Ministry At Scale Chad Williams - Five Q

Arnie Cole is a social scientist and researcher at Back to the Bible, who has studied the spiritual lives of over 1.5 million people over the past 20 years. In this insightful episode, he challenges ministries to truly understand the spiritual state of the people they serve in order to help move them closer to Jesus.
The Importance of Asking "How Are You Doing Spiritually?"
Through examples from his own family's equestrian ministry, Arnie highlights how children are remarkably open about their spiritual struggles, but something happens as they become adults and stop sharing. He argues it is critical for ministries to directly ask people how they are doing spiritually.
Introducing the Personalized Engagement Prioritization Model
Arnie presents a 25-dimensional model that identifies 17 trillion potential spiritual data points for where a person could be in their walk. The methodology includes:
1. The "Death Question" to assess their salvation
2. Their level of Bible engagement, which predicts spiritual trajectory
3. Prioritizing people into 4 categories: Need for Evangelism, Discipleship, Activation, or Mature Believer
Measuring Spiritual Transformation and Discipleship Impact
The critical metric is whether people are engaging the Bible regularly, which research shows leads to transformed lives. Arnie also emphasizes the need to measure if people are actively discipling others.
Addressing the "Hard Issues" People Face
The model accounts for the real spiritual struggles people face like anger, anxiety, pornography use, gender identity issues, and more. Arnie laments that many ministries are unwilling to even ask about these "hard" areas people need help with.
A Free Resource to Increase Ministry Effectiveness
Arnie's team offers ministries a free scientific study and impact assessment to truly understand the spiritual state of the people they serve. The goal is to equip ministries to more effectively help people find and follow Jesus.
This is a powerful framework for personalizing ministry engagement in a way that leads to real spiritual transformation. To learn more about implementing this model, be sure to listen to Arnie's full engaging and eye-opening presentation!

Andrew Rogers is the co-founder of BibleChat.ai, an innovative app that uses AI to help people engage more deeply with the Bible. With over 75,000 downloads and users in 188 countries, BibleChat has been pioneering the use of artificial intelligence for Christian ministry. In this insightful episode, Andrew shares:
The Alarming Decline of Biblical Literacy
Andrew highlights shocking statistics like 26 million Americans stopping Bible reading since COVID and only a third being able to name the four gospel books. This Biblical illiteracy crisis represents both a huge problem and massive opportunity.
Introducing Faith Assistant - AI for Ministries
To tackle this issue, Andrew introduced Faith Assistant - BibleChat's new product that brings AI capabilities to churches, ministries and Christian media. It understands each organization's unique teachings to provide personalized, spiritually enriching experiences.
Surfacing Your Ministry's Content with AI
By indexing sermon libraries, ebooks, articles and more, Faith Assistant surfaces the perfect content to answer user questions and needs. It remembers context, provides summaries, and can even auto-generate customized Bible studies.
Real Examples from Partners Like KCBI Radio
Andrew showcased powerful use cases from partners like KCBI radio, Concordia Lutheran Church, and Pastor Richard Ellis. From Finding relevant sermons to answering theological questions in a denominationally appropriate way, the applications are endless.
Shaping AI to Spread the Gospel
Andrew's passion shines through as he describes this innovative approach to shaping AI technology to increase biblical engagement and ultimately further the Great Commission in powerful new ways.
This episode is packed with insights, real-world examples, and an inspiring vision for how AI can be leveraged for kingdom impact. To hear Andrew's full presentation and vision, be sure to listen to the entire Ministry of Scale podcast!

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 Innovation
Jeff 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 Matters
It 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 Authentic
Ministry 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 Combination
As 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 All
How 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 Failure
It’s important to try new things and get really comfortable with failing.

Focus on Trust
Relationships 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 Behavior
It’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 Silos
Combining your people, platforms and processes to work in harmony together will help build deep, authentic donor relationships at scale.

Be Abundantly Thankful
Generosity 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 Curious
Write 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 Transaction
There 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 Pigs
In 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 Mindset
N+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 Mitigation
Assessment - 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 Expensive
One 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.