Author: Alan Ritari

As you better understand how your audience interacts with your online presence, you’ll be able to smooth their paths to engagement…and ultimately get them to embrace your mission. As such, it’s time to think beyond the isolated steps users take on your site—like purchasing a book, donating to your organization, or signing up for a devotional series. 

Of course these steps are each critical, but they’re single steps a user takes in the midst of a longer journey. Considering the user journey holistically is therefore the only way to uncover opportunities to meet users where they are and communicate your mission more effectively. 

That’s where journey mapping comes in. While journey maps are a tool nearly every industry employs, there are unique considerations—and benefits—to journey maps for ministries. Let’s explore. 

What Is a Journey Map?

A journey map describes the steps users take as they interact with your ministry’s services and/or products—from the first touch to the call to action and (hopefully) beyond. 

Journey maps also chart users’ emotions or feelings while completing each step on their journeys. Are they enthusiastic as they’re reading your “About Us” page, learning about your mission? Are they frustrated as they wait for their book order to process, wishing you had integrated a payment app with your website? Noting trends in these emotions can tell you so much about your ministry’s user experience (UX). More on that below.

What does a journey map actually look like? Typically, the user’s interactions are documented in chronological order on a line graph, and the emotions appear as a sine wave overlaying the steps.

How Agathon Approaches Journey Mapping

In Agathon’s process, journey mapping occurs during the Discovery phase of an engagement, when we’re getting the right stakeholders in the room to solidify what needs to happen to accomplish your project and conducting foundational work. 

Specifically, journey mapping happens after we’ve finalized your ministry’s personas—profiles describing specific, like-minded groups within your target audience. Why? After personas, journey maps are the next logical process point for understanding your users. We use your personas to imagine users’ paths. 

Say we decide during persona development that Ruth is an archetype for a stay-at-home mother interested in Christian-based volunteer opportunities. We’ll then use her characteristics to surmise what her journey looks like and map it. 

The Benefits of Journey Maps for Ministries

Journey maps are worth their weight in gold because they help you grasp what your constituents are going through as they navigate your ministry’s offerings. You’re able to walk the path with them by reviewing your completed journey map, seeing user touchpoints you might otherwise overlook. 

Only when you (figuratively) spend time in your users’ shoes can you spot gaps in your UX design. Then work to improve it. With a journey map in hand, you have the power to optimize your constituents’ paths. Consequently, they experience your ministry just as you need them to—so your mission comes across loud and clear. 

Journey Map Considerations Unique to Ministries  

As mentioned, lots of industries leverage journey maps to better their UX. But it’s especially important for ministries to create journey maps because there’s a higher probability that you’re missing something about your constituents’ experience. 

Think about it this way. Your organization doesn’t have the backstop of financial incentive that corporations do. You’re not out merely to maximize profit, so you might not analyze every single user step. Or invest indiscreetly in of-the-moment UX design. 

But, to be frank, it’s more vital for you to get your mission across than it is for businesses to make money. So it’s arguably more important for you to get your user experience right. To meet your users where they are. To do that, you must start with journey mapping. 

Get Started on Your Ministry’s Journey Map 

Agathon works with ministries, so we’re well-versed in the importance and nuance of completing journey maps just for organizations like yours. We’d be honored to help you spread the word that is your mission.

Does your organization focus on more than one area of ministry? Maybe you also run a faith-based conference with lots of name recognition. Or perhaps you have a service offering that’s a bit removed from everything else you do. You might even be in talks to add an entirely new initiative to complement your mission. 

Whatever the case may be, you need to consider how these different-but-related ministries affect your website and the strategy behind it. Namely, should you have sister sites for each? Or just one website that represents your entire brand—for example, conferences and services alike? 

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer because selecting a single website or several comes down to the needs of your unique audience. The good news is that four universal factors help every ministry make the right choice. 

Why Effectively Organizing Your Ministries Matters

Your ministry serves many diverse audiences, each requiring multiple offerings to suit their needs. It’s crucial to invest time and real brainpower into understanding how to organize and present information to best reach these varied audiences—whether that means having one website or more. 

Why? Because when you make the right choices about your site(s), your content will resonate perfectly with both prospective and current constituents. They’ll be able to find the information they want and need easily because it’s organized sensically. And your mission will spread further as a result. 

The 4 A’s of Choosing Your Ministry’s Website Structure

As promised, four factors that can lead you down the right path when it comes to finding digital homes for your various ministries. Remember, making the right decision will better connect you with your ministry’s members. 

1. Audience 

Understanding the people you’re trying to reach assists you in deciding how to handle each ministry’s site. If the audience of your parent organization and your specific ministry are essentially one in the same, having a single website is probably your best bet. 

Just think about a standard church. Yes, a church tends to have many ministries and outreach programs—youth groups, social ministries, missions, and so on. Obviously, the target member of each of those groups varies. But it’s still one church. Having just one website makes it clear that the church itself is the linchpin of all of its ministries. And that the church has something to offer every current and discerning constituent. 

On the other hand, if the audiences of your parent organization and a specific ministry don’t have much in common, a separate website is likely the way to go. A dedicated website allows you to focus your messaging on an exact audience. 

Consider Cru and Athletes in Action. Cru, a nonprofit bringing ministries to college campuses worldwide, is the parent organization. Athletes in Action is a subsidiary of Cru that specifically targets collegiate athletes. Athletes in Action could live in the navigation on Cru’s main website, but their audience is niche enough to warrant their own site. After all, getting student athletes to follow Christ requires an approach distinct from how Cru might wish to reach their other audiences. 

We even broke out Agathon for Ministries from our parent brand. Having a separate site allows us to address the bespoke needs of ministries so that the people who require our help most can find us, understand our message, and feel confident in our ability to assist them.

2. Autonomy 

Look at your ministry’s team. Is there a clear divide between the people who work on projects for your parent organization and those who work on projects for your  specific ministry? If so, separate websites make the most sense. That’s because delegating a website to the people most closely involved with the ministry is usually more efficient for all parties involved. 

Say, for instance, your ministry hosts a well-known industry conference. The folks who put the conference together are largely an independent team. If they had to work within the parent organization’s website, they’d have to run every decision up the ladder of the larger organization. It takes time to finagle that kind of red tape. Giving them their own website avoids publishing bottlenecks and generally puts them in the best position to be as efficient as possible in manning the conference. 

3. Access

Analyzing how your website users access and arrive at the information they need can help you decide whether one or multiple sites is right for you. 

Let’s return to our conference example. If your conference has become a household name, some people will probably google the conference and not your parent organization. If most of your constituents are finding your conference via its own name, all the more reason to give it its own space on the web. Just be sure to cross-link between the parent site and the conference site. 

Conversely, if your parent organization is popular but your conference is new and therefore relatively unknown, housing the conference within your main site might lend credibility to the conference while it’s in its infancy. You could always reassess and create a separate website for the conference down the line. 

At the end of the day, you of course want people to get to the content most relevant to them regardless of how they get there. But understanding their path can be key in making website decisions. 

4. Administration

Now for a more practical consideration: website administration and maintenance. Having multiple ministry websites can potentially fragment and complicate the work of keeping each site up to date. 

That said, using the right technology/SaaS platform solves most maintenance issues—even if you do have more than one website. Your sites can and should all be hosted on the same platform (like WordPress) so you can manage them all in one place. 

One time SaaS platforms aren’t the answer is when technology is the point of your website, as is the case with ecommerce websites or learning management systems. Those generally have to be built from the ground up, requiring separate site administration. 

The long and the short of it? Be sure you grasp the upkeep needs of your website(s) before launching more. 

It All Comes Back to Your Ministry’s Audience  

If you only retain one ‘A’ from this article, make it “audience.” Your ministry’s audience members—your constituents—are the lifeblood of your organization. You know that better than anyone.  

If you keep your audience and their needs at the forefront of any website decisions you make for your organization and its different ministries you can’t go wrong.

It’s exciting when it’s time for a new website or app for your ministry. So exciting that you might be tempted to dive right into wireframes or even the build itself. 

But every successful project begins with understanding the needs of the people your product will serve. And identifying the outcome needed to both please your end users and meet your organization’s goals. It begins with Discovery. 

Let’s explore why Discovery is an essential phase of your next project—and the five steps to do it right. 

What Is Discovery?  

You have a project in mind: Your organization needs a new website, app, or other digital solution to move the needle on your mission. You may have even submitted RFPs to a handful of developers. 

Discovery kicks off your project by getting the right people in a room to figure out precisely what needs to be done and how to do it.

Importantly, Discovery is always completed from a user-centered perspective to ensure the final product reflects the optimal user experience. 

When Does Discovery Take Place?

Kicking off your project implies that Discovery is at the beginning of your work. And that’s true the vast majority of the time. However, larger projects occasionally require an additional Discovery phase partway through the project to validate your path. 

Ideally, Discovery is its own project phase—independent of any building and optimization that might take place later. We conduct Discovery this way for two main reasons:

1. It enables a more accurate scope and budget for the rest of your project. 
2. Discovery is useful in its own right, helping to build consensus and chart a clear path forward. 

Discovery is the shortest, straightest path from an initial idea to a fully fledged, user-centered concept your whole team feels good about pursuing. That level of detail is required to map out a clear plan—and an accurate budget.

We can’t say how long it will take to get somewhere until we’ve decided whether we’re popping out to the grocery store or road tripping cross country. The same goes for your ministry’s budget. Discovery is key to solidifying your project’s scope. Only then can we say with certainty how much it will cost. 

It’s worth noting that Discovery is a valuable tool even if you don’t immediately pursue a project. You’ll receive helpful deliverables post-Discovery (a plan, budget, and takeaways from key session moments) to shop around both internally and externally. 

Internally, you can garner project buy-in from board members with your Discovery assets in hand. Externally, you can share Discovery findings with other developers to get their take on your project. We’re confident in the results this important phase yields.  

Why Is Discovery Crucial?

It’s common to assume everyone in your ministry is on the same page about what your digital project must achieve. In reality, diverse stakeholders naturally have competing priorities. 

Without Discovery, these varying priorities may never surface—or they’ll surface when you’re too far into your build to pivot easily. With Discovery, you’ll have the discussions necessary to reach internal alignment and foster transparency about your project. You may not agree on every tiny detail but it’s vital that everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Another downside of bypassing Discovery? You risk building a product users aren’t interested in. Discovery elevates the end user’s perspective. Without it, you might not see the full picture of what your constituents need.

5 Essential Discovery Steps 

We’ve found a way to construct Discovery sessions so that even clients unfamiliar with Discovery or lacking confidence in their ability to contribute get meaningful results. 

This method includes five proprietary steps: Framing, Empathy, Journey, Exploration, and Product Backbone. We’ll detail each below. The order of these steps is very much intentional. Each builds on the last to create a narrative arc that informs your project from start to finish. 

1. Framing

The Framing step is all about figuring out what we’re trying to accomplish and how that vision will be brought to life. We’ll frame the challenge in clear and concise terms and set the stage for understanding your organization’s goals and how they relate to your target audience, whether that’s parishioners, volunteers, missionaries, or other pastoral professionals. 

If you have an RFP, we’ll make sure the entire group is up to speed on what we knew before we even sat down together—and align as needed. We also conduct framing activities, such as card sorting. 

Card sorting involves writing down proposed project features or concepts on sticky notes. From there, we’ll work together to arrange the notes in four quadrants. The four quadrants indicate which features are the most important and which will be the most difficult to create.   

This exercise—and the Framing step in general—help surface the true challenges and priorities we need to pay attention to for the rest of our work together. 

2. Empathy 

We’re not building a site or app for ourselves. We’re building it for the people your product will serve. The Empathy step of Discovery elevates this critical user perspective, increasing your team’s understanding of and empathy for your constituents.

In a perfect world, you’d get out into the field for user research. But even if that isn’t in your budget, we will use Discovery to craft personas (profiles describing specific, like-minded groups within your target audience) that capture users as accurately as possible. 

To develop your personas, we’ll discuss commonalities among your audience, concerns they share, and what makes them unique. We’ll name the personas and refine them as we discover more about your users, ultimately searching for what motivates them. 

If we sense a disconnect between your organization and your audience, we may also complete an empathy map. We’ll brainstorm each persona’s hopes and what they’re afraid of to put your team squarely in your users’ shoes. 

You’re driven by a worthy mission. And you’re never trying to make a quick buck. To succeed in that vital mission, you need—and want—to help people. Personas are a useful tool to understand how to help. 

3. Journey

During the Journey step, we’ll pinpoint problem areas along a user’s journey (how they get from point to point using your product) that can impede a successful user experience. Then we’ll mitigate these problems. We’ll also spotlight high points of the user journey to identify when users are most open to taking next steps with your organization. We’ll do both by completing a journey map. 

A journey map describes each interaction—from first contact through to conversion—a user can have with your ministry. It charts an ideal user’s relationship with your organization over time. 

This Discovery step will help your team grasp just how far-reaching the user journey is. It’s never about a single interaction. You must constantly think about how one touchpoint builds upon another. This holistic understanding of the user journey gives us a more complete picture of your project. 

4. Exploration

With your journey map in hand, it’s time to brainstorm how to facilitate each step on the map for the best possible user experience. This exercise tends to be the most divergent in the sense that we encourage everyone to share their ideas without attempting to align right away. We want all those ideas on the table so we can eventually converge on the perfect solution. 

To get to that perfect solution, we leverage charrettes and dot voting. Your team will get a stack of paper and sharpies to sketch key moments from the user journey map, like when an individual is ready to learn more about your organization. You’ll then sketch possible solutions. 

Each solution sketch will go on display and dot voting will begin. Your stakeholders can place dot stickers on elements of the sketches they find worthy of further exploration. We’ll rinse and repeat (sketches followed by dot voting) until the best solution(s) bubbles to the top. 

5. Product Backbone

The goal of Exploration is to tap into your team’s collective wisdom. The best solution often leads to your Product Backbone. 

Your Product Backbone is essentially a features list. What does your website or app actually need to include? What do we need to build in order to achieve your vision, reach your goals, and stay true to your mission? 

Settling on your Product Backbone is the convergence of everything we’ve done to this point. Your Product Backbone will be actionable—the next step is execution—so rest assured all of this Discovery work is worthwhile. 

How to Customize Discovery for Your Ministry  

Despite the fact that we outlined the basics of the Discovery phase here, there’s so much more than meets the eye. And it’s not a wholly prescribed process. 

When you work with Agathon, we customize Discovery to meet you where you are. That means we’ll conduct some of the activities detailed above. But we’ll likely add different exercises to perfectly suit your organization’s needs. 

Our team has unique expertise completing Discovery sessions just for ministries. We have a wealth of knowledge on your niche and target audience we’ll tap into to advise the best possible Discovery. 

Measuring success as a for-profit company is pretty straightforward. At the end of the day there should be, well, profit.

But if your organization’s primary reason for existence isn’t to make money but to make change, how do you know you’re executing your strategy well? In this article, I’m going to outline a simple framework for measuring digital ministry success. This framework will help you think through what’s important and how you can measure progress.

Ways to measure digital ministry success

Hopefully, we can all agree that setting measures of success is important:

• Numbers represent the individual lives impacted by the ministry and the work you do. That’s worth measuring and celebrating.
• Measuring progress holds the ministry as a whole—as well as the individuals serving within the organization—accountable to the goal.
• This accountability is part of stewarding donations well.

Financials

For-profit companies measure things like revenue and profit, while nonprofits tend to focus on donations. Organizations that rely on donations to operate can measure the number of individual donors, the average donation amount, the number of recurring donors, the frequency of donations, or the longevity of a supporter.

The flip side of measuring the donations coming in is measuring the impact of those donations. How many people do you serve? How far can you stretch each dollar? How much is going to operating expenses?

Interactions

For digital ministry, interactions are an accessible measurement. For example, a broadcast ministry can measure the number of videos watched, audio sermons listened to, or articles read per user. Organizations can look at data such as the number of unique visitors to a site, their average time on the page, or their bounce rate. And others might measure how many visitors sign up for a user account or how frequently users visit the site.

Progress through the user journey

Another option is to measure progress through the user journey. Whether you have formalized the user journey using a tool such as a user journey map or simply have an idea of the steps your ideal user will take over time, use these milestones to measure progress through that journey.

For example, EveryCampus launched a prayer walk app in 2020 with a short-term goal of covering every college campus in the United States with prayer and a long-term goal of establishing gospel communities on each one.

For them, the user journey includes registering for a prayer walk, completing the prayer walk, continuing to pray for that college campus, becoming involved with campus ministry, and finally, leading a discipleship group on campus. Measuring how people move through each stage is an important part of evaluating your organization’s digital ministry success.

So which should you measure?

This is a sampling of the possibilities, not an exhaustive list by any means. But making it onto the list doesn’t mean it’s automatically the right thing to measure. Knowing what to collect is an important part of user research; knowing what to measure ensures you’re working toward executing your strategy well.

For example, user sessions on your website or a board that’s happy because your site redesign was inexpensive might be easy to measure—and even look impressive at first glance—but they don’t necessarily point to success for your organization.

A vision-based framework for digital ministry success

Instead of starting by looking at the things you can easily measure, start with a vision-based framework. To measure success, you must unpack why your organization exists in the first place. This has probably already been summarized in your vision or mission statement. I prefer to start with the vision statement because it’s focused on the organization’s desired future.

Breaking your vision statement down phrase by phrase helps you determine measurable outcomes for each phrase. This strategy works because it keeps a sharp focus on measuring what’s important. And it allows you to see where your ministry might be falling short in achieving that vision so you can create a strategy to improve. (Of course, if you find that you can’t measure the success of your vision statement, it might be worth redefining your vision to make it more concrete and measurable.)

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

Here is InterVarsity‘s vision statement. Even though it is aspirational and abstract, we can still use it to define and measure desired outcomes. I don’t know if these are the exact metrics they track, but I do know their digital strategy aligns well with their vision.

The purpose of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA
is to establish and advance
at colleges and universities
witnessing communities of students and faculty
who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord:
growing in love for God,
God’s Word,
God’s people of every ethnicity and culture,
and God’s purposes in the world.

The first step is to break the vision down into phrases:

The purpose of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA
is to establish and advance
at colleges and universities

This can be measured by audience size. That might include the number of schools with InterVarsity chapters, the number of staff, or the number of students InterVarsity serves.

They can also measure traffic to a website or email subscribers, but those numbers alone don’t satisfy this vision statement. Instead, dig deeper. Are there effective calls to action that draw interested visitors into chapter involvement or even to establish a new chapter? Tracking those response rates is a good way to know.

These are all measurable and are strong indicators that InterVarsity’s strategy is or isn’t working.

Moving on to the next phrase…

witnessing communities of students and faculty
who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord

This speaks of engagement. The audience is taking action by “witnessing” and “follow[ing].” Digging into periodic survey results can help measure this level of engagement, and they can also infer a bit by looking at performance metrics. Does the audience keep returning because of the value delivered? This can be measured through analytics such as logins and user sessions.

growing in love for God,
God’s Word,
God’s people of every ethnicity and culture,
and God’s purposes in the world.

Growth can be facilitated in many ways: relationships, mentoring, education, resources, etc. The last two, education and resources, are straightforward to measure. Are they providing resources to facilitate growth? Is anyone reading that content? How long are they spending with it? Are lives being changed? Measuring this is a bit more subjective but can be done through additional surveys or user interviews and looking for ways to quantify those results (e.g., using the classic “on a scale of 1 to 5” type question).

Compassion International

Let’s step through another example. Compassion isn’t an Agathon client, but this is still a solid example because of how well their online presence supports their mission.

Our mission is to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name.

Short and sweet! If you look at Compassion’s site, the focus is on pairing sponsors with individual children. The results are measured by the number of sponsored children who are spared from the worst of poverty because their daily needs are subsidized by donors. They also can measure number of donors, total donations, and donor retention rate.

Mercy Ships

Here’s another short and sweet example from Mercy Ships:

Mercy Ships uses hospital ships to transform lives and serve nations, one at a time.

There are many metrics Mercy Ships can use to see how well they’re achieving this vision: number of nations served or number of patients or procedures. This work, of course, relies on donor support. In addition to tracking the donor metrics outlined above, they could also measure average amount spent per patient.

Measurement leads to action

While measurement is an important part of growth and stewardship, you shouldn’t be measuring for the sake of the data. Instead, measure the items you plan to take action on. That’s why I recommend tying your measurement to your vision. This offers assurance that you’re looking at the right things.

But just as important as measuring is making a plan to improve and grow in each area. The action is what moves you closer to your goals and vision.

Now it’s your turn!

Go ahead and pull out your vision statement. Break it down into phrases. And brainstorm metrics for each one.

I’m a big fan of the design sprint phrase, “How might we…?” to help with this part. As an example, “How might we measure constituent engagement?” Your answers will be different than my examples above because your organization is different. This is not a case where one size fits all!

As you’re identifying areas to measure, keep looking back at your vision statement. The statement is the goal you’re working toward, and the things you’re measuring and setting goals around should support that vision.

When COVID-19 took hold in the U.S. back in March 2020, few of us understood how long and profound the impact would be. We’ll lock down, flatten the curve, and be close to normal by summer. We weren’t worrying about how to innovate during a global pandemic at that early stage.

Ha! My home state went back on full lock down again last week and it’s now clear we’re not going back to normal for a while. And when we do, normal will look different. I’ve shifted from trying to wait this out, to seeing the need for action and innovation right now.

My own journey started with mindsets, took a side trip through empathy, and landed on innovation. By sharing stories personal and professional, I’m hoping you’ll come to agree that right now is the time to innovate within your own organization.

A scarcity mindset

A scarcity mindset… is the belief that there’s never enough. This feeling can result in stress, anxiety and fear of missing out or not succeeding.

– Forbes.com

Spring break for my kids coincided perfectly with the early fog of the pandemic. They came home for the week and never went back, and our family began wrestling with what might come next. Step one: we needed provisions. I took inventory of our household, asking, “If we can’t leave home for a while, what should I buy now?” We were in fine shape with toilet paper but nearly out of salt. I added salt to my growing list, donned an old N95 mask, and went shopping.

I felt the first uneasy pang of anxiety when I found the entire baking aisle was already stripped clean. How does a national grocery chain run out of basics like flour, sugar—and most important for my list—salt? After three more stores, each with empty shelves, I was nearly panicky before recognizing I was letting a scarcity mindset drive me… over salt.

In reality, we had enough to eat, and we could feed ourselves even without salt. Remembering that shifted my entire perspective and helped me relax. (I did find salt two weeks later, before we ran completely out.)

That same anxiety can be seen in our work lives. Agathon partners with a variety of clients, some of whom have adjusted better than others to changes in budget, in communication, and in where and how they work.

We’ll start with an example of how a scarcity mindset drove one of Agathon’s clients to make a decision out of fear. This client sells physical goods online, and with careful, creative thinking could have broadened their reach during a time when demand was increasing. Instead, they felt an acute scarcity of options, so they closed their offices and sent everyone home for a month. There’s no guarantee they could have pivoted successfully; nevertheless, it was missed opportunity.

There is another way to act than from scarcity.

An abundance mindset

An abundance mindset [is when] a person believes there are enough resources and successes to enjoy themselves, as well as share with others. Those who possess an abundance mindset see opportunity for success to be plentiful. They’re happy, grateful and eager, and they carry the abundance viewpoint into their professional life as a platform to succeed in their careers. An abundance mindset is crucial for leaders to possess in difficult times to avoid stress and burnout. People with an abundance mindset believe that what you focus on grows, and this gives them the ability to foster even more success.

– Forbes.com

Scarcity is a real thing. Yet a scarcity mindset doesn’t have to define us.

Of course, my heart goes out to Agathon’s clients in the travel and events industries who took a haymaker to the head as their hard work and dreams have been destroyed. One client saw 97% of their revenue evaporate over a couple days. No amount of mindset can just fix that.

But many organizations, Agathon included, have been impacted less directly. Most of our largest projects continued as usual. When some clients paused projects, we seized the opportunity to finally attend to internal initiatives that had continually been brushed aside by “billable work.” There’s a saying we use all the time within our team to describe the problem of ignoring internal projects: “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” Finally, we could invest in ourselves! With a full slate of internal things to do, we haven’t had any layoffs; in fact, we’ve hired and are looking to do so again.

That’s Agathon. For most of our clients, scarcity has manifested itself as shrinking budgets. But choosing an abundance mindset prepared some of those clients to look for creative ways to survive, and even flourish, in the midst of a scarcity of options and budgets. The abundance mindset impacted our own work with clients in the automotive and publishing industries whose businesses had been impacted by the pandemic, as we asked the question: “Can we achieve 90% of what you need by customizing existing tools rather than building from scratch?” This resulted in the development of solid products at lower costs. We can still add that last 10% over time.

An abundance mindset isn’t some Jedi mind trick. An abundance mindset describes how we think about and solve the problems in front of us. Inevitably, those problems involve other people, each with problems of their own.

Empathy

Historically, the Agathon team doesn’t discuss world events. We do our work with professionalism and leave the rest to social media. This pandemic refused to be ignored though, as it impacts our organization and our work. Early in the crisis, one of our team members shared these thoughts with all of us:

I found myself yesterday apologizing for feeling mental slowness; I was really at a tough point, and I felt horrible–like I was letting down the whole team simply because my brain wasn’t operating at full capacity.

Then I thought about how everyone I’ve met at Agathon is a workhorse. You’re all freakishly talented, smart, capable, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And I think we’re all pretty hard on ourselves when we mess up in normal circumstances.

In this crazy time, my own mistakes (or lack of ability to juggle 20 balls at once) suddenly felt heavier than normal. It weighed on me because I thought I was letting others down. But then I realized: I’m probably not alone in this.

We’re not in the same world we were. All these changes take a toll, and we will make slip ups or have a harder time processing some times. Give yourselves grace. 🙂

The reminder that we’re all adjusting and coping was better than anything I could have said. (And if I can act like a proud dad for a second, our team has adjusted remarkably well.) It has also infused our work interactions with a fresh dose of empathy. We still expect the best from ourselves and our clients, while understanding the path may be a winding one.

Which brings us to my main point.

Innovate

Operating from a scarcity mindset is generally negative, but scarcity can be a force for positive change. One client of ours is a megachurch who took their services online. That’s not terribly unique. Thousands of churches have done the same, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are so many questions to ask about virtual church. How do you foster the sense of singing together? What’s the best way to plan for a tremendous surge in website traffic? How do you pass a virtual offering plate? How do we prevent people from getting lost in the cracks when you can’t see them each Sunday? Thoughtful innovation was key to navigating the path forward.

But what does the term innovation even mean? I like IDEO’s definition: “Innovation is the ability to generate and execute on new ideas. These ideas can be incremental, evolutionary, or revolutionary.” [emphasis added] Most of the changes made by the megachurch were incremental. They were novel ways of imitating familiar physical activities in a digital space.

Another of Agathon’s clients has chapters on colleges and universities across the country. Their entire operating model depends on physical presence. Yet the pandemic, and fear of irrelevance, pushed them to reimagine their core identity. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Innovate or die.”

This organization’s response was more evolutionary than incremental as they moved activities online and paired student leaders with mentors/coaches where appropriate. Instead of hunkering down and waiting COVID-19 out, they embraced the challenge and are thriving as a result. They innovated because they had to, and I expect they will operate in an improved hybrid/digital model even once physical presence is normal again.

I don’t have a personal example of revolutionary innovation… yet. You can be sure I’ll share when I do.

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Of course, innovating in the middle of a global crisis is easier said than done. All the “rules” have changed and the tactics that brought success in the past no longer work. How do you re-imagine a better future in the face of so many unknown and even unquantifiable problems? Few of the organizations we work with have the internal expertise to systematically and intentionally foster innovation. It’s not a muscle they’ve ever really needed.

That’s where we might help! We have a combined 149 years of experience helping organizations ask the right questions. We can help you discover innovative ways to serve users and achieve strategic goals. It will be uncomfortable and scary and exciting and invigorating … all at the same time.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to talk more about, please send me an email and we’ll schedule a call. The time to innovate is right now.