for a bad experience and it would be demoralizing to the current team.  We don’t ask about values directly, but the questions are designed to bring out the candidate’s past behaviours that are related to the values. 

As for personality?  If everyone on staff had the same personality, this would be a dull place and we’d have few perspectives to bring to the table.  A good variety of personality styles helps ensure we have a variety of viewpoints and real options to consider.  It also contributes to a healthy dynamic in the workplace.  We have lots of laughter here at CCCC.

How about you?  I’m sure there are lots of other excellent strategies for hiring.  Willing to share?

The book is The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld.  The premise is that marketing surveys ask too many questions that provide only marginal information.  Often the answers don’t give enough information for you to know what to change.  Those questions are also the questions that the asker wants answers to, as opposed to what the responders would really like to say.  (I wrote about this problem of presuming you know what the issues are in a previous post.)

Reichheld believes that real long term sustainable growth for any organization occurs because its supporters love doing business with them and sing their praises to their friends and colleagues.  He believes that any organization, for-profit, charity or government agency, can benefit from asking the ultimate question.

If you have satisfied supporters, they become your marketing department, leveraging well beyond anything you could afford to pay for.  Your strongest supporters are also your strongest promoters.  The ultimate question helps you raise more supporters and tells you how to help them become more committed to your organization.

The ultimate question is: How likely is it that you would recommend this organization to a friend or colleague?  On a scale of ten (ten being the most likely to recommend), those who score 9 or 10 are your promoters.  Those who score 6 or less are your detractors.  If you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters you are left with your net promoter score.  (People who score 7 or 8 are called passives – they are satisfied but unenthusiastic.)  Reichheld’s extensive research shows that the organizations with the most efficient growth engines have a net promoter score of 50% to 80%.

Aside from the ultimate question itself, you would ask only one other question (aside from any demographics you want).  If they scored as a promoter, you would ask “What is the primary reason for the score you just gave us?”  That will tell you what you are doing that is highly valued by your supporters.  If they score as a passive or a detractor, you ask “What is the most important improvement that would make you rate us closer to a ten?”  That will tell you what you are doing that is sabotaging your relationships.

At CCCC, we hired a market research firm to do our survey for us.  I think they were quite surprised that we only asked two questions, but wow, did we get some good information from those two questions (as well as a much smaller invoice!).  First, we had an astonishing 37% response rate to our survey.  This alone was remarkable, but I think it was due to the fact, at least partially, that the survey was a really short survey that was done entirely online.  It turned out 60% of our members are promoters, 30% are passive and 10% are detractors.  So we squeaked into the efficient growth range with a net promoter score of 50%. 

Our survey revealed lots of things about us that we wouldn’t necessarily have known to ask about, both strengths and oppportunities for improvement.  We also surveyed former members and never members with different questions and got good results there too.

There’s lots more advanced analysis regarding segmentation of your supporters that Reichheld  includes in his book that we at CCCC haven’t got to yet, but that will come.  I think this is where the book could be improved with more examples of how this advanced analysis is done.  He explains it, maybe I just need more examples, especially from the charitable sector.  I noticed today that there is another book called Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business by two of Reichheld’s co-developers of the net promoter model.  (The subtitle is correct, but I think it should say How Net Promoters….)  I haven’t read this one yet, but it is advertised as providing lots of real-life case studies of how the model is applied.  Perhaps you should buy the two books together.  I’ll be getting the second one.

ARK holds a gala event each year to raise money for charity.  In 2006, for example, they raised US$36 million in one night (they auctioned off things like a dinner with Gwyneth Paltrow, guitar lessons with Chris Martin of Coldplay, a game of tennis with Elton John, a week on the world’s largest single-masted yacht for you and eleven friends, a day of shopping with Elizabeth Hurley… you get the idea).  

Unlike most charities that start with a mission and then go looking for funding, the financiers got their start in charity work by raising more money than they knew what to do with, and then had to decide what their mission should be!  Isn’t that a nice way to get started!

They started off by giving grants to other charities, but felt they were not getting a big enough bank for the buck (do Brits say “not enough punch for the pound” ?).  So they stopped supporting other charities and became an operating charity themselves. 

Now, when you read the case you can’t help but think of this group of donors as a group of control freaks on steroids.  The problem they encountered was that they couldn’t find any charities that fit their criteria for how they think charitable work should be done.  Perhaps, you might wonder, their criteria were unreasonable.  Well, you decide.  They wanted to fund charities that are:

• engaged in measurable activities
• achieving real world results
• creating value
• efficient
• sustainable
• leveraging their resources, and
• scalable or replicable.

If they had come to you to talk about a grant, would you have met their criteria?  It seems to me that ARK has a pretty good set of criteria that we could use to evaluate our charities and our programs.  

Lots of the nonprofit CEO’s started today’s discussion with a very negative view of the ‘business practices’ these financiers were trying to impose on charities.  Our group felt at first that they just didn’t understand how things work in the nonprofit sector.  But as the discussion continued, I think everyone in the room came to appreciate the wisdom of their criteria.  After all, wouldn’t you like to have programs where you know there are measurable real world results and that the program has the potential to become self-sustaining and could be copied all over the world?  Wouldn’t you like it to be efficient and leverage your resources?

Maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss ‘business practices.’  Maybe they just might be ‘best practices’ for the nonprofit sector too.

Your mission statement is actually a claim.  Whatever it is, that is what you claim you are working on.  Some mission statements are auditable results claims, meaning that you can measure the results (results are always outside of your ministry) and prove that you are progressively fulfilling your mission by making a change in the external world.

Other mission statements make aspirational claims (such as the prevention of teen pregnancy mission statement).  These claims can’t be proven.  Either you can’t measure them or you can’t make a causal connection between your work and the real world result.  So how do you satisfy your board and your funders that you are making progress?  Fortunately for you, no problem!

What you need when you can’t measure is a really good theory of change.  Whatever you believe about the cause and effect related to the problem you are trying to solve is your theory of change.  The easiest way to think through and show your theory is to use a logic model.  You may not have a theory of change handy, but every organization has at least an implicit theory of change. 

If you don’t know where to start, you could look at your current programs and major initiatives.  When you designed them, you had some belief about what needed to happen to make the change you want to see.  So now you need to document the linkage between your activities and the final impact you want to have on the world and give that to your board and funders.  You could also go back to the philosophy held by the founders of your ministry.  What did they say they believed about the problem?  What have you said you believe about the problem?

If the theory is well-articulated and makes intuitive sense, you should measure what you can, get what anecdotal evidence you can, and then rely on the theory of change as an agreement with the board and funders that if you are working within the theory of change, it can be accepted that you are contributing to the problem’s solution.

When the case was finished, we had worked out their theory of change based on their statements and discovered that almost none of their programs contributed to the change they wanted to make.  In other words, they said one thing, but then tackled the problem from a completely different angle.