The hard part is done: you presented your budget to the board and they approved it. You’ve got (some) money and you’ve got (LOTS of) ideas… so now what?!
How do you ensure you’re spending the budget on the right projects? When next year’s budget meetings roll around, how can you provide clear evidence your projects impacted your ministry? There are plenty of pitfalls in getting started that can lead to delays or waste in your projects and budget. We think there’s a better way to make the most of your budget and impact your ministry by focusing on outcomes instead of outputs.
3 Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Before we discuss how to maximize your budget, we should recognize some of the most common pitfalls when starting to figure out how to spend your budget. These aren’t the only dangers out there, but you’ve likely experienced, or considered, each one of them. That’s okay—my goal is not to shame you! Indeed, we’ve all made these mistakes at some point. Identifying them allows us to both recognize when we’re pursuing them and avoid them in the future.
1. Meeting of the minds
Who knows your ministry better than you and your team? Nobody, that’s who! So why not get around a table, discuss your options, and decide how to turn your budget into ministry outcomes? After all, you’re smart and capable: you should be able to figure this out!
Apart from the potential concern for calling “yet another meeting”, the reality is that we all have real blind spots when we look at our own organizations. What we think we know about our users doesn’t always match what our users think. We often overestimate our internal resources apart from the budget. We get stuck in an organizational “way of doing things.” All of these can make it difficult to see what’s best for your ministry from within the organization. It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true!
That’s not to say you and your team aren’t important in the planning process. Indeed, as I joked earlier, no one really does know your ministry as well as you! But it’s rare to be able to step outside of oneself for long enough to readily identify the best ministry strategy. And without an effective and practical strategy, you won’t have a roadmap for moving forward. You risk building something your users don’t want or starting something you can’t finish. Either way, you waste your budget in the process.
2. RFPs are Requests For Poorly fitting solutions
Let’s say you avoided taking an insular approach and you hired a consultant to help figure out what you wanted to build. How do you find someone to design and build your project?
You might consider writing a Request For Proposal (RFP) to describe the project. You disseminate the RFP among colleagues, coworkers, family, and friends. Maybe you upload the RFP to a contractor website. But how can you be sure you’re getting it in front of the right eyeballs? And how can you be sure the responses are an accurate reflection of what an agency can provide? The truth about both is: you can’t.
RFPs give the appearance of a project definition that is in stone. They often codify details that are unimportant or distracting at early stages in the process, like a specific platform or coding technology. As such, they often attract development shops that want to churn out projects with little consideration for why they’re building what they’re building.
These shops want to receive input (i.e., the RFP), match it against their internal skills, stick it into their development black box, and return the output (i.e., something akin to a widget). They are ill-equipped to deal with custom, complex projects; unless you have a simple, discrete project, you do not want to work with such a shop. Otherwise, the resulting false start may leave you with a depleted budget and incomplete project.
As with the first pitfall, that’s not to say RFPs are totally useless, especially when you can capture strategic goals without jumping to technical solutions. And you should capture and document project requirements at appropriate times. But that’s also not a one-time task; project specifications can flex and change throughout a project’s life cycle. It’s also not something that you can do in a sequestered committee apart from your design and build team, whether they’re internal or with an agency.
3. “Ready, FIRE, aim!”
I stumble into the final pitfall as much as anyone. I have over 20 years of experience as a systems engineer, imagining and building computer systems and networks on grand scales. As such, I have a tendency to jump into building something—anything—even before the problem is fully defined. I usually assume we will be able to make midcourse corrections as we discover problems along the way. But it’s never that simple and usually not cheap.
The politician’s syllogism restates this challenge in another way:
- We must do something.
- X is something.
- Therefore, we must do X.
You can probably see how that plays out in the political arena. But it applies to your ministry strategy as well, and especially as it affects your budgetary decisions. We all feel the urgency to “do something” in ministry. That sense of urgency may even be why you’re in ministry in the first place! The problem arises in defining which X you want to pursue. Getting started in building before you’ve done the planning does not solve that problem. Or if it brings some clarity, it does so at great cost to team consensus and your budget as you test projects that don’t lead to organizational success.
1 Key Technique to Maximize Your Ministry Budget
To maximize your ministry budget, you must make sure you are pursuing goals that bring success to your ministry. You can define specific success metrics in many ways, but ultimately it means capturing and pursuing your organization’s vision. That vision is probably not based in projects, but rather in people. So to maximize your ministry budget, you must ensure your projects serve your ministry’s purpose. And to serve your ministry’s purpose, you must focus your goals around ministry outcomes, not project outputs.
Discovery—the process of turning ministry needs into an action plan—can help you do exactly that.
Discovery is not brainstorming about outputs
Earlier we discussed the danger of sitting around a table and trying to think about what projects you should pursue. Brainstorming at that stage can lead to less clarity, not more, about how to spend your budget. That’s because the most common phrase uttered in brainstorming sessions is, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” What follows is someone’s idea of what a project should entail, or what features could be neat, or what users might want. Those conditionals muddy the water and give the authority for making decisions over to “gut feelings”. You might come out of that brainstorming session saying, “That project or feature sounds good, so we’ll pursue it.”
Discovery minimizes gut feelings in the decision-making process by shifting the focus away from outputs like projects and features. It changes the question from, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” to, “How does this serve our users and, thus, pursue our ministry vision?” It allows you to use metrics, research, and rubrics to test every project against your vision and ruthlessly assess whether it serves that vision. It emphasizes the outcomes and de-emphasizes the outputs; after all, the means should serve the end, not vice versa.
Discovery is an investment in outcomes
We identified two big problems with building before planning: weak team consensus and expensive shifts in project focus. Discovery gives you the tools to invest in building team consensus and establishing a project roadmap earlier in the process. By focusing on organizational outcomes, staff and leadership feel purposeful in their involvement and supportive of the goals. Similarly, project managers can revisit the key question—“How does this serve our users and, thus, pursue our ministry vision?”—throughout the project life cycle.
But starting early with Discovery requires resolve. You will need to establish consensus and a roadmap at some point in the process, but it can feel like wasted money at the beginning. It may feel like spending a lot of time and having little to show for it. It may feel redundant or hard to justify (especially when a budget update is requested!).
However, leaving those tasks until later can cost even more. Any change costs something, but changes that happen mid-stream and threaten to distract the focus from ministry outcomes will cost far more. Consider a rough time-cost graph that shows this relationship:
Discovery doesn’t just keep the focus on outcomes: it also happens earlier in the process. This outcome-based focus does not end with Discovery; rather, it is part of the User Experience (UX) investment throughout the project. Indeed, industry studies have shown that “every dollar [invested in] UX brings in between $2 and $100 dollars in return”!
Starting earlier—actively planning at the outset—means that investment has more time to pay dividends. Those dividends include building the right product, serving your users well, and helping your ministry pursue its vision. It will pay further dividends, beyond the planning stage and into execution, as you use UX to continually maintain focus on your organization’s desired outcomes.
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Agathon has helped ministries maximize their budget through Discovery for over two decades. If you’re interested in learning more about how Discovery works or how to make some of these recommendations work for your ministry, feel free to drop me a line below, and let’s chat about it!