Background

The Tax Court of Canada (TCC) considered a related issue in a 2020 decision, Ampratwum-Duah v. The Queen (Ampratwum). Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) reassessed a taxpayer who had claimed charitable donations during the 2005, 2006, and 2007 taxation years. That taxpayer was the religious leader of the charity during that time and signed off on his own donation receipts. In support of his case, the taxpayer’s only evidence of the donations were the receipts themselves; he did not provide any accompanying bank records, church records, or testimony from another official at the charity.

Decision

The TCC was unconvinced, and reminded the taxpayer of his obligation under the Income Tax Act (ITA): section 230, subsection (6) requires a taxpayer who serves a notice of objection or is a party to an appeal to the TCC to “retain every record, book of account, account and voucher necessary for dealing with the objection or appeal”.

In other words, the taxpayer needed to keep adequate records to determine his payable taxes, including claimed deductions, until his appeal was decided. He failed to do so because the only records he kept were the official donation receipts, signed by himself. The court held that, without any corroborating evidence, the taxpayer failed to comply with the record-keeping requirement in s. 230(6) of the ITA. It then held that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether the claimed donations had been made.

Application

Where does this leave the charity’s financial officer, or similarly authorized individual? It is possible the court could have found in favour of this taxpayer if he had provided bank records or compelling testimony from someone else at the charity with knowledge of donations. If an authorized individual decides to sign their own official donation receipts, they should keep adequate records from a variety of sources. However, best practice is to avoid that situation altogether by having another authorized individual sign their official donation receipts.

CCCC members can log in to the Knowledge Base for more information about keeping proper books and records. They are also welcome to contact our Member Support Team with their questions.

The post Who Issues The Treasurer’s Receipts? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The Milestone 360 Can Transform Your Ministry

In the years leading up to its 50th anniversary milestone, CCCC reflected on its past, assessed its present state, and planned its desired future. Let’s call this analysis a Milestone 360. A comparison of CCCC in 2010 to what it is today reveals an organization reinvigorated with new life and creativity—it is refreshed with new programs, platforms, strategies, and an expanded vision for what it wants to achieve.

Our founder and his ministry friends accomplished their dreams of what they could do with the resources they had. My predecessor did the same. And, after focusing on membership growth and organizational development, in 2011 it was time for the team and me to dream as well. Our founder had told me he was amazed that we had surpassed his vision for CCCC, so it felt like a new beginning for us. A well-timed sabbatical in 2011 led straight into the discovery process that I’m now calling the Milestone 360. We used the process to dream about how CCCC could make a much greater contribution to the success of Christian ministries. Our 50th anniversary was within a reasonable planning horizon and our goal was to set CCCC up for success over the next 50 years. A looming milestone, such as a 50th anniversary or completion of a major project, is a great reason to pause and prepare the ministry for what comes next. However, since this analysis can be done at any time, there’s no reason to not do it now. How might your ministry be transformed by the Milestone 360 analysis?

The first two posts in this Milestone 360 series looked back over a ministry’s history to determine what to preserve, what to revive, and what to leave behind. This post shifts to the present to look around and assess the ministry as it is today, starting with its corporate values.

Corporate Values are Corporate Decisions in Advance

Corporate values are all about the choices that confront ministries every day. Will you go this way or that way, do this or that? When you define your corporate values, you are at the same time deciding in advance the criteria that will be used to assess the many choices the ministry will face in the future. Of the hundreds of values that could be your corporate values, which ones will you feature as the most significant for your ministry for the foreseeable future?

Selecting your ministry’s corporate values is not a forever decision. Over time, you may find that other values should be featured as corporate values. The previous values will still be good and worthy to be held by the organization, but the issues facing you then may benefit from a different set of featured values. Every so often you need to answer the question, Are your corporate values still the ones to feature today? This post will help you answer that question. And, if you have not yet identified your corporate values, this post will help you choose the ones that will best serve your ministry.

Types of Corporate Values

There are several different starting places for finding values that could become your ministry’s corporate values. I’ve found it helpful to label those starting points because the labels provide an organized approach to developing a well-rounded set of corporate values.

You will note that I have not included cultural or team values in the list below. These values are often called corporate values, but they are inward looking rather than outward looking and they deal with individuals rather than the organization and its needs. CCCC has formally documented its cultural aspirations and its team values, but we don’t call them corporate values. Our corporate values are reserved for what the organization as a whole needs to accomplish its mission.

Christian Values

Christian values apply all the time to all Christians and apply to your ministry whether or not they are your corporate values. A particular Christian value becomes a corporate value when it is deemed so vital to mission success for the ministry that it is worthy of receiving special attention.

Because CCCC is an umbrella organization with members from across the Christian spectrum, we feel we have a duty to model Christian unity. So, we have a top-level corporate value of “Evangelical in identity, ecumenical in service.”

And because we are involved in the “business” side of ministry, we believe it is important that we remind everyone, including ourselves, of the spiritual and faith-based aspects of our work with a corporate value to “Present a strong Christian witness at all times.”

Guardrail Values

Guardrail values keep the ministry safe by preventing it from suffering again from past failures or unwanted experiences. Completing the phrase “Never again will we…” will help you discern these values.

For example, for a number of years people perceived CCCC as being a “watchdog” or “police officer” enforcing the rules within the Christian ministry sector. This was neither the reputation nor the role we wanted. (Accredited CCCC members voluntarily make themselves accountable for complying with our standards, which we do “enforce,” but we do so from the perspective of helping them come back into compliance with the standards they’ve chosen to meet.) We have a guardrail value to prevent CCCC being seen as a “watchdog” or “police officer” again: “We aspire to…serve our peers with the integrity and servant’s heart that are expected of a representative of Jesus Christ.” For a season, we had a tagline that positioned us as among our members, not over them: Advancing Ministry Together. Having fulfilled its purpose, we no longer use this tagline, but the value continues as a guardrail for us.

Both CCCC examples of Christian corporate values, “Evangelical in identity” and “A strong Christian witness,” also serve as guardrail values. They protect us from mission drift.

Brand Values

Brand values are those values that tell people “We’re different and here’s how.” They set the expectations of those who engage with your ministry as supporters, staff, or beneficiaries about what they will experience. Review your brand guide to find what is particularly distinctive about your ministry and consider making that a corporate value because it is central to your ministry’s identity and reputation.

For example, a pillar of the CCCC brand is Caring, which we’ve defined as encompassing empathy, compassion, Christian spirituality, listening, encouraging, kindness, and being supportive. This pillar captured what we had been doing for years that built tremendous loyalty from our members. Our related corporate value is that we “serve all Christian ministries in Christian love and harmony.” We believe this is what makes membership in CCCC a relational rather than a transactional experience.

Strategic Values

Strategic values are values that your strategy requires. What values must your ministry hold fast to in order to successfully execute its strategy? Make each of those a corporate value.

For instance, CCCC provides information to its members about how to operate a charity so that it is an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry. We need to show our members how to apply our information by using that same information ourselves to be an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry. One of our corporate values is to be an “Exemplary model of a Christian ministry” because we aspire to practise what we preach.

Compass Values

Compass values are high-level values that don’t fit under the other value types. Compass values define who or what the ministry is and what it stands for. They keep the ministry on course with its identity and ethos.

CCCC wants to be a good citizen within the community of Christian ministries, so one of our corporate values is to “Demonstrate Christian unity by…always thinking of [other ministries’] welfare, being open to correction, and being ready to find a way forward that honours God.”

We also have a compass value to preserve our Christian identity: “We are Christ-centred and Spirit-led, helping ministries think theologically about all aspects of operating a Christian organization.”

Platitude Values

Platitude values are those that few, if any, people would disagree with. It’s what we mean when we say something is like “motherhood and apple pie.” Who can argue against it? Platitude values are worthy but uncontroversial values that your ministry has no trouble adhering to.

If your ministry has never had to struggle with honesty or integrity, don’t make them corporate values. Most people will assume honesty and integrity are a given, so stating them will make some wonder why you felt it necessary to highlight them. If, however, your ministry has had an experience with dishonesty or lack of integrity, then these are not platitude values for you; they are meaningful corporate values, at least for a time.

Platitudes often become corporate values when people don’t use the starting points listed above to discern a ministry’s corporate values. Instead, they consider in a general way what the corporate values should be rather than analysing what they need to be. One way to tell that you have a platitude for a corporate value is if you never refer to the value when making a decision.

Personal Values

Individuals associated with your ministry may personally hold strongly to some values they want to see adopted as corporate values. This is most likely to happen at the founding of the ministry, but personal preferences for particular values could be suggested at any time. There’s no reason to reject them out-of-hand as they no doubt are good values, but they should not become corporate values if they would be platitudes. Make sure suggested personal values fit one of the other types of values: Christian, Guardrail, Brand, Strategic, or Compass.

Updating Corporate Values

If your ministry already has corporate values, reflect on whether they are still the right values for today. Before you change them, though, consider this: previous leaders set them as corporate values for a reason. You need to understand why. Did they document how the values were chosen? What did your research about the ministry’s history reveal was going on when the values were adopted?

Current leadership can always change decisions made by previous leaders based on current circumstances, but since values are enduring, give serious consideration about what you are losing by deemphasizing the values you want to remove. To be clear, you are not disavowing the values your remove from your corporate values; you are just removing the emphasis on them. In doing so, what would you be walking away from that previous leaders thought was important? Why was it important? Why did they choose to feature that value and not another? Make sure you understand the history before you change a corporate value.

Though we don’t know when CCCC adopted its first corporate values, the 2002 strategic plan listed eight corporate values that had been in place for some years. In 2012, we updated the language for five of the values, and those values are still with us today because they are still relevant. The three values we dropped had all become platitudes since they are part of the very essence of CCCC today, in our strategy, programs, or way of life.

At the same time, we added two new values. One is about the place of the local church in the life of a believer. This was important as it is a key recommendation in my book, The Church at Work, and it was important that CCCC model it. The other new value was about continuous improvement. This was important at the time because we hadn’t kept up with changes in technology and how people use it. We also had a lot of infrastructure that needed updating. We’re doing much better now, but the value is still useful.

If you create or update corporate values, do a favour for future leadership by documenting why you chose to feature each value. This will help future leadership appreciate the reasons for the value and know if it is time to drop the value and replace it with another.

CCCC’s Corporate Values

1. Evangelical in identity, ecumenical in service

• We demonstrate Christian unity by serving all Christian ministries in Christian love and harmony, always
  • thinking of their welfare.
  • being open to correction.
  • being ready to find a way forward that honours God in keeping with the direction of the Holy Spirit as discerned by all parties involved.
• We are Christ-centred and Spirit-led, helping ministries think theologically about all aspects of operating a Christian organization.
• We recognize the biblically mandated special place of the local church in the life of the believer. We respect it as the primary gathering place of Christ’s followers, and we respect its denomination’s oversight.
• We present a strong Christian witness at all times.

2. Excellence in our work

• We aspire to excellence in all that we do, serving our peers with the integrity and servant’s heart that are expected of a representative of Jesus Christ.
• We commit to continuous improvement by
  • building our knowledge and expertise.
  • being an innovative provider of leading-edge services.
  • helping our staff become thought-leaders in their respective fields.

3. Exemplary model for Christian ministries

• The board and staff aspire to model faithfulness and excellence as a witness and an encouragement to other ministries.

You can read about the historical review we did and the consultation process we used to develop these corporate values here.

The post Looking Around: Corporate Values appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The theory of change I guide you through in this post was developed based upon what I learned at Harvard Business School in their Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management course (worth every penny! GO!!) and the one book I could find on developing a theory of change titled Purposeful Program Theory: Effective Use of Theories of Change and Logic Models.

Developing a Theory of Change is a process of examining what you need to do from the perspective of your beneficiary, pinpointing the activities that will get your vision fulfilled. The model’s outputs are the positive steps that will bring about the desired external change, which is your impact on the world around you.

For a really good theological discussion of how a theory of change applies to churches, please watch this video by a Cambridge University theology professor who has a good sense of humour. He may well change your approach to evangelism.

Process for Developing a Theory of Change

There is no single model for what a Theory of Change should look like. For example, a traditional logic model is a Theory of Change that shows how inputs are converted into impacts. Here is a guide for creating a Theory of Change based on a logic model.

The version described in this post is the one that CCCC has used with great success. Its focus is not inputs but rather the conditions for mission impact that we want our ministry to create or improve, coupled with identifying and overcoming the obstacles that have prevented us (so far) from achieving the full impact our ministry wants to make. The process described below does not have a specific name; it is just known as a Theory of Change.

Note: The Bridgespan Group has a guide to develop a more detailed theory of change than the one CCCC uses.

Overview

The process for developing a Theory of Change is as follows:

1. Identify your ministry’s desired impact. Clearly identify why your ministry exists by describing the impact you want to make. This is your Impact Statement (which you might be calling a vision, mission, or end statement). An end statement is basically a vision statement used in policy governance situations. I recommend everybody use it because it is so powerful. The traditional mission statement can be used if it is the only statement, but I recommend you do the work to create a vision or an end statement. These are true impact statements while mission statements are more process or activity related.
2. List the conditions needed to make the desired impact. Identify the key Conditions that must be in place for your beneficiaries so your ministry can make its impact. The scan of the external environments is most helpful at this stage of the strategy development process. It will identify the factors you must consider that affect how successful the desired change will be. The way CCCC did its theory of change, Conditions column has a positive focus – the conditions that must be in place for your ministry to achieve what it wants to achieve. The column could also be called Problems to be Overcome, which is a negative way to address the ministry’s mission goal. This is the way I learned it at Harvard Business School, and CCCC’s first version of a theory of change took this traditional perspective. However, I thought the result was a document that had a fairly negative view of our members. We were much happier using this column for a positive description of what we want our work to achieve. An example given in a book ¹ is that the negative problem addressed by an anti-graffiti program could be recast as a positive opportunity to support creative street artwork.
3. Identify the obstacles your beneficiaries face. Identify all Obstacles that could prevent your beneficiaries from having the Conditions in place. You can also include contributing factors and opportunities in this section.
4. Determine what solutions your ministry can offer to overcome the obstacles. Determine high-level strategies to overcome the Obstacles. This column could also be called “Corrections.”
5. Identify the assets your beneficiaries need. Identify the assets that those who wish to use your services will need to have to benefit from your services.
6. Identify any other general needs your beneficiaries have. While not necessary for making an impact, your ministry might be able to help your beneficiaries by filling their other needs as you are able to.
7. Determine the initiatives your ministry will undertake. Determine the actions your ministry will take in the way of programs based on this Theory of Change. This column is titled “Initiatives” to keep the at the list at the level of strategy. Specific programs will be designed as part of the initiatives. Think of this column as a number of baskets, each holding one or more programs within it.
8. Decide the outcomes you wish to see. The outputs of your programs should result in a change outside of your ministry. For example, you provide education (an output) and the graduate gets a job (an outcome). Outcomes can be short or long-term. The short term might be the example just given – the graduate gets a job. The long term outcome could be the graduate escapes poverty.
9. Check that the logic of your theory of change leads to fulfillment of your impact statement. You should be confident that by addressing all the items identified in the Theory of Change, your Desired Impact will be made

Using the CCCC Theory of Change Template

This section will walk you through the above process in detail and show you how to complete the Theory of Change template provided. Have both the CCCC’s Theory of Change Template and the CCCC’s Theory of Change open while you read the detailed instructions that follow. These two documents will make each step much clearer.

The template is colour-coded:

• The green columns identify the impact your ministry wants to make.
• The blue columns are items that your ministry has control over.
• The red columns are the obstacles your beneficiaries face that could prevent your ministry from making an impact.
• The yellow column contains items that are internal to your beneficiaries.
• The purple column relates to outcomes your beneficiaries will experience.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Desired Impact (First green column of the template)
   • In the first green box, enter a crystal-clear statement of why your ministry exists. This is a statement of the impact you desire to make. Your Impact Statement could be called a Statement Zero, Vision statement, End Statement, or Social Value Proposition.
     • Your Mission Statement can be suitable, but only if it either does not include how you are going to accomplish the mission or you leave that part out while doing this exercise. For example, “Our mission is to evangelize our city” would be acceptable, but not “Our mission is to evangelize our city by…,” because whatever follows “by…” presupposes what the Theory of Change is intended to discover.
     • The goal is to clearly identify the actual impact you intend to make “out there” in the real world. It is not about how hard your ministry works or how much it produces. It is about how you affect the world beyond your own organization.
   • In the green box below your Impact Statement, you may add additional comments about your Impact Statement, as CCCC did in its Theory of Change. It can be helpful to have a description of what fulfillment of your Impact Statement will look like both to guide your thoughts as you develop your Theory of Change and to facilitate a shared understanding among your staff and board of the impact your ministry will make.
2. Conditions for Desired Impact (First blue column of the template)
   • In the blue boxes, enter the Conditions you identify that your beneficiaries must have in place for you to achieve your Desired Impact.
     • For example, the CCCC Impact Statement is that its members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. We assume they will be all those things if they have the required knowledge, resources, attitudes, corporate culture, and ability to integrate faith into practice. They also need to be in an environment conducive for ministry.
     • Note that in the CCCC Theory of Change, each Condition has a few descriptive words to illustrate the scope of the Condition. Those words will help you brainstorm in Step 3 below.
     • The Conditions are only assumptions if they haven’t been tested. Testing will lead to more confident planning and could be done in various ways, such as through a literature review, focus groups with your beneficiaries, program evaluations, etc.
3. Obstacles Confronting Your Beneficiaries (Red section of the template)
   • Enter the Conditions that you identified in the blue column as column headings in the red section of the template. You might wish to follow the example in CCCC’s Theory of Change by bolding the keywords in your blue Conditions column that will become the heading names in your red Obstacles section.Brainstorm as many plausible reasons as you can think of as to why the Condition in each column heading might not be in place yet. These are the Obstacles your beneficiaries might be up against that will prevent you from having the impact you want.
     • For example, when CCCC did this process, we came up with a list of many reasons why a member might not yet have the necessary knowledge, resources, etc. The obstacles were identified based on the empathy maps we developed, consultations with stakeholders and others, our own knowledge from questions our members ask us, and some small surveys. We do not believe that all our members face all these barriers, but that if they are struggling to be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries, the reason for the struggle would likely be one of the barriers we identified. We then sorted the Obstacles under each Condition into like categories and named each category to make it easier to analyze the results. The names of these categories are the Requirements needed for the Conditions to exist. For example, to have the necessary knowledge to be an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry, the staff and volunteers need to have the resources, education, focus, learning posture, and strategy it takes to have the knowledge. The Obstacles were the reasons why they might not have the necessary resources, education, focus, learning posture, or strategy.
   • Now you can complete the red Obstacles section. In each red box, enter a Requirement for that column’s Condition. In bullet form for each Requirement, list the Obstacles that would prevent that Requirement from being in place.
   • The Obstacles might or might not be the actual ones your beneficiaries are facing, so it is a good idea to test your assumptions for accuracy.
4. Solutions (Second blue column of the template)
   • In these blue boxes, enter the high-level strategies you’ve determined will help correct or remove the Obstacles for your beneficiaries and bring about the Conditions needed to achieve your ministry’s Desired Impact.
     • For CCCC, the Solutions column is a high-level list of what we think would help ministries overcome their obstacles. This includes education, consulting, and facilitating peer-to-peer sharing.
5. Assets (Top half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Assets (the top half of the column), enter the assets you assume your beneficiaries have so they can use your ministry’s services. These are likely to be unstated assumptions you’ve made; assets you take for granted that everyone has but that aren’t necessarily available to all potential beneficiaries. For instance, if you work in English only, you need to realize that part of the population will not be reached by your ministry.
     • You may go deeper in this column by adding thoughts about what your beneficiaries could do if they do not have the Assets needed. What could you do to help them? Are there alternative ways to design your programs so the Assets are not needed? Could your ministry somehow provide its beneficiaries with the Assets or find a way to accommodate them?
6. Other Needs (Bottom half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Other Needs (the bottom half of the column), enter general needs your beneficiaries might have that don’t necessarily relate to your ministry’s services. This information could come from empathy maps, your knowledge from personal interactions with beneficiaries, or surveys.
     • For example, CCCC identified that people working in ministry need to be affirmed and appreciated for the sacrificial way they serve, something they do not always experience. That need aligns well with one of our brand pillars, to be a caring organization. They are also likely to have work-life balance issues, something to keep in mind as we design how we will engage with them.
7. Initiatives (Third blue column of the template)
   • In the language used in Theory of Change models, an Initiative is an action your ministry takes to implement the Solutions and make the Desired Impact. In Christian ministry, initiatives are programs and services. Be creative and, using the research you have already done to create a Theory of Change, list the programs that your Theory of Change indicates are needed and enter them into the blue boxes. In the CCCC Theory of Change, the Initiatives column is a very high level ‘basket’ that will hold all the specific programs we offer. For example, shared learning includes:
     • members learning from us,
     • us learning from our members,
     • members learning from each other.
     • The shared learning basket also holds most of our current programs:
       • the knowledge base
       • the Bulletin
       • the Member Service Team
       • the Green
       • This blog, and so on
8. Short-Term Outcomes and Long-Term Outcomes (Purple column of the template)
   • In the purple boxes under Short-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries to experience in their immediate future.
     • This column is significant because it forms the basis for measuring your mission success on your journey towards mission fulfilment. It is also evidence you can give to your donors that assures them their gifts are being well used.
   • In the purple boxes under Long-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries will experience over time as they use your services.
     • As with the Short-Term Outcomes, the Long-Term Outcomes will be used eventually to measure mission success and to give evidence of success to your donors.
9. Check that the logic of your Theory of Change leads to fulfillment of your Impact Statement (Second green column of the template)
   • In the green boxes of this final column, copy over from the first green column both your Impact Statement and any commentary regarding it Review the entire Theory of Change and ensure there is a logical flow to it that leads to your Desired Impact. Is it comprehensive? Has anything been left out?
     • The final column is a repeat of the first column because if everything in between is done, the mission from the first column will be fulfilled.

Conclusion

Developing a Theory of Change is invaluable, as it will provide a clear understanding of the obstacles and corrections your programs must address to accomplish your ministry’s mission and guide your program development work. Being able to reference your ministry’s Theory of Change will make a significant difference in efficient stewardship of your ministry and will provide the perfect tool on which to base future strategic reviews. CCCC has enjoyed great success by using its Theory of Change, and I pray that this will be your experience too.

Key Takeaway: Developing your Theory of Change is really about providing a clear, customized plan for how your ministry will move forward in accomplishing its mission, as well as a way to evaluate your ministry to ensure that it does.

The post Theory of Change: A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Customized Plan for Your Ministry appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Mission Statements Are Packed with Benefits

As a senior leader, you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in crafting your ministry’s top-level mission statement, but are you getting the maximum value from it? A top-level mission statement can do so much more than simply define what you aim to achieve. It can enhance every aspect of your organization and transform it into a finely tuned ministry that is perfectly designed to be exactly what your mission needs it to be.

I’d like to share how you can unpack your ministry’s top-level mission statement and tap into its power for the benefit of your ministry. By unpacking, I mean plumbing the depths of the statement and exploring its implications, nuances, and the subcomponents that are necessary to make the end goal a reality. Understanding your mission at such a deep level is immensely helpful when doing a strategic review of your ministry

Since June 2012, our End Statement has been CCCC members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. This statement has guided us well over the years. As the senior leader, I have reflected long and hard on what it means. It has been a roadmap as I’ve written my blog Christian Leadership Reflections and as I’ve laid out ideas for program development.

But when I began to formally document what our End Statement means, I realized its true potential went well beyond our programs and services. As I unpacked its meaning, it became more and more exciting, inspiring, and even beautiful to me.

It was like a two-dimensional black-and-white photograph had suddenly become a three-dimensional full-colour sculpture!

Our End Statement grabbed hold of me and the CCCC staff in a new way as we engaged with it. We experienced a burst of creativity that resulted in the renewed organization we are today. New staff positions were created. Our infrastructure is being overhauled. Our branding changed, and so did our name. The changes were all shaped by our reflections on our End Statement. You can download our presentation CCCC End Statement Unpacked (below) to see what we did. Please note: as of May 2023 we are still working on refining how we define the meaning of our End Statement, so this isn’t the final version.

The Power of Mission Statements

Your ministry’s top-level strategic statement is a rich resource, and unleashing its potential by unpacking it is really a matter of good stewardship. Here’s what your super-charged mission statement can do for your ministry.

Give Direction

The primary purpose of a strategic statement is to give overall direction to the work of your ministry. You have almost certainly used your strategic statement quite well for this purpose. It helps you make choices about what to do or not to do, and it defines what you are responsible for (that is, what you need to do to claim progress towards vision fulfillment).

For example, CCCC’s End Statement reminds us that we are not just a purveyor of information. Our responsibility does not end when we publish an article. Our responsibility extends to how members use what we publish. The onus is on us to produce content that is relevant, persuasive, and actionable. It’s our fault if members choose not to use our information. If that were the case, we would need to fix what we produce to make it more relevant, persuasive, and actionable so our members will decide to act on it.

Add Clarity

Perhaps your strategic statement says you will disciple Christians to become mature believers. But what exactly does discipling look like, and how can you tell when someone has a mature faith? A single statement cannot capture everything that is meant by it, so unpacking the statement will add clarity by defining its breadth and depth. The statement should be thought of as a shorthand way of expressing a much more complex description of the ministry’s purpose.

CCCC’s unpacked End Statement is a treasure trove of ideas for new content and new program development. Because it is so specific at a detailed level, it is easily actionable. It makes abstract words, such as exemplary, concrete. Having a full definition means we don’t start with a blank canvas on which to paint a picture of how we help Christian ministries. With the unpacked End Statement, the canvas already has a sketch on it. We can immediately grab a brush and some paint and get to work filling in the sketch.

Foster Unity

The clearer, more detailed, your strategic statement is, the more unity your staff and volunteers can have because everyone is being drawn to a shared understanding of the ministry’s high-level purpose and its detailed workings. Before you unpack the statement, your staff may be aligned at the 50,000-foot level on the overall goal to be achieved and yet not be aligned on lower-level details. Unpacking your strategic statement should bring alignment right down to ground level.

Allow For Better Delegation

When all ministry personnel have a deep understanding of the strategic statement’s goal and its nuances, you can delegate responsibility with more confidence because they understand how their work fits in with everything else being done, and they can make better decisions than they could if they didn’t have that awareness.

Increase Motivation

All strategic statements should be motivational, especially in mission-driven organizations such as Christian ministries. But the statements will be far more motivational as people come to understand the details of the change your ministry wants to accomplish and how all the parts of your ministry work together to fulfill the ministry’s purpose. Sometimes people read the strategic statement but don’t recognize its implications and the magnitude or significance of what is to be accomplished. Unpacking the statement may impress people with benefits attached to fulfilling the strategic goal they had not thought of.

Protect from Mission Creep

When the words in your top-level strategic statement are not clearly defined, there is a good possibility that people may interpret them differently. Some interpretations may be quite narrow while others may be quite broad and expansive. Over time, the ministry’s understanding of its purpose may begin to move away from its original focus. Changing your purpose in response to changing times or circumstances is fine because it is an intentional change. But mission creep is unintentional. At some point, the ministry will end up with a hodgepodge of programs, a loss of focus, and a dilution of resources.

A clearly defined strategic statement will make it easy to determine how a new program idea does or does not fit the ministry’s purpose. However, when you change a strategic statement you must remember to stay within the parameters of your ministry’s charitable purpose and objects that the Charities Directorate has approved.

Set the Stage for Branding

Your strategic statement connects with your brand because both are closely connected with your ministry’s identity. As you understand more about the change you want to make in the world outside your organization, you will need to think about how you want outsiders to experience your ministry. What brand persona would be most helpful to your mission? Based on your mission, what is your brand story?

A deep dive into CCCC’s End Statement crystallized for us the relationship we want to have with our members. We had previously seen ourselves as supporters of our members, but now we see ourselves more specifically as a guide and ally in a caring relationship with them. “Caring” became one of our brand persona pillars, and our brand story features our supportive role as a guide. The detailed, written brand story was converted into a short video called How We Fit into Your Story, which you can view here.

Clarify Messaging

The deeper knowledge you gain about your purpose will be very useful in your marketing and fundraising messaging. It will help you tell a compelling story about the impactful work your ministry does.

CCCC took its deeper understanding of its End Statement and used it to make a short video to help our members and prospective members understand that our programs and services are not just a collection of independent resources but are connected to something much bigger, helping them develop a thriving organization that is a great platform for their ministry to operate from. We have a clear logic to everything we do that will help our members become an ever more successful ministry. We want our members to think big about their organizations. You can view the video Our Journey Together here.

I must add that developing the content and courses that will help our members become ever more exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries is a process that we are just beginning to develop. Over time, members will find resources being released that will help them on their journey.

Identify Topics to Research

When you have defined the core attributes related to each of your mission statement elements (see below for how to do this), you will have a list of topics to research so your ministry can become expert in how best to pursue these aspects of its mission.

An example from CCCC’s End Statement is that a healthy Christian ministry needs great Christian leadership, which means that its leaders must model Christian spirituality in the workplace. CCCC, therefore, researched and reflected on Christian spirituality in the context of both leadership and organizational life so we could help ministry leaders develop their spirituality in the workplace.

Save Time

When you document what you’ve discovered about your purpose, you can more easily and quickly orient new staff and directors to the richness of your work. This documentation can help staff identify opportunities to fill gaps between what the mission needs and what the ministry is currently doing.

CCCC has worked our unpacked End Statement into both our board and staff orientation programs.

Redesign the Organization and Its Infrastructure

Every part of your organization can take the unpacked mission statement and determine what changes, if any, should be made to better support the mission.

Some of the changes made by CCCC related to our unpacked End Statement were mentioned above.

Do-It-Yourself

For detailed guidance with examples for how to unpack your mission statement, see the post How To Release Your Mission Statement’s Power.

CCCC members can discuss this post here.

The post The Untapped Power of Your “Mission” Statement appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

“A constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change — we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.”

If you believe that “God causes all things to work together for good,”¹ then you must be wondering what God is going to do to redeem the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Disruption’s Opportunity

Whatever our thoughts, stances, and opinions are in relation to the pandemic, one thing is clear: it has disrupted all of us. Disruptions are jarring because they are unplanned and usually happen very quickly. Typically, when disruptions affect us, our reaction is to think of them as problems. But their positive side—and yes, they have one—is that they force our attention on to a new reality and create an urgency to do something so that we survive the disruption with good prospects for the future. 

Now is an opportune time to reimagine ministry to meet the challenges of new conditions and take advantage of the opportunities they provide. I believe those opportunities are a gift from God to the church. While the pandemic is a terrible scourge, it is not beyond God’s power to redeem it by bringing some good out of it. We need to open this gift of opportunity and use it! How will you participate with God in drawing out that good to bless others? CCCC members can discuss this post in The Green.

Surviving a disruption requires a mindset that goes beyond incremental changes to how we think about and do our work. There may be some very helpful tweaks to make, and those should be done, but more importantly when in a disruption, we need bold, creative ideas for completely new initiatives that make the most of the possibilities inherent in the disruption. 

Some questions to start a discussion with your team about innovation in your ministry include:

• What new needs have been created by the disruption?
• What other ways to pursue our mission does the disruption make possible that weren’t possible or desirable before?
• How can we make sure we are open to the expansiveness of God’s possibility and will for our ministry in this moment and going forward?

Whether we like it or not, both we and our society will be changed by the disruption of COVID-19. But there is good news in that if we take the initiative and act proactively we can achieve greater mission success because of those changes. 

The choices we make might even bring about changes that are much needed and overdue.

Without minimizing the terribleness of the pandemic, this time of disruption holds an opportunity for churches and Christian ministries to further develop and expand how they work on their missions.

Making the Most of the Opportunity

The current disruption is already benefiting the church in that it has:

• Highlighted more than ever the difference between the church and its buildings,
• Forced us to find new ways to be the church without relying on buildings or large gathered groups, and
• Upset regular routines and practices, making people more open to change than usual.

What we learn from our experience during the pandemic can continue to be used when large gatherings resume. Our new skills and practices can go forward and augment (and in some cases replace) the traditional ways of doing ministry. 

To make the most of the disruption, churches and ministries need to think innovatively about their activities with respect to two time frames: what they can do during the pandemic and what they need to do to prepare for ministry after the pandemic.

During the Pandemic

“Saddleback has never been closed during these past eleven weeks,” Warren says. “On the contrary, we’ve been doing more in our communities than ever before. Our buildings have been closed, but the church is not a building. We are a living, breathing body …we are a people, not a place.”

Rick Warren

A number of churches and ministry leaders have shared how they are creatively responding to the pandemic. Follow the links to be inspired by their stories and then see what ideas your own team can come up with.

• The quote above comes from Rick Warren’s interview about how Saddleback Church is making the most of the pandemic not only to serve but also to evangelize through its members rather than its programs.
• This church transformed an existing program that was no longer needed as it was into a high value program meeting specific pandemic-related community needs. 
• Some churches are thinking about the new possibilities of being a church without walls.  
• Fresh Expressions helps churches build new forms of churches alongside themselves to attract non-church people. Their post discusses how distributed leadership makes possible a distributed church that can minister during the pandemic. It also covers integrating your church into the digital era and listening, loving, and serving your neighbourhood.
• Here are a number of suggestions for engaging and re-engaging people with your church while reaching out to new people with new programs.
• Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix, AZ developed a new mental health program based on text messaging, their website, and telephone and is providing financial assistance to individuals for their first ten counselling sessions.
• A ministry leader offers ten creative ideas to continue effective ministry.
• Here’s a church that turned to the ministries it supports to find ways to help them with their missions. The church is also supporting its local Social Services office.

But don’t just look at what other churches or ministries are doing. For real game-changing ideas, look to see what other industry sectors are doing. We are all in the same boat, having to innovate during the pandemic. Secular charities could have great ideas and so could the retail, manufacturing, hi-tech and other sectors of our economy. Hospitals, for example, improved their patient management system by examining automotive factories. Look for transferable ideas from sectors that are very different from our own. 

For guidance and ideas in developing creativity, please see my post on imagination. 

Preparing for after the Pandemic

During this time of disruption, churches and all other ministries should re-explore their missions and take a deep dive with a fresh perspective into what the words of their mission mean, what success of their mission looks like, and how their mission can be fulfilled. A process for how to do this will be the topic of my next post.

Conclusion

If the church makes the most of God’s gift of opportunity in disruption, it will emerge from this pandemic fresh, reinvigorated, and highly relevant to whatever the new normal turns out to be. 

The post Finding God’s Gift in Disruption appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At a young age, I discovered one of my family’s values – order and tidiness! I obviously on that day was not displaying our family value, which up until that time Mom may have presumed I had simply absorbed through association with my family, osmosis-like. Well, in the midst of something that was out of place or generally unkempt, I was told point-blank that our family values proper order and tidiness. Everything has its place, so put it there! And then my mom told me a story to reinforce the point. Her father had a spacious three car garage, and in the basement beneath the garage was a huge workshop full of benches, tools, drawers, and storage bins. She remembers her father working on a car and asking her to get a particular nut and bolt from the workshop for him. He told her exactly which drawer of which bench she should look in, and then within the drawer, precisely which of the 16 little cubicles held the desired object. Everything, every nut and bolt, was in exactly the right spot!

That story has stayed with me all these many years. Wouldn’t I like to be so neat, tidy, and orderly that I could tell you with precision exactly where something is! In fact, my wife is amazed that I can go into the basement and, most but not all of the time, find exactly what I’m looking for and be back upstairs in less than two or three minutes.

Such is the power of a story to transmit a value so that it sticks!

Corporate Values

If you did a spot check of all your staff, how many could recite your ministry’s values? They should be able to tell you exactly what they are without much thought, because they should be consciously thinking about them, making choices based on them, and generally living them out day-by-day.

Ensuring the corporate values are a part of daily life in a Christian ministry is one of the crucial strategies to prevent mission drift. As a ministry leader, it is your job to transmit your ministry’s values to your staff, volunteers, and supporters.

But if you are going to have corporate values (which of course you should), make sure they are your real values, the ones you are willing to suffer and sacrifice for because you believe so strongly in them. Don’t settle for motherhood values, the ones you think you should have.

The values you want are the ones that really matter. Your corporate values will either come out of your fundamental corporate identity or strategy, or they will be a response to a time in your ministry’s history when their absence caused a significant problem. Unless honesty has been a problem or is so integral to your ministry’s identity that it has to be a real focus, it is not a corporate value, it’s just a good value. Choose just the few crucial values that deeply matter to your ministry.

Transmitting Corporate Values

The two best ways to transmit your values are to model them yourself, and to tell stories about them. The two go together. Modelling values alone assumes people will pick up on the values osmosis-like, which may or may not happen (as I know from personal experience!). Telling stories alone will not have power unless the leader personally exemplifies them. Otherwise, they are just stories about someone else, usually long ago in corporate history. Telling stories (whether from history or current events) that are visibly supported by the leadership team’s actions today is a very powerful way to transmit your values.

A great resource for developing values-based stories is a book I’ve already told you about by Stephen Denning: The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative.

Crafting a Values Story

Denning has some very helpful tips for creating a powerful values-transmitting story:

• You can start with the corporate values and think about when someone did something that embodied those values, or you can think about crucial turning points in your ministry’s history and see what values were embodied in that moment.
• You can do the above either for the ministry as an organization, or if you want to connect the values to yourself to show how vital they are to you, you can do the above analysis using your own life.
• You don’t need a full-blown story. Review the parables that Jesus told. He told them in minimalist fashion. You don’t want to clutter up the story with so many details that people have to wait for you to tell them which details are important to your point. Only say what must be said to make your point.
  • My opening story contained just the  points that highlight the value of order and tidiness
    • a large space
    • someone who doesn’t know where something is being told by someone else exactly where it is with certainty from memory
    • a preamble connecting the reader with the story through me
    • evidence that the value has survived three generations, showing that Mom’s story was a powerful part of transmitting that value, thus validating the point of this post.
• A story with a twist will be much more powerful than a story that plays out as one would expect. Most, if not all, of the parables Jesus told had very unexpected twists. A Samaritan helping a Jew? A father demeaning his position (in that culture) by physically going towards his profligate son to welcome him?
  • Stories where the tables are turned are very memorable! If you can, build the unexpected in to your story. I told a true story up above, and it didn’t have a twist. But if you are creating a fictional story, such as Nathan did when he confronted David with his sin, you would certainly want to put a twist into it.
• You don’t have to spell everything out. It may be better not to even mention what the value is, but tell the story so that the audience is left thinking about it and then reasons out what the value is. Let them have the fun, and the reinforcing memory, of their own “Aha!” moment. So you could say, “Here’s what I’d like to hear about the service we provide. A person in need…” and then make up a story.
• You could tell a story about some other organization or person that exemplifies the value if you can’t find such a story in your own ministry.
• Finally, you could make up a story, as Jesus did with the Parables. “There was a woman who…” or something like that will start a great parable of your own.

So take your top few values, and try crafting some stories! Guaranteed they will make your staff meetings more interesting!

The post Transmitting Corporate Values appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

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

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

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

The key points are:

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

Some Lessons on Scaling That Were Shared

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

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

Collective Impact

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

Here are the elements for effective collective impact:

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

Conclusion

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

Imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions!

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

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!

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

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

“Oh, that looks so beautiful on you!”

“You deserve the best!”

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

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

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

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

Negatives of Careerism

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

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

The Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

Special Warning to Employers

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

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

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

Building a Shared Call

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

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

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