Everyone has had embarrassing moments and one of my worst involved playing a Sunday morning slide show that celebrated diversity and a old Windows 3.0 graphics card that could only support 256 colors.
It wasn’t pretty.
At that point, our church hadn’t spent hours discussing what the “hitting the mark” for that slideshow was.
But, after the fact? We all knew:
We missed it. Big time.
We also had a pretty convincing reason to upgrade our existing equipment…
So, What’s the Bullseye?
In our weekly 8BIT meeting of awesomeness, we read Andy Stanley’s Making Vision Stick book through the lens of churches & technology. This caught my attention:
State it Simply – People don’t remember paragraphs, they remember sentences.
Wow. That smacked me right in the face.
Some days it’s pretty cut-and-dry when you miss the target with technology (like my graphics card debacle). We don’t need paragraphs of information to know whether we’ve hit the target – it’s glaringly obvious that a miss has happened when equipment fails or websites go down. But others, the lines aren’t quite as distinct. How do you know you’ve hit the target?
Many times, your videos or sites act as a supporter to your church’s overall vision, but is that enough? And the more important the website, software, or video is the more we need a concise statement that acts as a way to measure where the bullseye on the target is.
What’s the Big Deal?
The reason I’m so adamant about doing the hard work upfront of creating or adopting short, impactful statements that stick is because no one wants to spend their energy or spin their wheels on software or websites only to find out later they missed the mark.
And the shorter and more memorable? The better.
For Example…
Here’s a few statements I’ve heard around the “video & web tech” watercooler that I’ve adopted:
Start with what connects. Work towards what’s cool.
North Point – It doesn’t matter if the video or website’s cool if it doesn’t support your church’s mission.
What we are familiar with, we cease to see.
Kem Myer – Has anyone been looking at your work with fresh eyes? What could be stale on that website that you’re missing?
Good is the enemy of great.
Jim Collins on excellence. What can you add to that design or creation to make it pop?
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Brad Bretz on pacing yourself. Don’t try to eat a Thanksgiving-sized design project in one bite!
And…
Now, it’s a lot easier to tell if I want to do a video “just because it’s awesome”, work too long on some code, or am not willing to submit my work to an honest critique, these pointed statements let me know that I’m starting to miss the mark.
And possibly some deeper personal evaluation needs to be done.
What About You?
When you’re developing or creating in the church-tech space, what metrics do you use to measure success? We’re always super-interested in how people define the wins….and it’s important to do!
Leave a comment below!
Kyle Reed says
Great post Andrew. I love all the quotes and resources from different leaders. Good stuff.
Graham Brenna says
Great post man! Love the examples you used. When I’ve been creating stuff in the tech realm for ministry it’s pretty much all been a win because we haven’t upgraded the way we do things for a long time. Moving to Google Apps was an obvious win because it solved two big issues that we were dealing with as well as added a bunch more functionality that we didn’t have.
Issue #1 – Outlook files were were too large on our server because staff would never delete their stuff.
Issue #2 – When our server would go down (used to be frequently) there was no easy way for staff to check their email.
The additional functionality that came with Google Apps was the implementation of using Google Calendars for personal collaboration as well as our official church website calendar. Google Docs for document collaboration. Web-based email inbox (I don’t allow staff to use a local client anymore).
Other areas that become “WINS” for me are when the user (congregation/staff) are able to do their job more effectively by using technology. Our recent database upgrade allows them to create their own query fields for event registration that they are able to export to excel and sort by field. WIN!
Andy Darnell says
Andrew
I’ve been trying to work within my organization to celebrate wins and have failed most of the time. We have very muddy waters when it comes to defining what our wins are.
I guess I don’t have anything radical to say, but want to thank you for the encouragement for me to get back up off the ground and start leading again.