Date: August 27, 2021
This week, we are looking at the new initiatives TryTank is launching to get more people involved in innovation. We have looked at our experiment managers and our new Innovation Hubs. Today, we’ll finish off by looking at our new Try Dollars program.
Here’s a bit of good news: there is no shortage of good innovative ideas in our Church. But many congregations simply don’t have even a few extra hundred dollars to try something out. TryTank hopes to help. Part of our framework is to develop the minimum viable prototype (“MVP”) of new ideas. In other words, what’s the minimum (and least expensive) thing we can try to get an indication if something will work?
For example, if you’re thinking of opening a coffee shop at the church to raise money for missional work, you can test out the concept of a coffee shop by renting a coffee cart and seeing if there’s a market. Likewise, if you want to test out a new innovative service, instead of hiring staff and just adding it to the weekly calendar, what if it’s tried as a one-time event? Then all you might need are some dollars for musicians and advertising.
We hope that the process will also help teach congregations who follow our work how they too can develop their own MVPs for new ideas. We will set up a special page on our website so that folks can send us their ideas on a rolling basis.
The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija
Director, TryTank