The Management Tradeoffs of Growing a Ministry

Social impact organizations of all kinds have an implicit mandate: to grow the scale and extent of their work, and to deepen the quality and impact of their essential programs — often with a fixed amount of capacity or resource.

Not a small challenge. How does a church reach more people, while increasing their energy in developing mature disciples, leaders, and servants of those they already have? What about impact organizations that are more product, service, or experience driven? The opposite impulse might be true: scale as far as you can, and don’t look as closely as you might at the true depth of your impact in the lives of people.

Of course, that which you measure is that which you optimize for. If an organization primarily leads with qualitative measures, stories of impact, and generally has a local scope of work (like a local church or a small community organization), it’s easy to celebrate depth, transformation, growth, recovery, change.

If an organization is primarily oriented around quantitative analyses of growth — attendance numbers, distribution numbers, program locations, program implementation sites, training metrics — then the instinct is often to optimize for scale. “Our ministry involves X number of results in X number of places,” one would hear.

Neither is wrong (although the optimization instinct in a nonprofit environment is often tailored to the perceived tolerances and appetites of the most essential donors and stakeholders), but it represents an essential management question, and one that requires strategic analysis in order to avoid the path of least organizational resistance.

Growing Wider

The mandate to grow wider in a nonprofit context is often mission-driven rather than stakeholder driven. While in some cases external donors or funding organizations might require economies of scope and scale over time (i.e., more reach for the same dollar), in general nonprofits often benefit from a (relatively) fixed impact model. “If you give us a dollar, we can reach 5 people with our program.” Scale, in this way, becomes a function of fundraising, but is really a function of the appetite and ability of the organization to pursue growth dollars.

Scale is also a function of mission and vision, which makes both critically important. To be faithful to a mission to “reach the city” or “work in every country in poverty,” or “plant churches around Africa,” or some other imagined goal requires a critical evaluation of market boundaries and mission fulfillment. In other words, to say one exists to “reach the city,” but to have no real ambition to truly continue to push toward that goal (at the risk of disrupting the status quo), is to introduce dissonance into an organization. Either they must pursue a growth mandate, or they must adjust the way they think about their purpose.

Growing Deeper

The opposite instinct, often more common in a ministry or social impact organizational setting, is towards depth. Drucker believed that “the function of a nonprofit is the transformation of an individual,” and focusing on the relationship between resource input, programmatic design, and transformational outcome, until it is proven that it works, is their essential work — especially in the early stages. You can’t (honestly) scale an impact model that isn’t proven.

Particularly in local environments (e.g., a local church), where there is a relatively close relationship between the stakeholders, the inputs, the programs, and the transformational results, the instinct is often to grow deeper. This, for better or worse, keeps the results “in house,” in the form of new converts, deeper relationships, better leaders, and more. This comes at the expense of wider reach —and this is what is most common. In United States churches, less than 10% of all funding goes to “external” programs. While there are likely other categories of expansion, the patterns generally indicate churches that prefer to re-invest their budgets into deepening the program offerings of their own congregations, at the expense of outward expansion. There aren’t just economic or strategic arguments against this, there are Biblical and theological ones in many cases.

Challenges, Context, and Conflict

The challenge of the “width vs depth” trade-offs in nonprofit or ministry management is that the essence of one’s mandate is to find ways to do both. In Christian mission, this is often expressed in various ways as the “Evangelism vs. Discipleship” trade-off, as if more of one would limit the opportunity of the other.

A focus on scale has the advantage of widening the impact in a way that might “unlock” new opportunities, pursuing wider relationships and wider exposure, and allowing an organization to truly “touch” far more people than it might otherwise. This brings the contextualization challenge along with it — the more an organization tries to scale a single impact model or product or service into new places, the more it loses its resonance and “fit” for each of those places, as that’s not truly where the program was designed for. To pursue scale is to allocate existing resources for reach first, in the hopes of gaining a foothold and an infrastructure that might allow for deeper impact down the road — a gamble to be sure.

A focus on depth has the distinct advantage of being far more contextual, and allocating far more resource-per-person than an impact model focused on scale. This is why church plants can focus all of their energy on contextualizing their ministry approach and building a core leadership team, with a relatively long time horizon, but why a multi-country child sponsorship organization has to choose between sponsoring more children in their existing markets, adding an additional year of education to their existing sponsored children, or translating their program materials into new languages to move into new areas of need, or a Bible Translation organization has decide between updating a version of the Bible for a major-market language, or investing in increasingly niche translations elsewhere.

The Ecosystem and Economies of Scale

The pathway forward for the strategic organization is often a middle one, although the order of priorities is important.

Some organizations, with the capital to truly pursue intelligent expansion, often have the opportunity to re-invest the margin from economies of scale, into various “depth” categories — market research, program design, program evaluation, innovation, and more. This often takes a reliable donor base, committed to the organizational vision and not just the product or model — because to truly pursue deeper outcomes might require the disruption of the original program itself.

Some organizations, with less capital up front, will aim for depth — pursuing deep relationships, high-touch environments, high quality experiences, strong culture, etc., in order to build a small but dedicated tribe to the initial cause. Having “1000 true fans” is all it takes to make a living, says technologist Kevin Kelley — and having 1000 people that have all had their lives changed by your organizational is more than enough to begin to have some momentum. Having a strong impact model predicated on an expanding circle of relationship is more of an “ecosystem” approach — however, cultivating that ecosystem intelligently over time can lead to the resources for scale and expansion down the road, provided the organization is able to maintain its appetite and mandate for growth (not easy to do in the midst of a strong relational culture).

Width and depth represent the trade offs in play for organizations concerned with human impact. Do we aim to reach more people, and sacrifice the quality of the impact, or do we aim to ensure the quality of the impact and leave numerous others on the outside? This is an essential design challenge for impact organizations today.