Setting Big Goals
It’s important to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) regardless of the type of your organization. A KPI is a metric you measure to ensure that your activities are leading you toward achieving your vision. In ministry, it’s even more important to do this as you are stewarding resources that people have entrusted to you to achieve a vision that aligns with their heart.
For most ministries, the goal is to see lives transformed by Jesus Christ. For GMO, we hope that seekers’ lives will be transformed by being presented the Gospel, indicating they’ve prayed to receive Christ, connecting with an online missionary to be discipled, interacting with discipleship content, and eventually connecting to local Christian community. This leads us to the natural KPI’s of Gospel Visits, Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and On the Ground Connections.
Over the past eleven years, we’ve seen several shifts in technology and marketing. For instance, when we began most of our seekers were using a desktop computer and typing in a search query in Google as they sought to answer deep questions about themselves, the universe, and their place within it. As we fast-forward to the present day, people are accessing the Internet from any screen – their mobile device, tablets, laptops, televisions, and watches! In addition, we’ve learned that in order to reach the world, we have to interrupt a person’s day by using display advertising on websites as opposed to search queries only.
These changes in technology and marketing have affected how people use technology. Consider yourself and how you engage with content online – you probably are consuming massive amounts of information in short pieces, rather than taking in a lot at one time. Also, when you consider “the world,” there are major chasms between the technology available in the developing world and the developed world. To best serve all device types and capabilities, GMO utilizes the “lightest” websites possible. This is based on the premise that if a website cannot load on a device because it has too many graphics, etc, then we will have lost an opportunity to share the gospel with that seeker.
In 2013 GMO adopted a strategy of “opening the flood gates,” driving for the lowest cost per gospel visit while we work to reach everyone on Earth multiple times with the gospel. After following this approach for approximately 18 months, our leadership team conducted a review of the strategy and determined that we could make a bigger kingdom impact by adopting a more balanced approach.
During this time, we also began tightening the definition around some of our main metrics, such as “gospel visits,” “indicated decisions,” and “new contacts.” In order for GMO to confirm that we have shared the gospel, we have placed a code at the bottom of the web page, which tells us that the gospel has been presented only when it renders on a seeker’s device as opposed to when it starts to download. When a person indicates a decision for Christ, we are not assuming a salvation. What we are assuming is that the seeker has indicated they are beginning their journey with Christ. And finally, for an individual to count as a new contact, they must submit a legitimate form through one of our websites. Through technology, we have been able to eliminate “bad submissions” from our numbers, which has helped provide our 6,000 volunteer Online Missionaries with “warmer” leads for discipling.
If you were to review our metrics over the past three years, what would you see? At first, there would be a decline in overall gospel visits, indicated decisions, and discipleship numbers. But upon further review, you would see that with fewer dollars, GMO has been able to stretch those funds for a greater kingdom impact than before. The proof is that with spending fewer dollars, we are seeing a higher percentage of Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and New Contacts. This means that each gospel visit is netting a higher amount of engagement downstream.
