But is your organization ready to evaluate itself?

Evaluation Anxiety

Does your organization and its culture support critical, objective self-evaluation? There actually is a phenomenon recognized in the social sciences as Extreme Evaluation Anxiety (XEA).¹ At its worst, people suffering from XEA also suffer from depression and low self-esteem, and they withdraw from social interactions to avoid the possibility of people judging them negatively. That extreme form of anxiety may be rare in the workplace, but there are lots of people who have ordinary anxiety or negative attitudes towards evaluation. If there are enough of them on your staff, no evaluation is going to be helpful because they will work to undermine it. They don’t necessarily have a malicious intent, but they are stuck in their belief that they are performing well, and they naturally think the measurements and standards that support their self-perception are the ones the evaluation should use.

Bringing the topic closer to home for ministry leaders, the authors of Accountability and Effectiveness Evaluation in Nonprofit Organizations discuss the psychosocial problems associated with evaluation, saying that the basic issue is that people like to succeed, and if there is a failure, they prefer not to be seen as responsible for it. The authors call this phenomenon an LGAB attitude: Look Good, Avoid Blame! This can result in two problems:

1. Their fear of an unfavourable assessment causes them to try to bias the evaluation from the start, when the evaluation process is being designed
2. Their wish to avoid responsibility for failure causes them to start the blame game in earnest when actual results do not match expected results

The solution isn’t as simple as saying “Don’t worry about the evaluation.” Even though people are told the evaluation is intended simply to reveal problems that might exist and provide information to help resolve the problems, they will still believe that if there are problems, they will be blamed.

The challenge for evaluators is that an LGAB attitude turns the evaluation from an objective process into a political process, and then you might as well save your time and money and not do it.

Avoiding the “Blame Game”

So, how can you avoid the blame game and do the kind of evaluation that will help your ministry step up its game? You need to go deeper than just reassurances to the staff, which may or may not be believed. There are three basic strategies to create an environment that welcomes evaluation. They will take time to implement because staff need to see that what management says to them is, in fact, true in their own experience.

1. Create the Right Corporate Culture

Corporate culture needs to embrace:

• A commitment to the mission that is greater than a commitment to a program or any other means to an end. People who are passionately committed to the mission will be ready to change or grow for the sake of advancing the mission. So look for passion for your mission, when recruiting and for people already on the team. Do everything you can to build passion for your mission among the staff. Start with yourself. Be sure you have an inspiring passion for your mission and model it for the staff.
• Seeing projects and programs as experiments. Assume they can always be improved upon by applying what you learn from experience. Everything should be as good as it can be, based on the circumstances at any particular time, but it should be celebrated as a good thing that we can learn from experience. It’s no failure to discover that improvements are possible. The staff should truly believe that “We did the best we could with the information and circumstances at the time.”
• A willingness to identify and challenge sacred cows. Nothing except your Christian identity should be untouchable. Everything should be up for discussion. Remember, cows became sacred because at one time they were a key success factor. But that was then, and this is now. Whoever created the cow in the first place was probably an innovative person, and in this day with these circumstances, that person may very well be the first to overthrow the sacred cow they once created and create something new!
• Re-thinking decisions that have been previously made. Like the sacred cow, decisions were made with the best available information at the time. With new information, a different decision might be warranted. Don’t stick with a bad decision just because time and money have been invested in it. The financial concept of sunk costs applies here. You’ve already spent time and money following through on that decision. There is no getting it back. But do you have to keep investing in it when you now know there is a better way? Don’t throw good money after bad! Make a fresh decision today and move on. If you can recoup anything, that’s good, but otherwise, what’s spent is spent. You should always search out a fresh perspective based on current circumstances when making decisions, making the very best decision today that will guide you to the most attractive future.
• Inquiry and exploration. Reflection, curiosity, and what-if scenarios should be a regular part of organizational life. This will prevent staff from rigid thinking that there is only one way to get a result. If evaluation shows there is a better way, staff should be open to that rather than be defensive about the way they did it.
• Rational, evidence-based decision making. Resistance to unfavourable evaluation results and resistance to change are often based on emotional, rather than rational, grounds. Train your staff to always look for evidence to support assertions.

In short, we need to identify our organizations as learning organizations, and make every type of evaluation risk-free by treating each one, including individual performance reviews, as opportunities to learn.

Corporate culture must put the highest priority on every person and every program performing at their very best. Every opportunity for improvement should be cause for celebration, because no person or program is perfect, and every improvement helps us better fulfill our mission. The focus should be on how the positive outcome of an evaluation improves our results.

2. Involve Staff

Once you have a supportive corporate culture, you can involve staff in designing the evaluation process without fear of political agendas. Staff can help you decide certain critical elements of the review, such as:

• What will be reviewed and how. It is particularly important that outcomes rather than activities are evaluated.
• What standards will be applied to the data to determine how good they are.
• How the final results will be interpreted and used.

Analyzing the final results is a subjective task, so the criteria for how the results will be interpreted needs to be set before the evaluation is done. Human nature being what it is, if the benchmarks for deciding what is acceptable and what is not are determined after the results are known, the bar will be set so that employees achieve the result they want to see.  So before the evaluation is done, answer these questions:

• What distinguishes between satisfactory and unsatisfactory performance? What objective criteria will you examine?
• After measuring the objective criteria, how good do the results have to be to be considered poor, good, or excellent?
• What would it take for a program to be terminated rather than modified? How bad would the results have to be?

3. Support Staff

Staff need to understand that evaluations benefit them too. They should know that the purpose of a program evaluation, or even their own personal performance evaluation, is to help the program or them be more successful. In other words, when you do evaluations, you are for them, not against them. The benefits for staff are:

• Job security: When an organization performs well, jobs are more secure because donors will see the impact the charity is making and want to fund it.
• Skill enhancement: Evaluations can lead to training for new skills, which enhances an employee’s capabilities and value to the employer.
• Personal significance: When staff become more successful in their jobs, they have greater job satisfaction and a higher feeling of significance.
• Greater enjoyment at work: Staff may have more interesting work, or new equipment or work processes that make doing the job easier or more effective. At the very least, they will know that the work they are doing is important work, because they know they are playing a part in achieving great results.

Conclusion

Evaluation is a critical part of being a good steward of your mission, the people, and the resources that God has given you responsibility for. It is worth the effort to ensure that the culture and the staff support objective evaluation of their work. God bless!

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So let’s take a look at sin within the Evangelical community and what we need to do about it. We tend to think of sin mostly in terms of behaviours such as lying, stealing, and such. But if we think of sin from a biblical standpoint, which adds other dimensions that we might easily gloss over or excuse, well… let’s just say that I find the broader concept of sin pretty challenging, so I’m talking as much to myself as I am to you.

Personal Sins

Paul explicitly told the Corinthians to stop judging the people outside the church entirely. We should only judge those inside the church, who know better.

We should each start with a personal self-examination. We need to do this scrutiny because as individuals we can undermine the public witness of our churches and ministries. You don’t want people saying, “So THAT’S what people who go to that church are like!”

Authors Barr and Citlau raise the issue of public witness in their book, Compassion Without Compromise, and question why non-Christians should take Jesus seriously given that even Christians don’t seem to do so when it comes to personal morality and following Jesus’ commands. Ezekiel 16:49-50 lists some sins you and I might judge ourselves against:

• Pride
• Excess of food
• Prosperous ease
• Not aiding the poor and needy
• Haughtiness

Can you imagine checking out a church filled with people committing these sins? Who would want to come back a second time?

Who’s in Your Church?

Next, we should look to our local church communities and see if we are doing anything as a group that might drive people away from our church.

Andy Stanley writes about the messiness that happens as we engage our culture.¹ When we try to eliminate all the grey areas to make a very clear line of distinction between what is acceptable and what isn’t, we end up with a caricature of what Christ intended his church to be. My own thinking is that when we make decisions about what makes a person comfortable enough for us to sit beside in a worship service, we are being just as exclusive and judgmental as the Pharisees were, and Jesus had very harsh words for them!

Think about the people Jesus surrounded himself with. Matthew recorded the time Jesus came to his house to eat, and Jesus raised complaints from the Pharisees because he attracted the despised tax collectors and sinners to his house. Would today’s “tax collectors and sinners” (those who are despised or marginalized) be attracted to our churches the way they were to Jesus?

So look at your Sunday morning congregation and ask, “Are we attracting tax collectors and sinners like Jesus did? If we haven’t got people like that in our congregations, shouldn’t we wonder why not? Could it be that our public behaviour is turning people away from our churches before they even reach our doors? Is our public behaviour preventing them from hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ? For us to truly be witnesses to the ends of the earth, we must be witnesses to everybody whether we’re comfortable with them or not. In fact, we must make ourselves comfortable with them or they will see the gospel of reconciliation as just another insincere idea that doesn’t deliver on its promise.

The Plank in Our Eye

When we examine ourselves for sin, go beyond obvious sins and take a holistic view of what constitutes sin. Ron Sider, in The Future of Our Faith, writes that the Evangelical church usually defines sin in terms of personal misdeeds, while the liberal Mainline church usually defines it as unjust, racist social structures which oppress people. Both wings of Protestantism have an incomplete understanding of sin. I’ll focus on Evangelicals here because the Evangelical church is the focus of this series of posts.

Sider says Evangelicals have reduced the Good News to an individualistic forgiveness of sins, which doesn’t come close to doing justice to Jesus’ self-declared mission of announcing the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and all that the kingdom means in terms of justice for all. We need to pay more attention to the many passages about corporate sins, two of which are:

• Malachi 3:5, which mentions the sins of defrauding workers of their wages, oppressing widows and the fatherless, and depriving foreigners among us of justice.
• Ezekiel 22:29, which mentions oppressing the poor and needy.

By buying in to the prevailing North American ideology of personal responsibility we tend to blame people for their misfortunes, assuming that they are reaping the consequences of their own poor decisions and habits. “It’s their own fault,” we might say. “Why should I help them?” That simplistic analysis overlooks the fact that society is structured in such a way that it is very difficult for the poor and needy, the addicted, and others to get out of their downward spiral. And even if it is their own fault, does that mean we shouldn’t have compassion and help restore them to the life that God intended for them?

The Mainline church and the more liberal wing of the Evangelical church understand the broader social issues and call it social justice. But while many in the conservative wing of the church are okay with giving out meals and backpacks (let’s call that kind of help practical social justice for individuals), we are very reluctant to challenge social structures and practices that reinforce social inequity and injustice. It’s too left wing for conservative tastes. But we have to ask, what do we mean by conservative? Are we talking politics or theology? We must not ever fall into the trap of equating the two!

By avoiding the more abstract social justice issues (which we can refer to as systemic social justice for communities), we have in effect become callous towards the suffering of people whom God loves and wants to redeem.²

Uncovering Our Sins

Everyone has blind spots. Entire communities can have blind spots too, because everyone in them shares the same cultural perspective and norms. In particular, we Evangelicals have our blind spots. We understand individual greed but we overlook rampant consumerism because it is so pervasive and is simply the unquestioned way the world works. We don’t realize how much secular society has ingrained itself into our attitudes and beliefs.

In Return to Justice: Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience, authors Rah and Vanderpol suggest that the only way to discover our blind spots is:

to hear from believers from different cultural and class contexts because they notice things we don’t. We have often so habituated ourselves to our cultural environment and the compromises the church has made in regard to the status quo that we are like fish swimming in water without realizing that they are wet.

Any self-examination should include Christians from other parts of the world and from different strata in our own society.

When we find a blind spot in which we have compromised our faith, we need to call it for what it is and repent, which means we really must change our ways. In Return to Justice, the story is told of World Vision confronting its own way of defining the poor in terms of what they lack. They realized this definition did not live up to a biblical view of humanity. They repented of their way of defining poverty and developed one that is biblically-theologically correct: the poor are now defined as fully capable and worthy to be listened to and partnered with.

Rah and Vanderpol’s Return to Justice is an excellent prophetic word to the North American church. We can follow along and learn from the stories of six ministries and movements as they move from one understanding of how to promote justice and mercy to another. We see them mature in their understanding of the systemic issues which, if not addressed, will mean that the traditional handouts will always be necessary. It reminds me of the old aphorism “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Return to Justice covers topics such as:

• what individuals can do personally to promote social justice,
• what organizations and groups can do to speak prophetically to our society, and
• what we can do within the church locally and globally to model God’s justice within our own church communities.

Getting Past Our Sins

Some self-reflection among Evangelicals has already started in the United States, and could at least be a starting point for Canadian Evangelicals. An Evangelical Manifesto was issued in Washington in 2008. It isn’t perfect, and it has been critiqued by Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Roger Olson (part 1) and (part 2). Nevertheless, it is an important document to spark creative self-reflection.

The Evangelical Manifesto reports that some of the sins we need to repent of are:

• worldliness of our churches
• factionalism
• living as practical atheists
• racial and ethnic separation in our churches
• loss of our independence and dedication to Christ alone by serving as “useful idiots” for one political party or another
• engagement in culture wars that have incubated conflict, hatred, and lawsuits

Canadian Evangelicals need to examine ourselves and humbly confess our own sins and weaknesses to Christ and ask for his forgiveness. We also need to seek forgiveness from each other and from the outsider communities whom we’ve hurt by starting with some sincere apologies. We must:

• hold true to our biblical-theological truths
• speak prophetically to, and engage with, the outside world
• avoid attitudes and behaviours that hurt our ability to promote the cause of Christ beyond the church.

Going Forward

We’ve come through a sea of change since the mid-twentieth century and now that we have some distance from the traumatic changes, we should be able to objectively and dispassionately assess where we are, make things right, and then move on—unencumbered by the past and with God’s blessing.

Key Thought: We need to get our own house in order if we want credibility outside the church.

“The book, Return to Justice has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

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How We Got a Class Anyway

The University was closed today even though there are five different Executive Education courses in session this week. One of the professors for another class lives within walking distance and he came to breakfast and said that even though the faculty wanted to teach, it would be considered insubordination if they did.

However, one of the students in my course thought “We’re all here, so even if there is no professor, we should still meet and discuss the cases.” It ended up that a few admin staff were in, and they opened our classroom for us. Since no one is supposed to walk outside today, we were led through a labyrinth of underground tunnels and corridors between the buildings.

One of the students is a Harvard MBA grad and she is a professor somewhere, so she facilitated the discussion. We finished the first case and then the professor showed up. It turned out that the Executive Education faculty had persuaded the Dean to allow the five exed classes to proceed because all students are on campus. The host faculty (the ones leading each course) promised to bring overnight bags in case they got stuck here. All the safety issues were resolved, so permission was given to teach. The schedule was juggled and the day proceeded. Since many of the guest faculty who would do individual sessions through the day couldn’t make it in, the Dean (who lives on campus) volunteered to come and spend an hour in each of the five courses.

Measuring Mission Achievement

The topic today was strategic planning based on a theory of change model. Since I’ve covered that topic extensively on this blog I won’t repeat the lesson, but one interesting point was made. When it comes to measuring performance, if you measure to please your funders, you might miss measuring what really counts for mission success! Be sure that you measure first for mission success and then add any other measurements your donors want to see. This point came from a case in which the charity was responding to the interests of donors and opportunities that presented themselves, instead of finding donors to support their mission-critical initiatives.

Mission Validity

Every once in a while you should conduct some research to determine if your mission is still valid. Over time, conditions change and the need you are addressing may no longer exist or may not be relevant. This came from a case about a private girls high school that was in a slow, seemingly inexorable death spiral into extinction. Recent research showed that girls learn differently from boys and that educational theory supported all-girl schools. That was the plus side. On the downside, it was no longer sufficient to be a finishing school in the 1990s. The school had to become more than that and add a significant science component to the girls’ education. Today they are thriving with an emphasis on science, music and sports.

Advisory Boards

The Dean has a group called the Board of Dean’s Advisors (BDA). This is an advisory group that meets once per year for two days. The combined wealth of the group would make it the tenth largest country in the world – this is one group of very powerful people. How the Dean uses this group is an example for how you could use an advisory group of your own. The Dean calls someone in the group (usually the Chair) and says, “Here’s the issue. Could you call five to ten people who you know would have something to say on this issue and find out what they think? Be sure to find people who are likely to disagree with my proposal.” The person may call people from the BDA, but could also call their friends. The Dean uses this technique to tap into the networks of these very influential people.

Dismissing Volunteers

The Dean says one of the hardest conversations to have is with volunteers who don’t deliver. Once someone volunteers to do something, they have made a commitment. If they don’t or can’t do it, then they should step aside. He doesn’t want people who volunteer their name, he wants their volunteer service. He says they either deliver or they have to get out. He’s learned to be straight with people. If you pussy-foot around, it gets very awkward. He says “Don’t try to be clever” when you have these conversations. With board members, he says you should always have term limits and a mandatory one year off the board. After the break of a year, they might be invited back on the board, or they might not. His preferred way to talk with people who wonder why they haven’t been invited back (or who have let him down in any other volunteer capacity) is to say, “I’m sorry, but your ability to be committed to what we do isn’t enough.”

Dealing with Opposition

When he has to make a decision that could be divisive, he asks people on the other side, “What would you need to see to be supportive of this decision?” If they have nothing to suggest, his position is that there is no resolution to the opposition and they will just have to accept that a decision has been made that they don’t like. When people sulk because they don’t like a decision he’s made, that’s their problem – not his. He consulted them. He was open to adjusting his plans to suit them. They had nothing to offer. They need to accept the decision and move on.

Meetings

The Dean prefers to talk one-on-one with people. “Having a group meet with you,” he says, “is like having no one speak to you.” In a group situation, you will never hear the breadth of thought that people have. Most will just let others speak and not say anything. To make the 120 members of his BDA feel like they are being heard, he holds a one-on-one meeting with each and every one once per year. They are not long meetings, but they give everyone a chance to speak their mind.

Meeting Preparation

In true Harvard fashion, when the Dean wants to bring a topic to his BDA, he writes it up as a case study. This is a much better way of stimulating discussion than just bringing a fact scenario and recommendation. It makes for lively interaction and really engages the advisors. It is enjoyable and interesting.

Significance of the Board

The professor led a great discussion based on two very interesting questions:

1. If your board did not meet for two years, what would be the consequences?
2. What do you think the consequences should be? (In other words, is your board doing what it should be doing?)

This led to an interesting discussion based on the metaphor of a rowing team. How much rowing should the board do and how much steering should the board do? There is no single right answer to this. It depends on where the line is drawn between board and staff responsibilities. The point is, that whatever you  have agreed upon is actually happening. And whichever quadrant you are in (little or much rowing and steering), what are the costs? Are they acceptable? Can you mitigate them? I might do a post on this another time, because I find the Carver Policy Governance model adds some twists to this discussion. I was amazed that 95% of the class didn’t know much about policy governance. In fact, most had never heard of it. The professor had the basic idea of it, but didn’t know much about how it actually works. I thought it was more popular than that.

The storm has abated (it didn’t really amount to very much in Boston) and operations should be back to normal on Tuesday.

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I recently read  The Measure of Our Success: An Impassioned Plea to Pastors by Shawn Lovejoy. His urgent cause is to get pastors away from the three Cs of unhealthy measurement: comparing, copying, and condemning, because they are based on the wrong definition of success. We’re not trying to prove ourselves better than another church, or to copy and become another church or to put down another church by, say, attributing their success to a watering down of the Gospel. We are all trying to be faithful to the way God wants us to live and work and to the  mission he has given us. Given that noble calling, Lovejoy quickly knocks down the idols of bigness, numbers, fame and so forth that many pastors unintentionally serve.

The starting place for measuring mission success is theological reflection on your ministry’s mission. What is God’s heart for your mission? What does he have to say about it? What is his ultimate goal that he wants your mission to achieve? The answers to these questions will define what mission success is for your ministry.

Measurements Must Measure Mission, Values, and Strategy

One of the best questions I’ve come up with to help me decide what to measure is, How will the answer matter? What will we do differently depending on the answer? If the answer is nothing, or nothing significant, then find something better to measure. Did people enjoy the sermon or the worship? Good, but does that really matter? The real issue based on the mission of the church is, Did they change an attitude, have a new insight, or make a decision as a result of the sermon or worship? Will anything change in their life?

So don’t measure the unimportant things. Look for the important things, things that will cause you to make significant changes based on the answer. Important things are directly related to your:

• Mission: The purpose you are trying to fulfill
• Values: The non-negotiable values you will abide by while operating your ministry
• Strategies: The key initiatives for accomplishing the mission

Mission, values and strategy are important. Focus on them and measure how you are doing in each of them. That is what will move your church forward.

Numbers Don’t Count, Percentages Do!

The Great Commission is all about conversion and discipleship. One measurement that Lovejoy promotes is the number of baptisms in a year compared to the average number of worship attendees. That gives a percentage, so big churches and small churches are on a level playing field. As Lovejoy says, “You don’t have to be big to be successful.” He’s not interested in the size of the congregation but in the rate of conversion growth.

He does the same thing for discipleship. He measures the percentage of worship attendees who are “active in biblical community, meaning small groups of people who are connecting together with God, doing life with and serving each other, and reaching out to people outside the community of believers.” Small groups are a key component of discipleship.

 Self-Worth

The bulk of Lovejoy’s book is actually aimed at helping pastors find their self-worth and security in who they are, rather than in the churches they lead. Pastors would do well to consider his advice relating to their own personal vitality, their relationship with their ministry team, and how to keep going when you feel like quitting.

Other Metrics for Churches

Lovejoy says that we need to take the Great Commandment seriously, to love one another, and to focus on the fruit of our ministries. He doesn’t actually develop a metric in this area, but since pastors are given to the church for the equipping of the saints for the work of service (Eph 4:12), then another measurement would be the percentage of worship attendees who are involved in volunteer service in the church or elsewhere, or who have an active, personal ministry of showing love to other people. Here, I’m thinking of a widow in my church who for thirty years has made it her personal ministry to serve other widows in our church. It’s not a program, it is a purely personal effort on her part to be Christ to her widow ‘neighbours’. The point of this metric is, are people doing something with their faith (James 2:14-18)?

If you want conversion growth, you must have people involved with your church who don’t yet know Christ. They could be attending worship, a small group, or a regular participant in one of your ministries. Find out how many people your church has a relationship with who aren’t yet believers. The higher the percentage of total people your church touches to your worship attendance, the more opportunities you have for conversion growth.

If your church is going to grow and multiply, you need lay leaders for small groups and other needs. What percentage of your worship attendance are either currently ministry leaders or being developed to become a ministry leader?

In the end, it is not about numbers, but about results. Paul put it quite well when he wrote to Timothy, “As for you…fulfill your ministry” (2 Tim 4:5 – ESV)

“Book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

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On Monday the final report was presented to the board.  Although programs are a staff responsibility at CCCC, the board is always responsible for due diligence under any governance model and program evaluations are a good way to show they are doing their due diligence.  They help assure the board that our programs are effective and efficient and that our mission is actually being fulfilled through our programs.  If an evaluation cannot show a program is effective and efficient and moving the mission forward, then it should be re-designed or scrapped.

The leadership team has also reviewed the final report and is beginning the process of revamping the conference.  I don’t expect significant changes for the upcoming September conference, but I do expect several significant changes for the next conference.

You can download the final report, Conference Evaluation Report – Public, if you wish to see the extent of the work.  I think it reflects a fairly comprehensive program review.  Certain parts we have labelled ‘confidential’ either because they refer to information from outside sources that we are not at liberty to make public, or they refer to new initiatives that it is simply premature to make public.

This brings the program evaluation series of posts to an end.  My hope is that you will select a program, any program, and try it out.  Let me know how you do!

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Eleven years ago, Andy wrote a thesis to complete his MA in Evangelism Studies 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.

The post A Great Example of Organizational Self-Examination appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

If you aren’t yet doing program reviews in your ministry, this series in real time should help you get started. The goal of doing a review is to decide whether to continue, discontinue or modify a program. Some people may question the value of doing program evaluations because you can just ‘eye-ball’ a program and get an idea of its performance. Maybe. But you are only looking at what is and not what could be. I don’t want to lead a ministry that is only doing ‘okay;’ I want to lead a ministry that is doing the very best possible! I want to get the whole job done, not just part of it. A formal program review will force you to get outside of your own observations and take an objective look at the program as it is and as it could be.

This first post will document the organizational context for the review, the rationale for the selection of the program to be reviewed and the high-level research questions that will drive the evaluation.

Organizational Context

Not every organization is ready to do a program evaluation. Employees might be suspicious of ulterior motives. Perhaps previous evaluations were badly done and no one wants to go through that exercise again! There may be little credibility in evaluations if program staff were not involved in designing and conducting the review. If the focus is on assigning blame for a failing program, you have bigger problems than the evaluation to address. Make sure your team knows that taking a hard look at performance is something that is rewarded. No one who is fearful of being blamed and penalized will take an honest look at their own work.

CCCC has had a good experience with program reviews and there are no special concerns or considerations to be addressed prior to launching this evaluation. CCCC  began doing formal program evaluations when we added a new standard for our Certified Members that requires program evaluations to be done. After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander! If CCCC says it should be done, then we’d better be able to show how to do it.

Having no experience with formal program evaluations, we started with a small scale review. “Start small and grow with experience,” is what I advise first-time program evaluators. In my opinion, some evaluation is always better than no evaluation! The result of the first formal evaluation at CCCC was to terminate the Certified Stewardship Counselor program. The program was muddling along but not going anywhere, and the research question was simply “Do we kill the program or invest in growing it significantly?” Stopping that program gave us the time to develop the highly successful three day Advancing Stewardship I course.

We next did an operational evaluation of the Community Trust Fund, which was a labour-intensive program. Not only was it not scalable, we wondered if the program was even covering its costs. The result of this evaluation is that the Community Trust Fund today is highly automated, donors can open an account to manage their gifts, and the program is paying for itself. (I still manually sign the cheques that go out, and it gives me great pleasure because while signing I think of the ministries who are receiving these donations.) If you have donors who want to give you publicly-traded securities and you aren’t set up for that, send them to the entry page of the Community Trust Fund’s website. We’ve done other reviews since these first two.

Our positive experiences with program evaluations mean that our employees know that doing a review is risk-free for them, so they need not be afraid of them. Every review, including the one that cancelled a program, led to a positive outcome for all staff because we are more effective and efficient and we have made room for new, more promising programs. The point of finding out why something did or did not work is to help us make better use of our resources.

So given this context, I think we are ready to tackle a major program and ask the hard question, “Is this program still worth doing? Is it effective?”

Program Selection

People generally evaluate their programs on a rotational basis over a period of years. Some might be reviewed every year or even a couple of times per year. There are a few factors that will help you decide which program to evaluate:

1. If a program is clearly not performing or is causing you trouble, evaluate it.
2. Programs that consume a lot of resources, whether money or time, should be evaluated.
3. If you simply have questions about a program, if you find yourself wondering if it is worth it, then evaluate it.
4. If a program hasn’t been evaluated in a long time, evaluate it.

This year we are reviewing the Annual Conference. Here’s why:

• The conference, along with the Bulletin newsletter, is the original program of CCCC. I think this factor elevates the conference to sacred cow status, and for that reason alone, it should be carefully reviewed
• The conference accounts for about 14% of our expense budget and 8% of our staff time (we don’t outsource conference planning and management). With salary and overhead plus the direct costs, the total cost of the conference is $250,000, the second highest investment in a program by far. The only program surpassing it is providing general technical support to our members, which is $676,000. The conference covers its out-of-pocket costs (everything but salary and overhead) and last year provided $11,000 towards staff time and overhead. That means that the conference is heavily supported from our general revenues. This is another compelling reason to check that the conference is an effective program and worthy of such support.
• Attendance is nowhere near the level that we would like it to be. Given a membership of over 3,200 ministries, why do only 180 or so send someone to the conference?
• Is the conference up-to-date with all that is going on in the world? Is it still relevant?

For all these reasons, it is a good time to take a serious look at the conference.

Research Questions

Program evaluations must have a focus. Our review of the Certification program focused on the internal operations required to support it with the goal of ensuring we could handle double the number of currently Certified members. Our review of the Advancing Stewardship I program focused on how it was delivered, with a goal of changing the program if necessary and of designing the follow-up program, Advancing Stewardship II, based on what we learned from the first one.

CCCC is in a season of challenging itself on all of its stated and unstated assumptions. We are diligently searching out our hidden assumptions, things we have implictly accepted as our version of reality, and subjecting them to challenge in order to verify the accuracy of our assumptions. While we have a pretty good feel for the conference, we want this review to go back to square one and address why we even have a conference, what function it serves, and whether or not it is really accomplishing anything worthwhile. The research questions are therefore all-encompassing:

1. Is the conference program helping CCCC fulfill its mission? It is only fulfilling our mission if it is helping our members fulfill their missions. So we need to examine what the attendees do with what they learn at our conference.
2. If it is helping CCCC fulfill its mission, then how can the conference program better meet the needs of ministry workers? How can it attract more of them? We need to dig into what they think of conferences in general, how they learn, and why they attend.
3. What assumptions have we made about our members’ needs and about how to put on conferences? Do they stand up to scrutiny? We need to understand what is going on in the life of a Christian worker and how that relates to attending a conference.
4. What is the state of conferences today? What are the trends and new developments? What does research show? Are there viable alternatives as replacements?

Sarah Rush, my assistant, will be the lead evaluator with the goal of presenting a final report to the January 30th board meeting.

After selecting the program and defining at a high level what you want to learn about it, you must document all the expectations you have of it, along with all the resources it consumes. So my next post in this series will be about the theory of change behind holding conferences and the resulting logic model.

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Challenging Assumptions

What I am thrilled by is that he is challenging his assumptions. Many people never do that because they aren’t even aware what their assumptions are. They confuse the way they see the world with reality, a monumental assumption! If you don’t challenge your assumptions, then the status quo reigns and the most a program review will do is help you tinker with it to make  it just a little more efficient or a little more effective. Without challenging the way you think, you likely will never question the program’s existence or do anything radical with it.

Start with the Program’s Purpose

Tinkering with a program to modify it for better performance is a legitimate outcome of a program evaluation, but there are actually three possible outcomes:

1. Keep the program as is,
2. Modify the program, or
3. Kill the program and do something else.

This pastor was starting from a good place—what is the purpose of the program? From that he built a logic model. And then he started to really think:

• What are my assumptions and how do I test them?
• What other ways could the church fulfill the purpose of youth ministry?
• What are the criteria that would indicate a successful program?

As you reflect on the mission of the ministry you lead, think as broadly as possible by starting with the basic premise behind your existence. Then think about broad initiatives to fulfill the mission. You don’t want to get bogged down or hemmed in by existing programs until you have the big picture in focus.

Here’s the simple way I always explain it: I am committed to my ministry’s mission, not its programs and not its plans. Otherwise programs and plans take on a life of their own and become sacred cows (or worse, leeches sucking the life out of the ministry’s energy and creativity).

Mission Takes Priority over Program

Remember, you were called for a purpose: to engage in a mission. Mission always comes first and how you do it comes second. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions like this pastor is. You just might end up with a far better way of pursuing your mission!

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The Ultimate Question

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%.

The Follow-up Question

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%.

What You Learn

Our survey revealed lots of things about us that we wouldn’t necessarily have known to ask about, both strengths and opportunities 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.

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An Amazing Fundraising Event!

ARK holds a gala event each year to raise money for charity. In 2006, for example, they raised US$36 million in one night by auctioning off things like:

• 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 11 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!

Grants or Investments?

They started off by giving grants to other charities, but felt they were not getting a big enough bang for the buck (or 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

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