Amazon started a service called "Mechanical Turk" nearly five years ago (today it's still in 'beta'). The main idea behind the 'turk' service is that you can assign simple tasks to human workers in exchange for micropayments. It is named after a chess playing machine made by Wolfgang von Kempelen in the 18th century.
The reality of the revolutionary 'Turk' was that a human chess-player was hidden inside the machine ala "The Wizard of Oz". Perception and reality were two different things.
Amazon has found success in outsourcing small, "chunkable" tasks for pennies on the dollar of what a typical project might cost. It has also increased security since each job is chunked into hundreds if not thousands of small tasks that are nearly incoherent when taken as chunks.
A popular parable asks the question, "How do you eat an elephant?" with the response, "One bite at a time." Perhaps in the weekly tasks of ministry we could learn something from this kind of innovative thinking.
I don't know about you, but when Monday rolls around, Sunday starts looking like a huge elephant. As the weekend approaches, that elephant gets bigger and stinkier, especially if it's a rough week or I've procrastinated. But Sunday's coming – and the elephant must be eaten.
What in your weekly routine of creating media, distributing materials, or administrative duties could be "chunked" into lots of smaller pieces that almost anyone could do? Some interesting possibilities:
- Could bulletins or church newsletters be prepared in a shared document storage, with each person only creating maybe 1/4 to 1/8th of each page? With each volunteer/worker responsible for such a small component the work would take just minutes (seconds?). A final review would be up to the editor/secretary/pastor in charge of that operation (which also might be chunked!)
- What about message preparation? If you knew the topic, theme, focal text, etc – could this be shared in a closed network environment of trusted Bible teachers, other pastors, friends, etc – that all contributed small parts of the final message? If nothing else it could provide some interesting dialogue and new ideas flowing into each week's message.
- In person ministries could be eaten one bite at a time much easier as well. Instead of putting 100% of the burden of the nursery on one person's shoulders, what about separating out the individual jobs that need to be done and giving away the smaller tasks to qualified individuals. One person wipes down the toys each week. One person carries out the stinky diaper trash. Another checks the smoke detector batteries. No one person has to remember everything and each task is done to a higher degree of competence.
- What else could be eaten "one bite at a time" – share your idea in the comments below!
There are some free web tools that lend themselves to allowing this to work well on the internet. Google Docs is an obvious choice for secure document sharing and storage. Each person could add their ideas and the document would maintain it's integrity since it's never downloaded.
What tasks in your ministry could you separate or divide out into 10, 20, or 50 smaller tasks that could then be divided among many volunteers? Focus on how much easier it would be to ask someone to do a specific, small, but meaningful job that they completely understand in about two minutes of training, versus a mission-critical job that might take a long time to train on and even then might not be up to minimum standards.
And when the inevitable volunteer or staff turnover occurs the empty spot is easy to fill with someone available – rather than having a large learning curve to overcome. Remove the barriers. Make your ministry tasks bite-size. Eat the elephant.
Photo credit: Andy Baio of Waxy (Faces of Mechanical Turk)
I think that as ministers we all know that we should be doing this, but for some reason we keep trying to do it all on our own. Being a perfectionist, I fight this all of the time. We need to learn that even though it may not be done the exact way we would do the task, involving others allows them to share in blessing of God’s work.
Just this past month I finally gave up on trying to maintain our student ministry website all by myself. Because of this decision, I had to go with a website provider that was not my number one choice. I could not find a provider that was both affordable and allowed multiple administrators. This provider will still get the job done for a very small cost all the while letting many students from my youth group add/edit content. Making this one decision lifted a huge weight off of my shoulders.
Another area we can definitely use help in ministry comes when we utilize social media. Our facebook student ministry fan page posts a new Bible verse each day. I found a senior adult lady who checks her facebook every morning and asked her if she wouldn’t mind posting our verses. She is happy to do this because she is able to support our youth group her in own way.
The one piece of advice I would add is in the area of communication and training. Shame on us as the leaders when we don’t adequately train our volunteers or communicate clearly what is expected of them. We need set them up for success and not failure.
God meant for us to work together if we are every going to “eat the elephant.” Plus, you never know who just might have the spiritual gift of stinky diaper removal!
Those are some awesome examples. Do you mind sharing what company you went with for the youth website?
I think the facebook example is a perfect idea of how easy it is to include others (and one I’ve missed thus far). So I’m definitely going to borrow that idea. It’s easy to add an admin to a facebook fan page that could distribute the administration of updates etc.
And you’re right – training is vital. Because of the almost impossible matrix of personal, work, and school schedules I have begun experimenting with asynchronous learning models – like “online classes.” I think this may be a breakthrough for people with limited time but a desire to further their volunteer skills.
PS – I’m certain I don’t have the spiritual gift of stinky diaper removal.
In the end, I went with mychurchwebsite.net because they power our main church website and I was able to piggy-back some of the features we already have in place without paying for them on my youth group site. The cost is $99.00 a year with a one-time setup fee of $35.
I have been reluctant to use them because they are a little cookie-cutter with their templates. However, from seeing other youth group’s that use them I learned I can change the header for free to anything I would like. Also, by removing a few of the standard modules that come with the site, I have changed the appearance enough that it doesn’t exactly like everyone else in town.
I tried to learn CSS so I could use WordPress, but I was never able to spend enough time with it to become comfortable making changes to my site. I still plan on learning CSS in the future so options like WordPress would become a possibility, but I have more pressing issues that currently need my attention.
In the end, I came to realize that while I would like for my students to be the primary target for my website, I know that they would rather receive updates via text messages and facebook. However, my youth parents will check the site and I don’t have to have it as flashy for them to like it. Knowing my primary consumer determined the product I decided to provide.
Nice post.
Jason: Thanks for sharing – I have used mychurchwebsite in the past as well and I was generally pleased with their offering, except as you note the limitations and somewhat “cookie cutter” feel to their software. My chief argument was the lack of “plugins” or ability to upgrade to new and innovative web 2.0 tools. One of their staff contacted me at one point because I was pushing the limitations to the max of their software – they were using our site as a model!
I also know nothing about CSS – my knowledge stops with basic self-taught HTML. However I have learned some PHP but I only modify what others have written. The thing I love about WordPress as a CMS for websites is the ability to change the theme and instantly gain a new look for your site. I think this may be one of the harder concepts to grasp, but WordPress is very easy to customize with a new theme. The theme acts like new clothes – all the site content you’ve created remains but it looks completely new.
A favorite site of mine is Theme Forest – http://bit.ly/bUNWsG – they have very reasonable and well designed themes that are often highly customizable with a simple menu system.
Kem: Thanks – your post was much more creative on crowdsourcing – I’m thinking of starting to crowdsource my pizza delivery – pepperoni or hamburger? You decide hashtag #pizzadecision2010 ?