Ideas are funny things, sometimes. A ministry like CSC requires lots of ideas. Ideas about how to best care for the kids, including how to educate, discipline, motivate, encourage and counsel them. We need ideas for planning for the future and for staff recruitment. Those kind of ideas usually come from lots of thinking, praying and collaborating.
But we also need ideas for how to promote the ministry: newsletter articles, layout ideas, color choices, website design, banquet themes, video topics and editing techniques. The creative side of running an organization. For a ministry like ours, we must run our ideas through several filters. Is it a true depiction of the ministry? Is it real and not glitzy? Does it honor God? Will it appeal to our supporters, who constitute a variety of ages and backgrounds?
Sometimes ideas come right to me, as if dropped on my head by an angel. Other times they come very slowly and painfully. That's particularly true when it comes to recurring things like banquets and newsletters. How can we present things that are fresh and exciting? Since the nature of our ministry doesn't change much, even though our children do, it is challenging to find different aspects of CSC to present, or different ways to talk about the same things. Because although some of our donors are new, many have been around for a long time. Some have been with us since the very beginning of the ministry.
At the current time we are working on a whole new look for our website. We have recently instituted changes to our newsletter format and are now offering an e-news option. We are looking into doing some podcasting and putting more video on our website. And we are thinking about better ways to communicate with our Foster Friends sponsors.
We need waves of new and fresh ideas all the time. And we need to surrender creative control of CSC to the One who created the universe from nothing.
