Episode 008: Strategy Map — Stewardship Perspective

Key Takeaways:

• The stewardship perspective of the strategy map encompasses your finances, physical assets (assets you can touch), and intangible assets (assets you can’t touch such as your website and social media presence).

• There are two main stewardship strategies:

  • Grow your revenue by finding new donors and by increasing donations from current donors.

  • Make your current revenues and assets more productive by reducing direct expenses (costs associated with running your programs) and indirect expenses (costs you would have regardless of whether you were running any programs) and by using the assets you already have more efficiently.

• What are your next steps?

  • List every way you receive money and every physical and intangible asset you have.

  • Brainstorm ways that you can grow your revenue and increase productivity by using the ways you already receive money and the assets you already have.

  • From your brainstorm ideas, decide on 3-5 objectives that directly support your beneficiary/stakeholder objectives, being careful to balance the growth and productivity approaches.

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Transcript

Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

What does the Stewardship Perspective Cover?

Today we're going to be talking about something that's a little bit of a specialty of mine as a CPA. We're going to be talking about the stewardship perspective of the strategy map, which entails your finances but it also includes your physical assets and your intangible assets. So finances are pretty obvious, that's your money, and the physical assets should be fairly obvious if you have a building or or a vehicle or any kind of something that you can touch, and intangible assets -- we're getting more and more of those -- and intangible assets are things like your website or your social media platforms if you use those and also it can be your... if you have any media. Like, if you have videos or pictures or something like that, those are assets as well. So when we're discussing a stewardship perspective, we're talking about how we can best use the assets, the money and the physical and intangible assets that we have, in order to support the objectives that we've just created last week for the beneficiary and stakeholder perspective.

So what we're trying to do this week is we're trying to come up with objectives that will help us achieve the objectives that we just created for the beneficiary and stakeholder objectives. So the question we need to ask ourselves is: what do we need to do to steward the assets that we have in order that we can best serve our beneficiaries and stakeholders?

Revenue Growth

So there's two approaches that you can take when you are looking at maximizing the finances and the assets that you have. The first one is revenue growth, which is just a fancy way of saying, "figure out how to get more money coming in." So one way you can do that is pretty obvious: it's to bring in new money from new donors or new projects. And the second one is to bring in more money from your current donors. Now, revenue growth path is the much more difficult one because usually you're trying to figure out where the money's coming from anyway and a lot of people feel tapped out and all that kind of thing. And it's harder to come up with new people to bring money in or to get money out of your current donors than it is to go the second route.

Increase Productivity

So the second route is productivity. And this is the best approach to take if you're in a pinch and you need to figure out the best way to use your current assets right now.

So there's two approaches with the productivity approach. One is to reduce your direct and indirect expenses. So your direct expenses are anything that you have to put out in order to have your programs. So let's say, for example, you are running a Sunday school program. You need materials to run that program. You might need some money for snacks, you might need access to some audio/video equipment, anything having to do with things that are actually being used during a program that you're putting on, that as a direct expense. An indirect expense is stuff that you typically would have to pay for anyway whether you have any programming going on or not. So, for example, insurance will be an indirect expense. You have to have insurance. If you don't have it, you should probably think about getting it! You have to have insurance. Electricity can be an indirect expense. Depending on how you look at it, your office supplies can be an indirect expense. Now, it could be a direct expense. When you're talking about Sunday school, you need to have some stuff printed off so that could be a direct expense, but your indirect expense might be the cost of your photocopier or the cost of the people who are doing the photocopier work if you have somebody who specifically is hired for that purpose.

And another way to look at productivity is to figure out how to use the assets you have more efficiently. So I'll use a intangible asset as an example. So let's say you have a website. How can you use that website more efficiently in order to get the most out of it that you can when it comes to your finances? Well, for example, if you don't have a clear place where people can donate online, that may be a way that you can use the asset of your website more efficiently to make it clear to people you can come to our website and donate and here's the button that you click... and make it as easy as possible for people to find that and to actually go through the process of donating to your organization.

Another way for physical assets, let's say you have a building but you're only using it one or two days a week. Is there a way that you can use that building more efficiently by having more programs running out of it during the week or by changing up how you have the building arranged to make it more user friendly for whatever programs you have going on right now? So maybe you could put something in a smaller room and then run another program out of the bigger room that that used to be used for. So thinking about reconfiguring your physical space, how can you best use your physical space. Or, if you want to throw out some crazy ideas, maybe you don't need as much physical space as you have currently. Maybe you actually need to downsize and go to something that's smaller or that's laid out differently or that is in a different location from where you are right now, somewhere that where you can be more effective.

Striking a Balance Between Growth and Productivity

So when you're talking about maximizing your assets and figuring out how to best steward those assets so they're most effective, the two approaches are revenue growth and productivity. And you want to be very careful that you don't emphasize one over the other. The one that people tend to emphasize because it's typically the easiest to work with and the best if you're... if you need to do something about your finances quickly, is the productivity route of reducing your costs and using your assets more efficiently. But you want to be careful that you don't accidentally reduce your costs so much that you hamper the growth and the opportunities that you can take on as an organization. You want to be sure that you're balancing making your assets as productive as possible with increasing the revenues that are coming in either from new donors or from your current donors.

Next Steps (Plus Brainstorming Tips)

So this is how I would suggest that you go about figuring out your objectives for the stewardship perspective. And it's always important to remember that you're trying to figure out what you need to do to steward your assets in order to support the objectives that you created for your beneficiaries and stakeholders. They have to feed in directly. You have to have a direct link between the objectives that you set out for your beneficiaries and stakeholders and these stewardship objectives that you're creating this week.

So what I would suggest that you do is you make a list of all of your revenue streams -- everywhere where you get money from, whether it's regular donations, whether it's occasional donations, whether it's from your website, from special projects, from whatever -- like, every single one that you can think of. You may need to discuss this with the person doing your bookwork, your treasurer or your CFO, because they probably know all the different places and you may not actually realize everywhere where the money is coming from. But do that and also make a list of all of your physical assets like your buildings, your vehicles, anything that you have, and your intangible assets like your websites, your social media, any archives that you may be able to pull from, videos and photos and brochures that have already been created, any of that intangible stuff that you can take advantage of when you're moving things forward in your organization.

So after you have a list of all of your revenue streams and all of your physical and intangible assets, then if you have a team, sit down with them and brainstorm every way that you can increase your revenue and productivity from each revenue stream and asset. And, when we're brainstorming, no idea is off limits. Even the craziest idea when you're talking about brainstorming can trigger something in somebody else that is probably a more sensible idea that you can actually use in order to increase your revenues or increase your productivity from what you currently have right now. I've been in brainstorming sessions where people have been kind of judgy and that definitely does not help you come up with some ideas. Sometimes the crazier the idea is, the better because it gets people unstuck from the old way of thinking, the old way of doing things. If they throw something crazy out there, people are like, "Oh, okay. Well, I can throw out my crazy idea that I'm thinking of" that actually might, in fact, be sensible. So make sure that when you're doing your brainstorming, you make it clear and you enforce that no idea is off limits, no idea is too crazy to discuss or to mention.

Then after you've figured out every way that you can think of to increase your revenues and increase your productivities from your stream of revenues that you currently have and your assets, then look through all those ideas and choose the objectives that you want to do with your finances -- probably between three and five and do your best to balance that out between revenue growth and productivity, making the assets you currently have more productive -- choose the objectives that best support the beneficiary and stakeholder objectives that you've already created from last week.

So remember the question that you're asking yourself: How can we use our finances, how can we best steward our finances in our assets in order to achieve the objectives that we've set out when it comes to our beneficiaries and stakeholders? And the direct line between those should be fairly obvious. When you're thinking about connecting any of these objectives that you're making in your stewardship perspective into your beneficiary and stakeholder perspective, it should be fairly clear: if we increase revenue in this way, then that's going to help this objective or, if we become more productive by using our assets better, this will help this objective. And they can help more than one objective. It doesn't have to be one to one, but you need to make sure that every objective is connected to at least one of the beneficiary and stakeholder objectives that you created last week.

On Our Next Episode

So on next week's episode, we're going to discuss the internal processes of your organization and how they can support the stewardship objectives that you're creating this week and the beneficiary and stakeholder objectives that you created last week. It's one thing to know how you want to help the people that your organization works with and how you're going to get the finances and assets going so that that can take place. But you also need to have some set internal processes so that you know that your organization is going to run as smoothly as possible, which will also support your productivity and your ability to take advantage of different revenue streams that you may find yourself having access to. So I look forward to discussing that with you next week.

Thank-you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast (at) ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai