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Ah, Retirement!

Posted in Athens, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 12, 2017| 3 Comments »

Glasco ChristianOne week ago we were worshipping with a little Christian church in Glasco, Kansas, of which in 1870, my great-great grandfather Mahlon Woodward and his wife Mary Ann were founding members.  After lunch at church with people who knew my grandparents and my dad, we accidentally went to a poetry reading that had been advertised as a Smithsonian program on Kansas waterways! I suppose towns of 500 can’t be picky!

Today, one week later, Sherrylee and I worshipped with the Omonia Church of Christ in Athens, Greece! Ten days or so ago, the missionaries in Athens put out a call for immediate help with their English program for refugees. Some very generous donors called us and said that they would sponsor us, if we were able to go, so here we are, getting ready to start tomorrow helping people mostly from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kurdistan, and Afghanistan improve their English and become better acquainted with Jesus. 

MunichOur international flight was via Munich, a new airport, but the same city where in 1971 two pretty clueless young newly-weds landed and began their mission journey together.  We are slower than we were then, but wiser, I hope—certainly more experienced.  While we have definitely changed, the world has changed also. When we left for Munich in 1971, Christians faced Iron Curtains and Cold Wars and Walls. We could just barely drive to Berlin back then, much less the Arab world. Now Christians can go to a small church building in Athens and work in the Middle East. Look around your neighborhood and tell me the world has not changed and that the nations are not coming!

So we may need to work differently than we did forty-six years ago, but people are still riding around in their chariots and saying, who will help me understand what I’m reading here about Jesus.  And God still uses those he has used before–regardless of their job status or age–to serve and teach Searchers.

Sherrylee and I will be in Athens for three weeks, and I hope to post regularly.  Pray for us—for health and strength and courage and boldness.

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Transition: A Case Study in Board Guidance of the Transition

Posted in Transitions, tagged , , on June 10, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Relay-race_02In the last post, I began to tell you about how the LST Board initially organized itself for transitioning from the Founding Executive Directors (Sherrylee and me) to a new Executive Director. You will remember that the board organized itself into two work groups: a Search Group to identify the new Director and a Transition Group to negotiate the Woodwards continued relationship to the ministry after our transition. (We avoided the word retirement from the beginning because we knew we did not want to walk away completely from LST, nor could we really afford to.)

The Search Committee began almost immediately to work through a list of potential candidates, contacting them, asking them if they would consider the position.  Most of the candidates were happy where they were or the timing was not right. They were honored to be considered, but practically, could not pursue the position any further. About six months into the search process, the committee was very close to making a final recommendation to the board with a potential transition as close as 6-8 weeks later.

The Transition Committee, on the other hand, for a variety of good reasons had not yet met!  Nor did they have yet all the information they needed from Sherrylee and me in order to fulfill their mandate.  One thing had become clear to the Transition committee, however, and that was that the Woodwards needed to continue drawing their salary for at least another year and maybe longer in order to make their long-term financial planning work.

When the Transition committee and the Search committee talked to each other, they discovered that their timetables did not come close to matching up.  The Search committee was ready to move to transition, but that was impossible with the needs that the Transition committee was presenting.  Some members of the Search committee felt like their work was at risk of being voided and discarded; some members of the Transition committee felt unfairly judged for doing what they were supposed to do.

For the first time in the long history of LST, there was potential tension between board members. To make matters worse, one of the four “objective” board members resigned at this critical moment for non-related issues.

In an attempt to clear the air, the whole board convened a special session. With prayer, great transparency, and a generous spirit of cooperation, all the issues were laid out. Ultimately the board decided at this meeting to make all the necessary decisions involving dates and compensation that affected the Woodwards, feeling like with those set in concrete, the search for their replacement could continue on firmer footing.  One board member strongly opposed this solution, abstaining from the final vote, which was otherwise unanimous.  Predictably, this board member resigned immediately following this meeting, feeling out of step with the other board members.

Now the LST Board consisted of five members, only two of which were not directly involved in the transition process—clearly an untenable situation for the Board.  In our next regular meeting—approximately one month after the special meeting—the Board decided to call a “time-out” and to search for new board members.  Six very strong candidates were identified, all people who had been involved with LST and loved the ministry.

Surprisingly, all six of these candidates accepted nomination to the Board of Directors and were installed at the next meeting.  Now we were eleven—with lots of fresh eyes to look at the transition process that one could describe best as frustratingly stalled.

Bringing in great new board members may be the best decision the LST board has ever made!  One item dominated the agenda at their first meeting and that was the transition.  The history of the current stalemate was rolled out, their questions answered, and nothing held back.

At the end of the day, the new board decided to stop the process—completely—so that the old board members could take a breather from the load they had been carrying, but also allowing the new board time to initiate a newer and better process.  Six months later, the search began again–new committees, new eyes, new timetable–and here we are, less than a year later, with an Executive Director-elect, stepping into his new role as the unanimous choice of the board of directors, on July 1.

Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.  Ecclesiastes 4:9 (NLT)

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Transitions: Giving Notice Is A Good Thing!

Posted in Transitions, tagged , , , , , , , on May 18, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Relay-race_02Almost three years ago, Sherrylee and I gave the LST board of directors our two-year notice as we had agreed to do many years ago.  The LST Board of Directors wisely had been discussing the eventual transition from the Founders (Sherrylee and me) to a Successor probably for at least five years before we gave notice. In fact, the “Succession Plan” as it was always called in those earlier board meetings is what eventually drove us to the first Strategic Plan in 2013.  Afterwards, Sherrylee and I knew what we were supposed to do to start the transition process.

Just a few months ago, I was sitting with two wonderful kingdom workers who were both in their late 70s, living in a difficult, foreign country, directors of a local non-profit organization—and after eight years there, just exhausted from the physical and spiritual demands of their mission!  As they told me over dinner one night, they had repeatedly told their American Board of Directors and their supporters that one of their top priorities was to find their replacements, and while everyone acknowledged the need, not much was really done to move the process forward.  A few comments in newsletters and a little correspondence with casual inquiries were all that the older couple themselves could do while keeping up with the strenuous daily demands of their foreign ministry.

I told them that they needed to give notice!  Not that they should create a hardship for their Board of Directors, but they needed to do what was right both for the mission and for themselves.  And by giving notice—in this case they decided (quite generously, I believe, for their age) to give their board two years notice—they were also placing the responsibility for the continuation of the mission squarely on the shoulders both of those who truly carry the responsibility as well as those in the best position to successfully find their successors.

If you have been reading carefully, you will have picked up on the fact that we gave our two-year notice almost three years ago!  Perhaps where there is tension between a board of directors and their executive, the official notice might be an irreversible legal step, for most of us in non-profits it is probably more a statement of intent.  In our case, the process of finding a successor took longer than anticipated. For others there could be financial considerations, a health issue, or even questions of momentum that might make the official hand-off date other than what was anticipated. In some cases, the succession might even need to occur earlier for the good of both the executive and/or the organization.

Here are my conclusions about giving notice as a step in the transition process:

  • The Board of Directors should create a Succession Plan long before it is needed, and this plan should include an appropriate and agreed upon timeframe for their executive to give notice.
  • If the Board does not have a succession plan or one that includes giving notice, then the executive should initiate the conversation with them and encourage them to develop one.
  • If the Board does not grasp their responsibilities for succession, the Executive may need to simply give notice on his/her own initiative, in order to raise the urgency level—for the sake of the organization or for him/herself.
  • Only in rare cases, does either the Board or the Executive need to feel that the Notice must be strictly enforced. Neither the organization nor the executive should view it as a bludgeon, rather as a green light signaling the start of a slightly unpredictable journey into a new future for both.

 

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Transitions: How To Deal With Founders–Or Not!

Posted in Transitions, tagged , , , on April 29, 2016| 1 Comment »

Relay-race_02Just to show how difficult it is to transition from Founders to Successors, let’s be very honest and answer the questions that I said every Founder was thinking when the question of succession is raised:

  • Who knows more about this ministry than I do?
  • Who is willing to do what I am willing to do?
  • Who will cast a vision that others will follow like they follow our vision?
  • Who is willing to risk what I have been willing to risk?
  • What kind of outcome could be expected without the great risk?
  • Who can lead this ministry better than I can in spite of my age, my health, my family, my . . . ?

The truth of the matter is that unless your Founder has serious mental or health issues or has done something that morally/ethically disqualifies him/her, then the obvious answer is nobody knows more, no one will do more or risk more personally, and no one has more followers already in step with their vision than Founders. 

And the longer they have led, and the more successful they have been, the harder it is to move them out!

So what reason are you going to give to convince this Leader that he/she needs to step down? 

First, you need to consider that you may not convince them to step down.  Your board may be able to force them out—but unless they are totally out of favor with staff, volunteers, and donors, you will suffer great damage by doing so. The whole ministry/organization may be threatened, and by forcing them out, you may find yourself in competition with their new, parallel organization!  Not good.  Allowing them to continue to lead until such time that they are persuaded by some of the observations listed below may be the only viable strategy.  Sorry, if you were looking for a miracle way out!

Two approaches that I don’t think will work, but that are often attempted anyway are

  • You may be able to appeal to them on the basis of age, health, or family situation. Aren’t you ready to spend more time with your family, with your grandchildren?  Aren’t you going to be spending a great deal of time caring for your spouse now?  You need to focus your energy now on recovering your health/taking care of yourself. It may take family members to convince them, close friends, even their respected church leaders.  And while their own health or age might seem like strong appeals to you, don’t forget that the Founder is used to being sacrificial and may have a “leave it all on the field” attitude about the ministry/organization that keeps them from being moved by what they see as self-serving rationalizations.
  • You may appeal to them on the basis of popular opinion. The staff thinks it’s time . . . . The board thinks you should step down, or Everyone sees it, but you . . . . Don’t forget though that Founders have always had the courage to go against the mainstream or they probably wouldn’t have done what they did.  They probably did not lead by taking polls, so I don’t think this is going to achieve a congenial, voluntary resignation.

My only good suggestion to you is to appeal to their desire for the success of the ministry/organization! More than their own personal welfare, they have given everything so that the ministry/organization can accomplish the greater good which they desired. If you can help them understand that this greater good—the advance of the Kingdom of God, the health of children, the care of the aged, any benevolent cause that was worth someone giving years and years plus all the tangible and intangible sacrifices that Founders make—that their cause will be advanced by their stepping down, then you will have pricked their soul.

As Sherrylee and I looked at our own ministry and what was best for it, several very specific situations propelled us toward our decision to step down voluntarily after thirty-six years. I’ll share these with you with the hope that it will help you with your Founder:

  • As I mentioned in the first of this series, our experiences in our youth watching Founders being locked out of their organizations was so painful that we determined to stop before someone wanted our keys.
  • Although reasonably healthy, our age has made extensive international travel much harder on us physically.
  • The financial responsibility for the ministry had always been heavy, but it began to feel like a burden. We thought that was our problem, not the ministry’s.
  • We have found ourselves getting further and further away from those who volunteer to go, not even recognizing the names of some who have done LST for several years.
  • Sherrylee and I are boomers. When we began working with students, we were dealing with Gen Xers. We’ve now gone through Y’s and are well into millennials.   We have also gone from moderns to post-moderns, and some even say post postmoderns.  We are less sure that we are in touch with the way students today are thinking.

We still believe in the mission; we still see the vision in front of us, and we are still sold out to the goal of sharing Jesus and sharing ourselves—and we will be until the day we die! But, honestly, we believed in that mission before LST began.

I’m very grateful to our board of directors, all of whom are dear friends and people who have been a part of the Let’s Start Talking Ministry, who have understood and walked with us through our own transition.  My prayer is that you will be as wise and gentle with those Founders who need your help with a pretty difficult moment in their lives.

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Transitions: The Problem with Founders

Posted in Transitions, tagged , , , on April 26, 2016| 3 Comments »

Relay-race_02Founders, charter members, church planters, entrepreneurs—all of these terms probably describe the same kinds of people—and all of them create unique and real challenges when it comes time for the BIG TRANSITION.

For entrepreneurs, the start-up phase is over and it is time to build the business; for church planters the new church is stable and now needs to appoint its own leaders from within; for charter members who stepped out in faith to establish something new, they are now outnumbered and out-voted by those who joined after the struggle and sacrifice were just the story rolled out for special occasions.

Founders may be the biggest challenge of all. Entrepreneurs move on because they have to in order to scratch their itch; church planters begin with the expectation of growing new leadership; charter members never had that much control to start with, but FOUNDERS are all of the above—and they see that organization/ministry/business they have begun as their life’s work!  They expect to lead until they die!

Sherrylee and I have been all of the above!  We have been instrumental in planting one church, were charter members of another, started a for-profit business in the mid-80s that was a disaster, and, much to our surprise, founded Let’s Start Talking—a mission and ministry that God has blessed and grown far beyond our imagination.  For over 35 years, we have walked in front of hundreds of volunteers and dozens of extraordinary staff members.  We have always worked under the oversight of elders of our sponsoring churches, with advisory boards, and, for the last sixteen years, within a passionately committed board of directors.

So what’s the problem with Founders, especially at the time of the BIG TRANSITION?

Let’s list some characteristics of Founders, just to get some insight into what might make it difficult for them to transition:

  • Founders often launch their boat when and/or where no one else is really going!
  • Founders often launch without the means to achieve the goal, just with an idea or a dream.
  • Founders often launch in the face of opposition, either political, financial, or personal.
  • Founders have often failed at previous launches, so they don’t necessarily inspire overwhelming initial confidence from others.
  • Founders may be “lone rangers”. They don’t need lots of other people to follow them in order to proceed.
  • Founders believe they are prepared for the task. They can do it!
  • Founders, when their project is successful, generate great followings and loyalty.  The longer their organization survives and the more successful it is, the greater the following and loyalty of those who have not only joined them, but who also have committed to their vision.
  • Founders are often willing to sacrifice more for the sake of the mission than most people would be willing or would think reasonable.
  • Founders may “own” their life’s work—sometimes literally, but almost always emotionally.

What makes it hard for Founders to step down or to transition to a supportive role?  In light of the above characteristics, just listen to their questions—their feelings:

  • Who knows more about this ministry than I do?
  • Who is willing to do what I am willing to do?
  • Who will cast a vision that others will follow like they follow our vision?
  • Who is willing to risk what I have been willing to risk?
  • What kind of outcome could be expected without the great risk?
  • Who can lead this ministry better than I can in spite of my age, my health, my family, my . . . ?
  • This is mine.

Please don’t hear me being critical of Founders.  Don’t forget, I am one!  I am trying to describe a category of persons broader than myself, but I will certainly confess to entertaining all of the above questions as we personally go through this transition.

We Founders know what the problem is with Founders.  Next time, we’ll talk about successful ways to deal with Founders when it’s time for them to give up control.

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Transitions: The Beginning

Posted in Transitions, tagged , , , on April 22, 2016| 6 Comments »

Hello, again. After a lengthy hiatus, I plan to start writing again. We’ll talk about the hiatus later, but today, let’s just jump into the deep water!

 Relay-race_02It’s Friday—the day before the Saturday board meeting—the BIG Saturday board meeting!  Ten board members will begin arriving tonight, though most will just drive to the meeting in the morning. Even though it is not yet noon on the day before, I’m confident that all of these men and women have already been thinking—and, I suspect, praying—about this Saturday’s board meeting.

Tomorrow, the Let’s Start Talking Board of Directors is interviewing the two finalist candidates to take Sherrylee’s and my places as the new Executive Director.  We—Mark and Sherrylee—began this ministry in our home 36 years ago—a lifetime ago. Sherrylee was the first paid staff member. Our three kids were born into it and raised in the backseat of our many rental cars that we drove around Europe each summer of their lives, organizing and supervising those early LST teams.

This short-term missions ministry which we started with a very small, limited vision for working in Germany (actually, still West Germany in 1980) has now sent Christian volunteers into over 60 countries—including some countries that were not even countries in 1980. Literally thousands of Christians have shared their faith with more thousands of people who asked those Christians to tell them why they were so happy and what made them believe the Story of Jesus.  God has truly done greater things than we could have ever imagined.

Three years ago, Sherrylee and I told our board that it was time for us to give the leadership of the ministry to the next generation.  We were not pressured to give notice, not by board politics, not by financial crisis, not by scandal, nor for health reasons.  No, many years ago, when we were young missionaries in Germany, we watched the painful struggles between older missionaries who had planted churches in Europe after WWII and those same churches who needed to break away from their “parent” in order to mature.  My memory is that at least one church changed the locks on their building because their founding father refused to give up his key, aka “control”, of his church.

His church? Really?  Watching those missionary giants rejected by their spiritual children is how we learned not to believe that we possessed, that we owned a ministry just because God used us to start something that He wanted done.  Not owning LST made it easier to start the process three years ago of giving up the keys to the building!  It isn’t our building; they aren’t our keys! They never were!

Tomorrow, we believe we will begin the final step of stepping down. And that’s just the beginning!

What has brought me back to writing again is the opportunity to share with you this transition. I want to share with you what happened when we gave notice three years, what didn’t happen, and what probably should have happened! I’d like to talk about processes, choices, and feelings. And I wish to share this information, not as a history, but perhaps as a case study for those of you who are in non-profits, ministries, or small organizations that will face this same kind of transition sooner or later.

 

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Doing Short-Term Missions Well, Part Two

Posted in Short-Term Missions, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 6, 2013| 1 Comment »

Dan BouchellePart 2 of a series of guest posts by Dr. Dan Bouchelle, President of Missions Resource Network

Here are a couple more suggestions for doing STM in ways that bless both those you go to serve and those you take on the trip. For earlier entries see my last two posts.

  1. Do what the locals cannot do themselves: It is tempting to take groups of Americans to developing countries to do hands on projects that make Americans feel useful in fighting practical problems. So, we take dozens of people thousands of miles and spend tens of thousands of dollars to do carpentry, plumbing, concrete work, painting, pass out fliers or hand out food and clothes. This is good and hard to criticize. It is doing good and not wrong per se. But often it makes no sense to the local people and can create resentment in places where people with the needed skills in the church or community badly need the work and can do a better job for a fraction of what Americans spend getting there. Not to mention, hiring local people helps the economy, fights poverty, and creates opportunities to form relationships that could lead to making disciples. If you are going to do a service project, bring something the locals cannot do or hire done with your help. If you are bringing a group of people with special skills, e.g., medical personnel, and the local church requests you come as part of their ministry strategy, that is a good use of your trip. Also, doing an English as second language ministry is a great way to help out. People in many parts of the world are desperate to learn or improve their English and will jump at a chance to talk with Americans even if that involve reading the Bible together. Let’s Start Talking does this extremely well and I highly recommend them to any church wanting to do short term missions. LST logo
  2. Do what you are asked to do: It is easy to forget our reason for going and decide we want to rid the world of ____________ and then try to find someone who will let us fulfill our dream in their location. For example, we all want to see people get clean drinking water, end sex-trafficking, reduce preventable diseases, etc. We see the news about huge problems around the world. We feel guilty about our blessings. We want to “make a difference.” So, we develop this dream to go and fix problems other places. But, when our goal becomes to satisfy our need to feel significant rather than help people who really want us there and can benefit from our presence, we can end up being a problem and spend lots of time and money on projects that come to nothing after we are gone. Most of the systemic problems we want to solve are too complicated to address meaningfully by a trip of a week or two. A short-term mission trip may not be the way to address the issues we want to fix and no one may be asking us to fix them anyway.
  3. I know of one ministry that recently spent tens of thousands of dollars drilling a water well in an African village so the people did not have to rely on contaminated river water over a two mile walk away. However, when they returned, they learned the women of the village walked past the new well as they continued to make the two mile hike to the river to get water. Turns out, this was the only time the women of the village were able to talk among themselves and get away from their husbands’ expectations. That meant more to them than clean, convenient water. Perhaps that well should have been drilled two miles away, or maybe the ministry should have listened more closely to what the people in this location believed they needed. There are broken water wells all over the developing world lying unused because no one was taught how to maintain them. But, the people who put them in have some cool pictures to show back home about how they made a difference. The stories like this are endless. The point is, we don’t always know what is needed and need to listen and think long term as we follow the lead of the people on the ground. This is not about us.

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20% of Non-Christians Do Not Know A Christian!

Posted in Christian Culture, Christian Missions, tagged , , , , on August 26, 2013| 1 Comment »

SikhsIn an article that appeared in August web-only edition of Christianity Today, Abby Stocker wrote about “The Craziest Statistic You’ll Read About North American Missions.”  Her article opens with this paragraph:

One out of five non-Christians in North America doesn’t know any Christians. That’s not in the fake-Gandhi-quote “I would become a Christian, if I ever met one” sense. It’s new research in Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity’s Christianity in its Global Context, 1970-2020. Missiologist Todd M. Johnson and his team found that 20 percent of non-Christians in North America really do not “personally know” any Christians. That’s 13,447,000 people—about the population of metropolitan Los Angeles or Istanbul—most of them in the United States.

The study shows that it is not the atheists and agnostics clustered together in academia or Hollywood or the liberal unbelieving media whom evangelicals love to hate that make up the majority of those who do not know a Christian.

No, mostly it is the immigrants and those they live among.  Here is the chart that was published with the study:

stats

And although Christians make up one-third of the world’s population, eight out of 10 people in the world do not know a Christian.

Sherrylee and I just went to a wonderful Journey to Generosity retreat and in the opening session, we were confronted with the fact that Americans hoard much of the world’s wealth.

So is it worse to be poor because we hoard our wealth—or to be LOST because we hoard Jesus??  I’m not so sure it is not the same thing if looked at from our side of the equation.

So why do you think that 79% of the Sikhs in North America don’t know any Christians?  It’s not because of a scarcity of Christians; it’s not for lack of churches they could visit?

Well, how many Sikhs do you know?  How many Buddhists from Asia live in your community?  How many Chinese?

Just last week there was a Chinese couple in Wal-mart and I could tell they were searching for something that they couldn’t find, so I asked them if I could help.   They were looking for that kind of ice cream with many flavors in it, so I found the Neapolitan and they were quite pleased.  I wish I had been even friendlier and asked about them and . . . .who knows what might have come from a little conversation about ice cream.

They might already be Christians!!  But I don’t know because I didn’t take the time to even offer to get to know them.  And because of that they may still be one of the many Chinese in our country who don’t know any Christians.

I’ve quoted this verse before in describing the reason for the FriendSpeak program, that we offer churches through the Let’s Start Talking Ministry.  But surely the convicting results of this study should make us question whether we truly believe the verse to be inspired by God—or not!

26 God began by making one man, and from him he made all the different people who live everywhere in the world. He decided exactly when and where they would live.  Acts 17:26 (ERV)

Immigrants are in North America for the same reason you are—because God decided exactly when and where they would live.  And Paul says the reason that he put people in the same place was so that they could find Him!

It’s not just “foreigners”  who cluster in ghettos.  Christians do too!

What could you do to reduce the number of people who don’t know a Christian?

  • Make a point to speak to people of other origins in public places.
  • Find meaningful service projects to join or to launch in ethnic ghettos.
  • Adopt an international student from a local university!
  • Host a Thanksgiving meal at your church and invite the immigrant community nearest you, specifically!
  • Inquire about beginning a FriendSpeak ministry at your church (www.friendspeak.org)  and volunteer to be a part of it.

What can you add to this list?

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Strategic Planning: Part 5 – What Does All This Information Mean?

Posted in Strategic Planning Series, tagged , , , on August 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Strategic-PlanningThis series might be called a series of “reality posts” since we are following LST in real time through its strategic planning process.  To see earlier posts, go to the Categories drop down box and find the Strategic Planning Series.  

As I reported in the last blog in this strategic planning series—which was about 90 days ago—LST sent out over 9000 surveys to all its different constituencies in order to help us know how to plan for the future.  We received about 15% of the surveys back and if each survey averaged 50 questions, then we are talking about approximately 70,000 bits of information for us to analyze.

The ease with which you can get useful information out of your surveying depends primarily on two main factors:

A good online survey tool like www.surveymonkey.com will make the task much easier. 

  • A good tool itself provides some basic analysis of the captured data.
  • The data analysis must be presented in both table and graph forms.  You need it in both because different people in your organization process information differently.  Your accountants will love the tables with all their numbers, but your public relations people will often understand the graphs much faster.  Your board members will likely have different ways of processing information as well.
  • Filters should be available to further refine the data.  For instance, in LST’s Donor Survey, we asked “Have you personally done LST either out of the country or through FriendSpeak?”  This question would seem to require a simple Yes or No, and would result in a percentage of Yes’s and No’s, but because of other questions that we asked, we could find out how many men vs. women said yes, how many of those who said no contributed over $100, and much more.  Your online tool must allow for sorting and filtering your bits of information.

The demographic questions you build into your survey are the second big factor in making your information easy to understand. You only get out of a survey what you ask!

  • If your survey is 50 questions or less, probably the first 7-10 questions should be the demographic questions that are important to you, i.e., the categories that could be important for sorting the answers. Here were our questions for our donor survey:
  1. Gender?
  2. Age?
  3. Average household income?
  4. Size of home congregation?
  5. Have you ever done LST?
  6. How many non-profits do you support?
  7. What has been your single largest contribution to LST?
  8. Largest annual contribution?
  9. What prompted your most recent contribution?

What these questions have in common is that they are going to provide sorting and filtering categories for all of the remaining questions in the survey.

In this particular survey, there are a total of 25 questions.  After these first nine demographic questions, the remaining ones are mostly satisfaction or preference questions:  Example:

  • “On a scale of 1- 5, how satisfied are you with the way your donation is used by LST,” and
  • “When giving to LST, how do you prefer to contribute?”

Inevitably, you will discover that you failed to ask one demographic question that you really needed to ask.  We got all of this information back but realized that we could not separate our regular donors to our general fund who have given to us perhaps for years from those donors who had only given once to support a particular worker, often one of their family members.  The difference between these two types of donors is huge—and we simply failed to ask the one right question that would allow us to separate them in our analysis.

And, finally, you are going to need to let many eyes look at the results if you truly want to understand what your surveys are saying.  We gave all of our staff and all of our board members complete access to all of the raw data online, so that they could see everything, sort and filter the numbers as they wanted to, and then we asked for them to tell us what they saw as well.

One tip:  you can be more open with the data if the surveys themselves are anonymous.

Next, we’ll talk about actually beginning to draft the strategic plan.

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Strategic Planning Part 4: Gathering Information

Posted in Strategic Planning Series, tagged , , , on April 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Strategic-PlanningThis series might be called a series of “reality posts” since we are following LST in real time through its strategic planning process.  To see earlier posts, go to the Categories drop down box and find the Strategic Planning Series.  Be sure and take the poll at the end of this blog post.

According to our planning schedule, March and April were to be given to gathering information from LST’s different constituencies, a task that sounds easier than it is.

We first had to decide which groups/subgroups we were going to survey. Some groups were obvious choices:  workers, donors, and missionaries. But then the harder questions surfaced:

  • Were we going to subdivide workers into campus workers, church workers, and FriendSpeak workers, sending each group different questionnaires?
  • What about donors who have only given to workers as opposed to those donors who support the ministry directly and regularly?
  • Should we send to church leaders whose congregations send one team a year or restrict it to those who send multiple teams? Should those surveys go to the preacher, an elder, the LST coordinator, or someone else?

We settled on five different surveys: Workers, Donors, Sending churches, Host sites, and FriendSpeak workers.

We chose to use Surveymonkey.com which would let us ask demographic questions and then sort any single survey for comparison. Reports can be broken out of just one survey of workers that would allow us to compare church workers with campus workers, for instance.

Then we had to compose the questions. That was a process also:  first drafts, followed by second and third drafts, questions scratched for ambiguity, redundancy, and other horrible reasons, then new, more pointed questions added.

After all the revisions were halted, the draft surveys were sent to some “testers” to see if the questions were clear, if they were understood as intended.  The tests resulted in a whole round of further revisions based on suggestions from the testers.

Finally, almost a month after starting the project, the surveys were ready to go out—but then it took another week getting the right email lists in place and, in the case of the sending churches especially, determining who should receive the survey,  then getting their email address.

Finally . . .

We sent out 9,943 surveys!  650 emails bounced with bad addresses; 265 people opted out of the survey, but that meant there were still 9028 good emails. We received about a 15% return rate on these surveys, which is pretty good, but we had to send out two reminders to get this result.

Our last group to survey is the staff.  Several weeks ago, we set aside April 18 as staff workshop day. That was today!  Today was the day, we met from 10 – 3pm to gather information.  But I’ll tell you about this meeting in the next SP post.

Before you leave, I’d love to ask YOU for input, so here is a simple but a real question that is surfacing. Help us know what people think by participating in this simple poll. It will take 30 seconds to answer and will be a help to us!

And, you’ll be able to see the results from the blog poll immediately.

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