Whether we’re at the tail end of the pandemic or simply learning to live with it, we face ongoing unrest and other uncertainties: inflation worries, housing market bubbles, gas prices, war, and wildfires. All of these disruptions over the past two-plus years have stimulated innovation at some ministries and stifled it at others—leaving everybody looking around and wondering, “What now?”
In this troubling context, you may feel there are countless reasons to postpone your plans and push innovation to the back burner. But when you look at the world through a lens of what could go wrong, you’ll always find some reason to stick with what’s worked in the past and avoid innovating.
Innovation doesn’t have to be scary—even in times of uncertainty and struggle. In fact, having an innovation mindset is the best way to move forward through uncharted waters, break out of old routines, and succeed.
Innovation becomes more important as your ministry is called to respond to fluid needs among your users and ministry partners. Having a healthy understanding of and approach to innovation will help secure your ministry’s future by embracing change in your ministry’s present.
Innovation can help your ministry pivot, reach a new milestone or decide what to build next. Let’s look at some proven ways you can start your organization along an innovation journey.
Doing What You’ve Always Done Won’t Accomplish New Goals
One of the most common barriers we see to innovation is, “Well, we’ve never done it that way.” And to be fair, this is a reasonable concern! You worry if you take a different approach, you’re inviting danger. Why risk wasting precious time and money for an uncertain reward? Or maybe you have a sense that God has ordained a specific plan for you. If your programs deviate from that, you might risk veering outside of His will.
These are obstacles that can be overcome when you view innovation as a frame of mind. Innovation is looking for ways—both large and small—to optimize whatever it is you’re doing. It invites you to lean into what your users are asking for, what they’re doing, what they’re seeing.
That piece about users gets at the heart of innovation: to innovate in the right direction, you must always be aware of what your users are looking for. That can include everything from design elements to information flows to finding a new way of doing things nobody else has.
Use Innovation to Build Your Ministry’s Long-Term Stability
Innovation is critical to the ongoing health of any ministry. That’s especially true for ministries facing a shrinking population of older members and donors. The time has arrived to revitalize your constituents and attract a new generation of engaged users. Instead, less forward-thinking ministries wring their hands and worry about what’s next without strategically planning for the future.
The same old approach won’t turn the tides of a deep-seated problem. But neither will quick fixes, like building a glitzy new website and hoping new visitors will show up. In fact, that sort of thing—”just do something and hope it works!”—is not the kind of innovation we’re talking about. We’re talking about much more intentional innovation with a purpose that drives results and serves your users.
Here’s an example of innovation with purpose. One of our clients was considering adding PayPal as a form of payment for donations. They received a quote to integrate the payment app into their existing platform, and there was some skepticism as to whether it would pay off in the end.
They decided to go ahead and it ended up paying off multiple times in the first month alone. And it increased donations: these were not donors who used PayPal instead of a credit card. Rather, these were people who weren’t donating at all and started once PayPal was a familiar option.
Innovation often takes that form—adding a simple feature, reimagining menus—where the idea doesn’t have to be extraordinary to see extraordinary results.
In this next section, we’ll show you how your ministry can look at innovation in the right light.
3 Essential Innovation Practices for Ministries
Ministries unaccustomed to operating with an innovation mindset can follow some simple guidelines to make innovation more effective and less intimidating.
1. Innovation must be purposeful.
We touched on this above, but it warrants repeating: you’re operating from a limited budget, so you can’t just throw money at solving a problem without understanding the problem itself. If you want to attract or expand your audience, you need to know what that crowd of people is actually looking for. Then there’s the added layer of justifying your plans to a board and to key donors who want to know exactly where their money is going. The best way to do that is to innovate with purpose. Being purposeful means knowing with some certainty where you’re going, having a roadmap in place, and being intentional about getting there.
2. Innovation doesn’t have to be massively transformational.
In all but the rarest cases, innovation won’t make your organization unrecognizable next year. It’s meant to push your organization forward, not necessarily turn it inside out. In fact, taking an incremental approach to innovation is generally the more responsible path. After all, the further you get from iterative to revolutionary, the more risk you absorb. Instead of avoiding risk, you can lean into it by minimizing it, mitigating it, and finding ways to do things in a slightly different way to work through that risk. More incremental steps build confidence in your own processes, in your own people. So that if the day comes when you have to look at revolutionary change, you say, “Okay, we’ve proven we can do this. Innovation is not a new concept to us anymore.”
3. Innovation is a way of life.
Innovation shouldn’t be viewed as something that’s nice to have, but rather a necessity. It’s not something you do every once in a while; innovation should be baked into your organization so that everybody is on board. It’s not something they learn about after the fact. It’s in your statement of values or your mission statement. It actually becomes a driving force of what you do. It propels the very Christian notion that God is constantly renewing, remaking, and reforming things into what He intends them to be in the end. The same thing should be true of how you run your ministry, as well.
Ready, Set, Innovate: Simple Ways to Get Started
If you’re ready to adopt an innovation approach in your ministry, here are some steps you can take right now:
- Work Your Way Up. Start internally by talking to people with boots on the ground and work all the way up to leadership. They’re bound to have different ideas of where innovation can breathe life into your ministry.
- Focus on the Solution. Instead of asking ‘What are our problems?” ask “Where are our opportunities?” That will generate more positive discussions that begin with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
- Seek Guidance. In some instances it is more effective to engage outside help. Having a neutral, expert third-party partner weigh in can enable you to see your ministry’s work—and future—in a completely new light.
Taking these steps now primes your team to develop an innovation mindset. This way, future efforts toward innovation will be a matter of course, not a seismic shift within your organization.
Use Innovation to Move Your Ministry Forward and Prepare for Whatever Comes Next
Remember when Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream about an approaching famine? He didn’t just talk about his interpretation; Joseph pressed Pharaoh for a solution. And once Pharaoh put him in charge, Joseph put in motion his plan to store up food in preparation for what was to come. When the famine struck, they were ready and able to provide people with the food and sustenance they needed.
Innovation is a lot like Joseph’s prudent preparation. We don’t always have strong indicators of when something is going to go terribly wrong. COVID’s a great example of that.
But adopting an innovative mindset futureproofs your ministry’s strategy and technology against known challenges and unknown curveballs alike. Doing so builds your organization into something strong, even during the good times. And when times get tough, you’re prepared not only to weather the storm—but to thrive in it.