vango ventures
What's Your #1
Organizational Goal?
Of course, finances come to mind, but what impact are you making?
What's one thing that will move your organization forward?
What's one thing stopping your org from moving forward?
Which organization do you want to grow?
We specialize in helping you move forward quickly
Helping Your Organization
Make a Difference
Are you more likely to double your revenue through strategy or marketing?And which approach is more timely and cost effective? We want to help you double your revenue, double your enrollment, or double your effectiveness.After a couple of conversations, we'll identify the one or two action steps that are going to net you the greatest return.You don't have to chose between strategy and marketing, but I've worked with many organizations where there's not a clear strategy nor a clear marketing plan.Simply trying to generate more revenue is not a strategy, and often leads to mission-drift and less revenue down the road.Let's have a conversation about defining your strategy to double your effectiveness.
Mission-Driven Organizations
What's a mission-driven organization? People who are working together to solve a problem. These people may take the form of a nonprofit, a church, a social enterprise, or a corporation, but it's the mission that defines them not the building in which they meet or tax code they file under.What are high-impact results? First, let me say it's important that your organization generate revenue and funding, and I help you do that quickly and sustainably. However, revenue by itself is not world-changing result. Solving problems and transforming lives (both inside and outside your organization) are high-impact results. Changing the world and doing it at scale is high-impact results.Whether you run a college, direct a nonprofit, or are changing the world on a mission field...if you're asking people for money you have to be solving someone's problems.My goal is to help you be the best at solving those problems, and help with all the strategy, marketing, organizational development that effectively gets your solution to market.
© Troy Van Go. All rights reserved.
Thank you
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Increase Your University's Enrollment, Fundraising, and Impact
Today, higher ed is caught in a very dynamic space between old and new worlds. What's the best way to move forward and drive enrollment?
Colleges and universities are vital and important institutions.People go to college for education, but that also includes character formation, discipleship, worldview, and networking.The cost of higher ed is increasing. This makes the value proposition of going to college more complicated. Convincing students and families to make a six-figure investment can be a hard sell.And what are people getting for their money? Many colleges are still selling a traditional, residential college experience. But that does not translate well to commuter students, adult ed, or online classes (which now form the majority of students).With some notable exceptions, most private colleges have been struggling for the past decade. This has led administrators to cast about for solutions. Change leadership, add some online classes, build a new clock tower, and mostly, do more and more and more marketing.All these things may helpful or necessary. But more often they are costly experiments and they do not lead to a sustainable increase in enrollment.Each college is unique and each college will require a tailored approach. But, in general, there are a couple of key tactics that all colleges will benefit from.
Focus on your distinctives.
Focus on your distinctives.It seems ironic that colleges intentionally become less distinctive in their marketing. The marketing focus becomes educational programs. All the marketing verbiage becomes, "we're just like other colleges".In today's world, education is not a distinctive. All colleges offer the same degrees. All the course content is ubiquitous across the web.What is distinct about your college is its history, its heritage, its worldview, the kind of student it is creating.That is the actual value proposition. Reducing everything to program and cost reduces your college experience to a commodity. In the commodity business, someone else is always cheaper and easier.Focus on your distinctives.
Focus on your audience.
Focus on your audience.Your audience is not everyone in the world. Nor is your audience everyone in American. Nor is your audience every high schooler.Your main audience is the people who already know you. Alumni, current students, student families, student networks.In any business, 80% of your new customers will come from existing customers. Students who are having a great time at your college will recruit other students. Alumni who are proud of their college will recruit family and friends.Most of your focus should be on the people who already know and love your college. However, most colleges spend about 80% of their marketing on strangers. They actively overlook their network and focus on strangers who do not know your college. The number of touches required to recruit strangers is an order of magnitude more than the number of touches to recruit from your existing network.Focus on the people who already know and love you.
Focus on the experience.
Focus on the experience.Maybe more than most organizations, colleges tend to be broken into little departments. The departments have different rules, goals, and . Athletics, academics, and administrators all view the college experience differently. Registrars, finance, student life all operate independently of each other. Marketing and fundraising don't communicate much.It makes sense that each department is focused on one thing. But this often leads to overlapping work, competing agendas, and lack of synergy.The main problem is that it results in poor student experience. Every student has to navigate each department separately. Most departments are not focused on customer experience. Therefore a majority of the student and family experience is spent hassling with bureaucracy of the college.The registrar cannot talk to finance, finance does not talk to enrollment, academics does not talk to any of them. So the student has to manage each department and interaction separately and unpleasantly. Because it is easier for the college.Focus on the student experience. Make it easier for the students and the families. Make it seamless. Make it enjoyable. This is far and away the best marketing you can do.
Growing Church Growth
The secret?
Create programs that lead to development, not growth.
What is growth?
What is growth?For the purposes of this discussion, let's use a pretty straightforward definition of growth: more.Last year we had 100 people at our church, and this year we have 200 people at our church, we can say our church has experienced growth.A community of people is an organism. Paul points out in I Cor 12 that we are a body. And he's not using a metaphor. We aren't "like a body", we are a body. Bodies grow from infancy to adulthood. Bodies grow from smaller to larger. Bodies grow from simple to complex. Bodies grow. As we progress from infancy to adulthood, we don't have to try to grow, we grow naturally.Here's a biological definition: Growth is the irreversible change in size of cells and plant organs due to both cell division and enlargement.So, your church, your small group, your core group, your ministry can experience growth via division and multiplication.However, without development that growth will not be effective.
What is development?
If growth is getting larger, development is getting more functional.The simple definition is: "development is the progression from earlier to later stages in maturation." The key word here is maturation.If your church was 1000 people last year, and 2000 people this year, your church has grown by 100%. But did your church experience development and / or maturation?
Growth & Developement
The rise of generic mega-churches demonstrates that getting a crowd is neither that difficult nor particularly divine.
At few years ago there was a statistic that large churches will churn up to 80% of their congregation every 18 months.That's a lot of people. That means these churches aren't engaging 80% of the people who want to be engaged.
Missions & Outreach
There are 3.2 billion people who have not heard the gospel.
Missionaries go around the world to reach people with the message of Jesus.Some missionaries are full-time church planters. Some bring the message through vocational work. Some missionaries still live in the neighborhoods they were born in.Here's what most missionaries have in common: a sending agency that supports them. Missionaries who head out with sending agencies have a greater likelihood of accountability in their language and culture acquisition, in their marriages, and in the general work of the ministry.Be it gospel presentation, discipleship of new believers, quality of Bible translation, or actual growth of churches—it’s always beneficial to have seasoned missionaries evaluating your work.The rise of new technologies has made communication and transferring funds more accessible to the missionaries and their support. At the same time, churches and sending agencies are navigating new relationships. Churches may see sending agencies as redundant. Or, in order to raise funds, sending agencies may feel compelled to re-frame their work and results in more nonprofit terms of sanitation, jobs, and finance.Missions organizations are vital to recruiting new missionaries and supporting existing missionaries.The missionary organization of the future will 1) successfully train apostolic workers, 2) partner with churches to lead and train them in missions and missions support, 3) receive and train new missionaries into the field, and 4) continue to be a witness to the world as pursing kingdom results.Taking the gospel to a lost world is the highest of mandates. Maintaining healthy and vital missions organization into the next century is central to fulfilling that mandate.Missionaries need to navigate their cultural contexts, effectively minister the gospel, and side-step cultural traps and syncretism. In the same way, today's missionary organizations must successfully engage their church audiences and missionary supporters in a way that trains, educates, and multiplies kingdom results.
The role of missions organizations are more vital than ever. But their role is also under more pressure than ever.
The missionary organization of the future will 1) successfully train apostolic workers, 2) partner with churches to lead and train them in missions and missions support, 3) receive and train new missionaries into the field, and 4) continue to be a witness to the world as pursing kingdom results.Taking the gospel to a lost world is the highest of mandates. Maintaining healthy and vital missions organization into the next century is central to fulfilling that mandate.Missionaries need to navigate their cultural contexts, effectively minister the gospel, and side-step cultural traps and syncretism. In the same way, today's missionary organizations must successfully engage their church audiences and missionary supporters in a way that trains, educates, and multiplies kingdom results.
Let's talk about increasing the impact of your organization.Reach out to today to start a conversation.
Changing the World
with your nonprofit
Your Mission is Unique.Down the road from me, there's an organization that delivers educational books to people who don't have access to educational books. It started about ten years ago in a publishing city where there was a surplus of books. A local educator had been overseas teaching and knew someone who had book connections. Calls were made, books were collected, some initial shipments were made, lives were changed. Ten years later it’s a million-dollar operation.Today this mission is a unique network of people who form this organization, it's vendors and intermediaries, and the people it serves. This book organization has a unique mission, a unique heritage, and unique way this problem is being solved. Even though there are some other organizations who do something similar, there's not another organization like it.In Phoenix, AZ, there's a small college the reaches out to Native American students on the reservations. This organization started over sixty years ago, long before Pell Grants and school loans and diversity efforts. That means they were reaching out to Native American students long before there were channels for helping these students. Helping these students requires more than providing marketing and some admissions reps. It means providing wrap-around services that include working with the students, parents, extended family, and tribal leaders.Whether it's homeless shelters, small colleges, Native American economic development, colleges, foodservice, or whatever else- your mission matters. The origins of your organization are grounded in solving a problem and meeting a need. Your organization exists to change lives.The uniqueness of your mission matters.
The DNA of your organization explains who you are, why you're here, the people who form your network, and the people who are affected by you.
What this means is that your organization can't simply be reduced to profits, losses, and cash flow. Of course, these are mechanics of your business, but they're not your business. Much like the oil, gas, and exhaust are the mechanics of your car – but they're not your car. And the mechanics aren't where you're going.Your mission is important because of the people it helps inside and outside the organization. You need someone who understands your business and has the insight to look at it from all the angles, to understand some of the archaeology, to see how it impacts lives. It's precisely your heritage and passion that has kept you into them game this far. That's something to build on and something to go forward on.Managing the missionLet's take all those good things and focus on the one or two things that can move your forward. And possible the one or two things that are holding you back. Sometimes that means separating the idiosyncrasies and quirks from actual DNA of your organization.DNA is true you who is helping people and solving problems.Quirks can be the fact that you still use Windows 95 because you haven't had an IT person to help. Or the fact that the office manager actually functions as the COO because they've been there for over 20 years. Or thatDNA is not the quirks, feelings, or values your organization has developed over the years. The DNA of the organization is demonstrated in how it solves problems and helps other people. This is the mission of your organization, "Solving This Problem." Your mission isn't, "We have values".Staying on mission can be difficult to do, especially the longer you stay in business. The problems change, the mission creeps, the decisions start being driven more by finances than by ideas.Staying on mission and getting back to mission are the core tasks of leadership. It's your mission that makes you unique and it's your mission that is going to make you sustainable over the long haul. And no, your mission is not your mission statement...(at least it's typically not. Most mission statements talk about the company values and the company goals; rarely do they these statements talk about the problems they solve or the people they impact). This is why many of the people in your organization can tell you the mission statement but they would be hard-pressed to tell you the mission.Your organization has a unique mission, re-articulate it, get back to it, double down on it. This the quickest way to funding and sustainability.
How Vango Ventures can help.Let's spend an hour and identify what makes your mission unique, what makes it sustainable. Then write down on a piece of scrap paper the two things you should stop doing and the two things you should start doing that will get your organization to the next level.Getting started is really that easy: two hours and some scrap paper. That isn't to say we don't have a lot of other tools, processes, and analytics that help. But these are tools. The first tool is identifying the uniqueness of your mission.