3 steps to having an effective giving strategy

Are you unsure whether your donations are accomplishing your God-given mission or not? Do you feel like your donations could make a greater impact than they are? I have good news for you:

They can.

This simple three step giving strategy helped us make 4,500 times the impact that our giving used to make. Now, I want to share this same strategy with you.

Let’s say that you use the IGSIS financial strategy we recommend and now you have money to give towards the causes and people you love. That’s awesome! Now what? How do you give it effectively?

The following is a tool that, in three simple steps, will help your giving be exponentially more impactful and rewarding.

1. Write out your personal mission statement.

Just like businesses and charities have mission statements, develop your personal mission statement. What is your mission? What are you passionate about? What has God put you here to accomplish? Which injustice makes you the most angry?

Personally, I hate poverty. I hate it, and I want to see extreme spiritual and physical poverty ended. That’s my mission because that’s the great commission of the Church and great commandment of Christ, to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19) and love our global neighbors like we would ourselves (Matt. 22:37-40). Currently, about half of the world still lives in extreme spiritual or physical poverty, with no access to the Gospel or the basic means of physical survival, and that ticks me off.

That’s my mission. What is yours?

2. Find the metric that measures your mission statement.

This may sound kind of nerdy, but this is a very important step. You can spend a lot of time and money trying to accomplish your mission but never know if it is actually making a difference. This will help you avoid that.

So, find a metric or data set that measures the problem that you’re trying to solve. That can be the percent of the world that lives in extreme poverty, the number of unreached people groups in South Asia, or the number of homeless in your city.

This step will also help you find the organizations who are addressing your mission and help you determine which of these organizations best improve the data that represents your mission.

So, for my mission to help end spiritual and physical poverty, there’s a group called the Joshua Project that measures global spiritual poverty, and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that the United Nations and University of Oxford use to measure extreme physical poverty. If I want to end spiritual and physical poverty, I need to find and fund the organizations who can best get these data sets down to zero.

Which leads me to the third and final step…

3. Find the organizations who can best accomplish your mission.

Find your mission partners. Who shares your mission and is most effectively improving the metrics and data that represent your mission?

A helpful way to find effective mission partners is using the acronym ‘MECC’. Effective partners are typically:

Metric-driven: They seek to improve measurable data and metrics.

Evidence-based: What they do is well studied and proven to work.

Cost-effective: They try to make the most sustainable impact per dollar.

Christ-centered: Either explicitly or implicitly.

Here’s a visual that might help you.

Once you complete this easy three step giving strategy, you can write out your giving portfolio to organize the organizations you want to give to in order to accomplish your goals. Write down how much you’re giving to who and why you’re giving that amount to that organization. What goal are they hoping to achieve with this money, and what’s the purpose for giving them this specific amount? How will they achieve your goal? What is their methodology? Is it sustainable? Are they transparent with their finances, their results, and even their mistakes? Can you hold them accountable?

For example, if your IGSIS financial strategy allowed you $10,000 to give this year, your giving portfolio could look like this:

If you want to give effectively towards accomplishing your mission, stop giving to organizations and start paying them. Spend money like crazy on the people and causes you love. Use the IGSIS financial strategy and this giving strategy to define your mission statement, and have a giving portfolio of partners and organization who best help you accomplish your mission.

If you use these tools, I believe it can help you not only give well, but also experience a more fulfilled and purposeful life.

Want to give effectively? Join us!

Join us in giving to The Collective Fund, our strategically managed pooled-giving fund. 100% of donations go to the high-impact programs in our portfolio. We do all of the research, evaluating, granting and monitoring of the programs for you. Every month, we’ll send you an impact report with portfolio updates, content and financials.

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Author: Lane Kipp, ThM

Lane is the founder of All Access, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping end spiritual and physical poverty by helping you give effectively. Lane is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary with a Master of Theology (ThM) degree and a graduate of Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Ocean Engineering. Lane and his family live between Dallas and Fort Worth.

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