What makes your organisation effective?
If you were deciding to give money or time to a Christian ministry, which of these narratives would you most want to hear?
“This is the urgent injustice or opportunity we are addressing”
“This is our clear vision of how we want the world to be”
“This is why our organisation is effective at creating the change we want to see”
We suspect most people would want to hear all three, and yet in our experience, Christian organisations are often better at speaking clearly about the first two than the third.
This is one reason why our impact strategy model provides an opportunity for Christian organisations to evidence that third narrative. We call the intentional characteristics that make an organisation likely to be effective at creating change “success factors”.
“Success factors” is simpler language for an existing concept. In other impact strategy models, they are sometimes called “key ingredients”, “causal mechanisms” or “assumptions”. They don’t guarantee success and impact but they make it more likely. And if they make impact more likely, then organisations benefit from naming them and trying to influence them.
While running any Christian ministry is hard, the hardest part can be using the resources you have in a way that’s most likely to be effective. Yet this can be deprioritised as a “nice to have”.
However, while we’ve found the concept of success factors valuable and empowering to Christian organisations, it is a new idea and they can sometimes struggle to know what sort of success factors they could helpfully identify.
So here is our typology of success factors that can help you build your strategic clarity on why your organisation is likely to be effective at creating change.
“While running any Christian ministry is hard, the hardest part can be using the resources you have in a way that’s most likely to be effective. Yet this can be deprioritised as a “nice to have”.”
Type 1: Organisational
The first type is about practices, policies, and decisions made at an organisational level to be effective at creating change. Common success factors in this type include: an organisational learning culture, investment in staff training, a defined organisational strategy, or hiring staff with context-specific experiences.
The important aspect here is that these are not characteristics that enable your organisation to be sustainable or governed well or raise money, important though they are. These are about organisational policies and practices that have a direct influence on your organisation being effective at creating change.
Type 2: Delivery
The second type of success factor is what you do at a delivery level to be effective at creating change. Whether your organisation delivers training, resources, events, programmes, services, or anything else, there are ways to do that in a way that facilitates change and ways to do that in a way that doesn’t.
Common success factors in this type include: intentional processes that make services well-designed, policies to identify or motivate those who you want to engage, having clear outcomes that define success, having high-quality trainers or delivery staff, the use of Biblical content in resources, or the use of physical/digital forms of content to promote accessibility.
There is an array of possible success factors at the delivery level because of the diversity in approaches to creating change. However, the central criterion is to demonstrate intentionality in delivering in a way that achieves outcomes, not only activity or reach.
“having high-quality trainers or delivery staff, the use of Biblical content in resources, or the use of physical/digital forms of content to promote accessibility.”
Type 3: Service user or beneficiary
The third type of success factor is what those you support or engage need to have to make your work effective. Whatever you deliver or offer as an organisation, and whomever you are seeking to influence, you will never create lasting change with or in anyone without their cooperation and effort.
Examples of this kind of success factor from our clients in the past have included: the willingness of young people to do reflective work between sessions; the motivation of church leaders to change; an oversubscribed leader able to give sufficient time to engage; and civil servants respecting the role Christian organisations can play in society.
This type of success factor comes with an appropriate level of humility. No matter how well-formed a theory of change is, no matter how well-designed a campaign, programme, or resource is, individual-level change can’t be forced.
“the willingness of young people to do reflective work between sessions; the motivation of church leaders to change; an oversubscribed leader able to give sufficient time to engage.”
Type 4: Role of God, faith, and the church
The final type of success factor is underpinned by the reality that Christian organisations have a worldview that is not the same as that of a secular organisation. While some of the day-to-day work will be the same, many assumptions about why, what, and how they work will be different because there is an underlying belief in God’s existence and presence in the world.
Therefore, this success factor is about enabling Christian organisations to better articulate what role this worldview plays in their understanding of what will make them effective.
Through talking to different clients, we’ve found at least three distinct routes to name this:
The role of God as an active agent in creating change
The role of personal faith within individuals in facilitating change
The role of the church (theologically and sociologically) in facilitating change
None of this is trying to define or isolate the role of God in an impact strategy in an unhelpful reductionist way, but it is trying to help Christian organisations think about how they understand the role of God in making their work effective.
Put practically, one question that our clients value is: “If we came to observe your work for a week, what would we see in what you do and how you do it that is different from a secular organisation?”
Conclusion
Much of what our “success factors” concept is trying to do is help Christian organisations be better stewards of the resources they have. Stewardship is not only about effectiveness but it also can’t not include it.
There are a range of approaches to identifying and clarifying an organisation’s success factors, and Eido is growing further in supporting organisations to do this.
However, our question to Christian organisations is quite simple: What makes you effective in creating the change you hope to see?
“Our question to Christian organisations is quite simple: What makes you effective in creating the change you hope to see?”
Eido Research exists to help Christian organisations measure and improve their social and spiritual impact. We do this through impact strategy and research services.
