Jeff Kliewer is the founder of ViewSpark. He has worked in fundraising for over 30 years and brings much experience to this episode. Jeff has taken his experience with fundraising and, through ViewSpark, has put a powerful way to connect with your donors right at your fingertips. In this episode, Jeff shares a variety of topics, including:Why Customer Feedback is Critical for InnovationJeff shares how ViewSpark customers started using the product in ways he had never imagined and how those experiences have helped shape their product development.How Real-time Information MattersIt is one thing to tell your donors what their funds are doing to make the world a better place. It is an entirely different thing to show them firsthand. Jeff shares stories about rescue missions in Maui using ViewSpark to give real-time impact updates.Showing Impact Means Being AuthenticMinistry work can be messy, yet we often feel like everything we produce must be polished and shiny. But donors want to see the impact they are having firsthand. Jeff shares a story of how one customer shared a video during a massive snowstorm about the need to help their homeless neighbors living in that very storm. Simple and real wins over polished messaging every time. Why Video and Text is a Winning CombinationAs a digital communicator, you know how hard it is to get your message seen and heard. Jeff shares tremendous response rates made possible by the video and text message combination. He also shares why these rates get amplified when you send the content your recipients have been waiting to watch.This episode is full of powerful stories and practical tips on how to better serve your donors with authentic, timely video updates from the field.

During this talk given at the Digital Ministry Conference in 2022, Aly Hammond & Chip Johnston from Virtuous provide 8 responsive mindsets that ministries and organizations can utilize to solve some of the big problems that many non profits are facing today. Personal For AllHow do we treat all donors the way we treat major donors? This doesn’t mean you’ll have the capacity to take all your donors to dinner, but it does mean you can send every donor a personal thank you email, call and text. If you have hundreds of thousands of people in your database of donors, you can followup with all your donors in a highly personalized way based on what they’ve done.Innovate, Experiment and Embrace FailureIt’s important to try new things and get really comfortable with failing.Focus on TrustRelationships thrive on trust and accountability. Donors have rightful expectations that whoever they’re donating to will do what they say they will do. Jennifer McCrea from the Generosity Network puts it like this: “Resources will tend to flow naturally towards you when you focus on the most important aspect of the fundraising process: creating human connections”. Donors tend to continue giving when they feel connected with and have confidence in the organization they are involved with.Value Motivational Insights Over BehaviorIt’s incredibly important to understand somebody’s intent. What’s their connection? Why are they giving? What’s their motivation for giving? The first thing to find out is “why”. Listen so you can understand the intentions of your donors so you can serve them in the most effective way possible. Breaking Down SilosCombining your people, platforms and processes to work in harmony together will help build deep, authentic donor relationships at scale.Be Abundantly ThankfulGenerosity breeds generosity. Don’t lose sight of the sacrifice that your donors are making with their time and money. Rather than treating donors like an ATM, lead with gratitude and provide highly personal and meaningful experiences.Design Plans, Adapt, Stay CuriousWrite out your plans in pencil. Be willing to fail and learn from your failures. “Some organizations will thrive from this increased chaos, some will be unprepared and some will merely fight it and lose.” as Seth Godin put it.View Generosity Beyond the TransactionThere are often so many transactions, it’s hard to see beyond it. Ask questions like: What was the mindset behind that donation?Why did it take place?Take steps to focus on personalization in order to best serve donors based on who they are as a whole.To listen to the entire talk, listen to episode #74 of the Ministry at Scale Podcast.

Anthony Elliot is a senior software developer at Five Q. On today’s episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, Anthony joins Chad to talk about conversion tracking and why it’s so important. For many people unfamiliar with conversion tracking, there’s one big question: what are conversions?As Anthony put it, it has similarities to a spiritual conversion. Much like how a spiritual conversion involves a person on a journey through life interacting with something that causes a change, a conversion on a website happens when a user comes to a site and interacts with the site in some way. This could include signing up for an email list, engaging with articles, posting on social media or even donating.Conversions are important because they provide data in order to more effectively use advertising in ways that actually work. You can start testing and optimizing based on how you know people interact with your online presence. In order to track conversions, you need to know the journey that a user takes. Asking questions such as these can help you to understand how people interact with your site:What are they doing on your site?How long are they on each page?Are they a recurring donor?The process to set up conversion tracking can be done many ways, but the way that Anthony and the 5Q team have done it successfully is to set up Google analytics to track conversions. It can be a daunting task to begin understanding this process, but Anthony gave an example about how it works. If you wanted to track donations, for example, you can create a “thank you” page that users are taken to when they donate. You can set up google analytics to track how many people visit that specific url each day, thus tracking the number of people who donated in any given day. Another way to track this is to link your Google ads account to Google analytics in order to capture which ads are most successful and which ads need adjustment. To learn more tips about conversion tracking and how to do it well, listen the the entirety of episode #74 of the Ministry at Scale Podcast.

In this session from the Digital Ministry Conference, Pete Marra, the Vice President of Innovation at the Colson Center discusses how to get started with risk mitigation for your ministry. Your Ministry is Like the Three Little PigsIn the story of the three little pigs, each pig picked different materials to build their house, one used straw, another used sticks and the last pig used bricks. When the Big Bad Wolf stopped by and began huffing and puffing the results were often disastrous for the little pigs. Your ministry is likely built on straw, sticks or bricks as well, though it is most likely a combination of materials and risk assessments will help you identify the areas your ministry is being held together by straw.Building Resilience Through and N+1 MindsetN+1 comes from network administration. It stands for Node plus 1 which means you have your main node (server, channel, means of communication etc.) plus an alternate or backup in case something happens to the main node. When thinking about this in your ministry you need to think beyond just your data, you need to think about N+1 in terms of people, processes, and technology. The 4 A’s of Risk MitigationAssessment - What is it that you are going to measure to assess the risk score of your ministry. This will be based on probability and impact.Alignment - This is about bringing agreement across your team as to what your risk is and how you will handle it.Assignment - This is where you decide who will head up your risk mitigation plan.Action - This is where you put your plan into action and start building resilience into your ministry. Resilience Doesn’t Have to Be ExpensiveOne simple way to ensure you don’t lose your data is to download it from the cloud and store it offline somewhere. For example you could get a backup of your email list.Bottom line Pete, wants to make sure that the biggest takeaway you have from his talk is to get started, anything you put in place is better than having nothing in place to mitigate risk. Pete shares many more practical ideas so be sure to listen to the full episode, but whatever you do, get started now.

John Cobb is the Vice President at Ligonier ministries. He started looking into Web3, Blockchain and the Metaverse simply as a way to understand what they are and how they could impact ministries going forward. What he found is that there are three main buckets he thinks ministries should be considering. The three categories are community, content and censorship. CommunityWhen he first began he discovered NFTs since he has an interest in art and photography but found that it goes beyond the art, NFTs can also be used to build community and show membership in a specific community. When building a community one thing that is important is owning the community so that it is not fully dependent on a platform that you don’t control. Many people think of this in terms of collecting email addresses or other contact information so you can still reach them if the platform goes away. Blockchain and decentralization take this one step further by allowing the platform for communication to be secure and resilient. ContentWhen it comes to content there is the possibility of censorship and deplatforming coming in America, but there are many places around the world where censorship is already in place, and there is a real risk for those who spread the Gospel in those areas. Blockchain in particular could provide a secure way to distribute content digitally.CensorshipThis topic dovetails nicely with the other categories. Making the world virtual (as in Web3), decentralized and secure (via blockchain and NFTs) enables you to build security and resilience within your systems. This is also a way to future proof your digital ministry.This is a high level overview of the types of things you should be thinking about for your ministry. John takes some time to answer specific questions and dive into details, so if you have questions you’ll want to listen to the full episode. 

Marketing Communications can be a critical part of your ministry. It ensures your message is presented effectively, all of your resources are consistent so you can stand out in a sea of other organizations and that your materials are engaging your audience. In this episode we speak with Cheryl Brunkow, the Marketing & Communications director at Bethany International, and she shares her five C’s for building an effective communications strategy.The five C’s for effective communications are clear, clean, concise, consistent and creative. Be sure to listen to the full episode as Cheryl gives very practical advice on why these are important and how to implement them within your organization. Clear It’s critical that people can understand your messaging if they are going to get excited about the mission of your organization. All too often in ministry we design things around our own personal experiences which require a significant amount of explaining for others to understand. When you’re creating your messaging make sure it will be meaningful to your audience.CleanReviewing for things such as typos, or grammar and spelling errors, will go a long way in showing that you value quality, and are a professional organization. Taking the time to make sure all of your resources and materials are clean will go a long way toward building credibility with your audience.ConciseIt takes time to build the right messaging, but If you can not clearly communicate what you’re about in a very concise way, then your message is going to get lost, and likely misinterpreted. ConsistentThere are a lot of moving parts in any organization and keeping consistency in your branding and messaging throughout all departments and channels is important for building your brand identity. Your audience wants to know that your whole team is working toward the same mission and vision rather than a collection of individuals doing their own thing.CreativeThe world around us is filled with amazing creative and engaging things that pull our attention in a lot of different directions. As ministries we need to be on the same level as the secular world in terms of both quality and creativity. Designing creative materials and experiences will not only get people’s attention but it will also keep them engaged over the long term. This summary is just scratching the surface of what Cheryl shares in the podcast, so whether you are in the middle of rebranding, building a new communications department, or just need to breathe new energy into your communications you won’t want to miss this episode.Resources:Bethany InternationalThe Poisonwood BibleLess Chaos, Less Noise by Ken MeyersCreativity Inc.Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me Podcast

Shae Bynes is the Chief Fire Igniter and founder of the Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur movement. On this episode of the Ministry at Scale Podcast, Chad sits down with Shae to talk about what a kingdom culture looks like and how to focus on using a kingdom approach to business.In 2009, God told Shae to quit her corporate job at IBM. She originally started out as a software engineer and had continued to work her way up in the company, but she knew it was God telling her to move on because it wasn’t in her plans. Less than a year later, she quit her job at IBM with little guidance on what to do next but continued to trust in God’s faithfulness along the way. After some time, she got connected to a woman who would eventually become her cofounder of Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur. She knew that it was a God-given friendship and since then, she has worked to help others take a kingdom approach to business.What does a kingdom approach look like? Shae breaks it down into 5 categories.The first piece is identity, which the other 4 pieces are built upon. You need to be able to trust that you can hear God’s voice and allow him express Himself through you. It’s very much a discipleship process as you learn to build an identity based on how God sees you.The next is assignment. What’s your assignment? Does it match up with God’s assignment for you and your business? Financial ROI is important, but we also need to focus on eternal ROI.The next is assets. We have an unlimited God that we are in partnership with. What does it look like to operate out of Heaven’s economy? It’s not about operating for provision, but rather from provision.The next is culture. How does your kingdom culture affect your company, self, and your business ecosystem along with all the people that you touch with what you do in business? The final part is operations. When we take a look at marketing or any other aspect of a business, we need to be asking what we can learn from Jesus. How can we avoid the ways of the world when it comes to marketing or staffing or any other part of our business?The whole point of all these is to help people align with the King of Kings to let God influence the world around us through our work and through our businesses.To learn more from Shae Bynes about how she uses social media and how she focuses on efficiency in her work, listen to the entirety of this episode Ministry at Scale podcast.Resources:https://kingdomdrivenentrepreneur.comGrace and Grind by Shea BynesA Catalyst for Change by John Bost

During his time at Bott Radio Network, the director of marketing Sam Rinearson came to speak at the Digital Ministry Conference in 2022. He taught how to personalize your user's experience in a way to build connection and to increase your number of divine appointments every day.Personalization is defined as “the process of tailoring a message or an experience to each individual which speaks directly to their needs, interests, and concerns.” In today’s day and age, we’ve come to expect personalization. On Netflix, we expect to be told what to watch based on our watch history. All throughout the tech industry, we expect someone else to know what we want. Sam breaks data down into two categories: readily available data and actively collected data. Readily available data collection can only tell you what has already happened such as Google analytics and Mailchimp. Actively collected data is the information you can get from your current users. Sam has had success collecting this type of actively data with surveys and questionnaires. He tends to go straight to analytics, but has learned that sometimes data collection is as simple as going straight to users to ask simple questions.Of the data that you acquire, you have to be able to sort through what’s useful to you and what’s not. It can be helpful to first ask “What do I want to know?” then go and find the data that answers your question, rather than going to the data first without having a clear idea of what you’re looking for. Data tagging is an important aspect of personalization as well. Within the audio world, audio transcription is something that Sam highly recommends people to do if they don’t already do it. It’s useful for categorizing content and for helping people find exactly what they’re looking for. According to Sam, you’re not going to be able to make good connections with users if you don’t have good taggingTo learn more from Sam about the power of personalizing your user’s experiences, listen to this entire episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast.Resources:JournityFinney MediaBott Radio NetworkThis talk on YouTube

Ken Coleman is America’s Career Coach, the #1 national bestselling author of The Proximity Principle and From Paycheck to Purpose, and host of The Ken Coleman Show. Ken helps people discover what they were born to do and provides practical steps to make their dream job a reality. During this talk given at the Digital Ministry Conference in the spring of 2022, Ken spoke about the 6 rules of employee engagement and gave lots of practical tips about how to ensure employees feel valued, cared for, and passionate about their work.The Purpose Rule: Your people should be using what they do best to do work they love to produce results that matter to them. This rule can be broken down into three parts. First, “using what they do best” talks about talent, then “work they love” deals with passion. Third, “matter to them” is about mission. According to this first rule, talent, love and mission are all an integral part of discovering purpose in the workplace.The Expectation Rule: Your people will know what to do, how to do it, and how their results will be measured. After you show people how to do it, the most important step in this rule is that people know how results will be measured. People want to know if they’re winning or losing. Stop coddling them. The Relationship Rule: Your people must feel cared for by their leader and connected to their team. There are two simple questions that can be used to build relationships in the workplace: How are you doing? How can I help you win in your role? If these questions are asked genuinely and with intentionality, it can help people to feel cared for and valued by their leader.The Recognition Rule: Your people must be recognized publicly and privately for their attitude, effort and contribution. Private recognition deals with the one-on-one part of a relationship. Public acknowledgement of people’s achievements and successes is what happens in front of the rest of the team. One way that public recognition is done at Ramsey Solutions is during leadership meetings, they will do popcorn shout-outs as a way to encourage one another and point out the areas where they see others winning.The Growth Rule: Your people must be challenged to learn new skills and step into new roles. This rule is not about promotion, it’s about giving people an opportunity to progress. If you don’t give people a ladder, they’ll leave and advance their life on their ownThe Crusade Rule: Your people must see how their work is part of a cause greater than themselves. This is one of the most important rules and ties closely with the first rule. When people can see the value of their work, they can understand the bigger picture.To learn more about each of these rules of employee engagement, listen to the entirety of episode #68 of the ministry at scale podcast.

Chris Martin is the content marketing editor at Moody Publishers. From his talk at the 2022 Digital Ministry Conference, Chris shares some practical tips for maximizing your reach using social media. Just a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to reach a high percentage of your followers on social media with just a single post. Reaching 50% of your followers was not unheard of. Today, however, the average organic Facebook post reaches about 5% of followers. The best way to use Meta is to free yourself from Meta. If we learn to use social media as a means to an end, it will have less of a hold on how we reach our audiences. One practical way to do this is to focus on driving your audience to email lists or other forms of intimate off-social media communication. If social media is the front porch of our ministry or nonprofit, we need to invite users through the front porch into the living room; a more inviting place where we can engage more effectively.When creating content for social, we also need to also consider the fact that going viral is not always as great as it seems. “Can you help us go viral?” That’s one of the most common questions that social media managers get. According to Chris, it’s not as great as it sounds. It seems like the most common way to go viral today is to do something that makes a lot of people mad. In many cases, going viral could lead to controversy in a way that you did not intent. Rather than focusing on trying to go viral, the best way to use social media to maximize your reach is to just make good content. In order to do this, Chris outlines three steps: Isolate your audience. Investigate their needs.Identify the gifts God has given you to steward for the good of his kingdom. To learn more about how to take practical steps in order to isolate, investigate and identify, listen to the entirety of episode #67 of the ministry at scale podcast.Resources:Terms of service book