Authenticity in Content through Grace and Truth

Achieving Authenticity in Content through Grace and Truth

Are you a Christian content creator struggling to find the balance between grace and truth in your work? Discover the secrets to effective content creation that engages with authenticity and impact. But what happens when your audience demands more truth than grace? Find out in this suspenseful trailer that leaves the main character facing a difficult decision with no resolution in sight.

Clayton Groh is the Director of Operations at Time of Grace Ministries. With a background in data tech and backend business analytics, Clayton brings a wealth of expertise to his role. His journey to Time of Grace began when he was recruited for his technical skills, which he quickly realized could be applied to a higher purpose. As the Business Intelligence Manager, Clayton is responsible for gathering and analyzing data from various channels, such as Facebook and YouTube. By leveraging these insights, he helps the ministry make informed decisions when it comes to advertising and fundraising strategies. Clayton's technical prowess and dedication to using data for the greater mission of spreading God's word make him an invaluable asset to Time of Grace.

This is Clayton Grow's story:

Clayton Grow, the Business Intelligence Manager for Time of Grace Ministry, has a unique journey that led him to his current role. With a background in engineering and a longing for a deeper sense of purpose, Clayton found himself drawn to the world of Christian media. It was through his involvement in his hometown church's worship band that he connected with Time of Grace and discovered the power of using his technical skills for a ministry. Since joining the organization in 2017, Clayton has been instrumental in leveraging data to make informed decisions and drive impactful content creation. He understands the importance of balancing grace and truth in content and is constantly seeking ways to engage with authenticity and impact. As he delves deeper into the world of multimedia ministry, Clayton's focus is on nurturing deeper relationships with both the audience and their relationship with God. Through his work, Clayton embodies the mission of Time of Grace, sharing God's word with as many people as possible while embracing the power of technology and data-driven insights.

In today’s digital era, the role of business intelligence in ministries can't be overstated. It's all about making effective and strategic decisions based on the accurate analysis of data. This skill can help ministries direct their resources in ways that yield optimal results, leading to more significant outreach efforts. While it may not seem like a typical aspect of church work, in reality, it's crucial for understanding trends and making informed decisions to better connect with the congregation and beyond.
From Clayton Groh’s perspective, the power of data in decision-making is immense. For him, being a business intelligence manager involves more than just working with numbers. It's about translating those figures into actionable insights that align with the mission of Time of Grace Ministries. Clayton uses tools such as Tableau to visualize data, allowing patterns to emerge that wouldn't be noticeable in a standard database. This kind of data visualization helps to optimize the ministry's strategies, ensuring they are effectively reaching more people with their message.

Personalization is important, but guiding the audience towards a broader user journey is equally vital. The goal is to cater to specific interests while also presenting a more holistic understanding of the scripture. Also, it is crucial to maintain a balance in content that provides truth while also providing grace. This ensures growth in all areas of spiritual life.
Borrowing from Lombardi's correlation with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, he emphasizes the value of guiding the audience. Personalization is excellent, but there should also be a universal user journey that broadens the understanding of the scripture. Clayton, throughout the conversation, reiterates the importance of maintaining this balance, presenting content that aligns with individual struggles, yet simultaneously remains balanced, providing a comprehensive understanding of the Word of God.

Data comes from various sources, and merging them effectively is one of the major challenges in data analytics. Information from CRM, social media platforms, and website analytics need to be organized in a way that they can offer a comprehensive viewpoint. Like a jigsaw puzzle, each piece of data helps form a bigger picture.
From Clayton’s conversation with Lombardi, you can see his passion for utilizing data to inform decisions at Time of Grace Ministries. He understands the complexity of unifying data from various sources but recognizes the value this process brings. Clayton's comment about using tools like Tableau again shows the importance of software solutions in the organization that can help analyze data effectively and clearly, allowing him to identify trends and make more effective decisions.

While social media platforms like Facebook are a key avenue for Christian ministries to engage with their audience, there's also intensifying concerns about accounts being locked or suspended. This kind of reliance on third-party platforms can put content creators in a vulnerable position. This raises the importance of having owned channels as a primary means of audience engagement.
Clayton Grow brings attention to the issues faced by Christian organizations on social media platforms. During his conversation with Lombardi, he brings attention to cases where Facebook suspended accounts of ministries for posting job listings for Christian positions, flagging them for discriminatory content. Friedrich advocates for greater ownership of audience engagement strategies and also recommended using established service providers like HubSpot or Access Engagement that offer reliable email domains and analytics to maximize deliverability.

00:00:05
Well, hey, how's it going? Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Holy Donuts Podcast. I am joined today by Clayton Groh from time of Grace Ministries. Super excited to have him on the show today. He is their director of operations currently, but brings just an incredible amount of experience in data tech, backend business analytics, all this stuff that every ministry knows they really, really need, but then kind of struggle with.

00:00:28
How do we even do that? So pumped to have a conversation with him today about that. Clayton, thanks for joining us. How you doing, man? I'm doing well.

00:00:34
Thanks so much for having me on the show, man. Yeah. In honor of Wisconsin, people who watch the show will know I'm usually in know I'm in Florida, so I can be know, button down shirt, look professional. In honor of Wisconsin, in the impending winter of doom that I'm sure you all will have, I busted out the hoodie today so I could be cold weather fan just like you. Thank you.

00:00:52
I appreciate it. We actually just had snow on Halloween, October 31. There's still snow on the ground outside. And it was 84 degrees here. On Halloween, it was 80 probably, I think, three days before it snowed, it was very close to 80.

00:01:11
So it's been a wild October. Yeah, wild October in Wisconsin for sure. Okay, well, do this for me, man. For people unfamiliar with Time of Grace, why don't we start there, tell them a little bit more about Time of Grace, what the ministry is. Just a quick snapshot of its history and tell us how you got involved there and kind of about your role.

00:01:27
All right, time of Grace Ministry is a Christian multimedia ministry, and I typically have to explain what that means to people. We have a TV program. We produce typically one book a month. We have a robust daily devotion email that we send out. We do podcasts.

00:01:45
We have eight different podcasts. And like I said, we produce books, but not just books on one topic, but we do 365 devotional or 365 daily devotional books as well, which a lot of people use to stay in God's Word each day. So lots of different types of media where we share God's word with as many people as possible. And now as we kind of get more acquainted with the media landscape, we're trying to figure out how we can get people deeper into the Word and form deeper relationships with people and have people form a deeper relationship with God. And that's kind of like our next big challenge.

00:02:23
So, yeah, Time of Grace was founded years ago, and our current lead speaker, his name is Mike Navotny, and before him, our lead speaker who served us for about 18 years there, his name was Mark Jeskey, who he really established us as a TV ministry. So now Mike Novotny is our lead speaker, and we record him up in Appleton, Wisconsin. And we get so much energy from him because he's a very energetic speaker and he's super passionate about many things in God's word. And we're kind of trying to ride his coattails and generate as much content. Based on his content as very, very cool.

00:03:00
Cool. So tell me, how did you kind of come to Time of Grace? Is this a ministry that you kind of knew about through just, like, local church? Or was this, hey, I got recruited for this. How did you come to Time of Grace?

00:03:11
Yeah, so my background is kind of tech. It's more engineering than tech. I worked as a civil engineer and a mechanical engineer for a total of like twelve years. And I worked for a software development company that was never really satisfied. I know how to do the stuff, and I know that people will pay me to do those technical things, but I wasn't satisfied with the purpose of what I was doing.

00:03:33
So at my hometown church in Middleton, Wisconsin, our current board of directors president, I played in the worship band with him, and he said, hey, we need someone with some technical skills to kind of help with the data aspect of this media ministry. And I had heard of time of grace before. I had basically got on their daily email list, read their daily devotional email. And so I was super intrigued on being able to use technical skills for a ministry. So he knew that I had those technical skills and that our ministry needed them at that point.

00:04:07
So I was brought in as a business intelligence manager back in 2017, and I didn't realize how important the purpose of the organization was to my job satisfaction until I started working for Time of Grace. And I've never loved my job more now because I am using my skills, and I never would have thought my technical skills would be used in a ministry. But they totally are. They're totally useful, especially in modern day ministries. That's amazing.

00:04:37
So I'm guessing there are not a lot of ministries who immediately think, hey, you know what we need to grow here? Business intelligence. Yeah, that's what we need. Help me, just let me nerd out with you a little bit. One for people unfamiliar with what that role even looks like, right?

00:04:52
Help us understand what is day to day. Why would a ministry need someone who focuses on business intelligence? And what does that mean to actually how you do fundraising, how you do product, like all the things that happen in a nonprofit, how you deliver the content, the services that you all provide? What does that business intelligence role really mean to an organization? Help them maybe get a vision for here's what it could be in your organization.

00:05:14
I think that can be summarized by a class that I took while I was getting my MBA at University of Wisconsin. It was called data to decisions. So the important word there is decisions. Like you need to make the right decisions and there is some merit to a lot of prayer and a lot of getting in God's word to seek knowledge. But part of that knowledge is the everyday data that we have and the ability and using someone's technical ability to gather it.

00:05:47
And then once you gather it, being able to kind of pull out the story that the data is telling, which is more fun than it sounds. I greatly enjoy it. It's like, what is this data? Like, I've got this big huge database. I'm going to put it into something like Tableau, which is like this visualization software where you can use color and different types of charts and filter different things out in order to be like, oh, here's a trend that it would be impossible to see if you were just looking at, like a giant spreadsheet or a big database or something like that.

00:06:19
So in a multimedia ministry like ours, we spend money because we want to reach more souls. And a lot of that money is on advertising to use things like Facebook or YouTube or podcasts like how can we get this in front of people? And to know that when we spend money here it is x number of cents or dollars per person that we reach and we spend the money here, it's either lower or higher. So we want to spend more money on the areas that have a higher return on investment, which is a higher number of people per dollar that we spend. So making those kind of decisions using data.

00:06:54
So data to decisions is kind of. The summary of that data to decisions. I love that. And so with data, one of the things we talk about with clients like hey, it's kind of garbage in, garbage out. With data, put in bad data, get bad decisions out, right?

00:07:09
Also, one of the big struggles that we see is just every organization knows we have so many data touch points, right? Like so many places where we're essentially bringing in data, so many different channels. How do we even unify that data? Where do we put that? Let's go strategic.

00:07:29
Maybe we can define what are some of the most common channels that most ministries would have for bringing in data. But then what tools, strategies do you use to help unify that data? So then you can put it in something like Tableau, right, to actually say, hey, here's the trends we're seeing. Or not to go too trendy but using AI to say like, hey, let's use some intelligence stuff to actually use AI to pull out trends. But just getting that data from all the sources because I think every marketing or donor development team out there is like, listen, we know we've got stuff in our CRM.

00:07:58
Of course we know, we've know the Facebook ads we've run and hopefully the Pixel will set up. Right. We know we've got analytics for our website. What tools would you use to start making sense of that data, getting it unified? Yeah, I'll start with a little bit.

00:08:10
So when I became the Business Intelligence Manager for Time of Grace, that was my first job in business intelligence for sure. I had done a little bit of software sales before that, so using data was kind of new to me, but I really enjoy figuring things out. Just kind of the problem solving aspect of my personality. So I had to figure out how to do my job. After they hired me, they're like, okay, we don't know how to do this.

00:08:35
Hopefully you can figure it out. And to say that I have it figured out is definitely not true. I'm always learning, and especially if you're in tech, you're never going to know at all. And if you think you do, all the people are going to zoom right past you. So just figuring out, okay, we were doing a whole bunch of ads to try to get our daily devotion videos in front of as many people on Facebook as possible.

00:08:57
How do we get that Facebook data into a point where we can see like, oh, this is the return on investment based on the number of ad dollars for people that we reached, but also compare that same data to if we were going to do ads on YouTube, which we still do a lot of. So some of it's kind of manual. In some organizations, you literally have people who control all of your data and they host all of your databases on Amazon, Snowflake or whatever. But with ours, I don't actually control the database. I basically just gather it from Facebook or from YouTube.

00:09:33
And for a long time I basically developed a routine where you develop out, say, I want to know these different things. I want to know like 32nd views, I want to know 1 minute views, I want to know likes and comments, and tell Facebook to give me a report, and I would download that report and make sure that all the columns were right and then kind of merge that into the master database. Which database in this case is literally just a Google Sheet. So you can just do that. You can just use Google Sheets as databases.

00:10:06
If it gets too big, then you can't that's where the challenge is. And then also once you have Facebook data and then YouTube data, they don't always have the same columns, so you kind of have to figure out the equivalent ones and use some unifying linking data point, which typically is like the date that we published a video. So you'd use that date as like, okay, here's the linking thing. If I want to merge these two databases, I have to use that date or date or video ID or something like that in order to so using things like Google sheets, if you don't have millions and millions of data points, if it's just hundreds of thousands of data points, you can use Google sheets for things like that. But if you get big enough, there are certainly some ministries where we can't use Google Sheets.

00:10:52
We have so much bucket or something like that for all the data that's living there. Yeah, exactly. Even like SQL database or just something that's more custom for your organization. That's super helpful. So some of it sounds like it depends on the size of organization.

00:11:07
Sometimes gathering all this data is literally just a very manual process. It's not something where it's just I think that's why it's tough. It's because this is not something that often is just click, click, hit these three buttons and then it all shows up. If it were that easy, but everyone does it because it's a lot of manual, consistent processes. Procedures, any strategies, any tips within your business intelligence?

00:11:29
But even I know you're doing more with your digital marketing for Time of Grace Ministries. Any strategies that you've loved that have been really effective for you, all that you're like, man, I'd love to share this with other nonprofits out there. Yeah, we looked at a lot of the data on how many people viewed our videos and like, okay, if we change the title, if we change the topic, if we make it a question, make it provocative, we just weren't able to move the needle for the number of views on a platform like Facebook. We didn't give up. We still share our stuff on Facebook, but we have kind of transitioned more to, hey, let's own our audience, instead of basically kind of like rent our audience from like we are at the whim of Facebook.

00:12:18
When we share stuff on Facebook, facebook shares what it wants to based on the algorithm that changes on the daily. So if we can own that audience and the way that we are kind of currently owning the audience is to develop a robust email list. So we've been trying to really focus on how we share content with people via email because we know that we can send people those emails. That's about as close to owning your audience as you can, because you can control when you share emails with them to some degree, you can kind of influence how often they open. It based on a provocative subject line you can get on a service that really focuses on deliverability, which we had been struggling with for a while, but now we've kind of realized the importance of like, stuff has to be deliverable.

00:13:08
Meaning does it get sent to your promotions tab or spam or does it get sent right to your inbox? So email communication has kind of been the thing that we've really been focusing on probably the last two to three years, and we're still very much learning that. But I would advocate for email communication as opposed to relying on something like Facebook or YouTube. Yeah, we have some clients who literally just got a Slack message yesterday or two days ago about a client who just randomly their LinkedIn follower account dropped by like 60 people overnight and they're like, wait, what? How did this I mean, just anytime you're renting and there's nothing that changed in content strategy or anything literally just LinkedIn algorithm changed.

00:13:52
So now we're dropping followers and horror stories of Facebook accounts being locked out or banned, especially if we're talking about Christian ministries, right? Christian ministries had some who have their accounts completely suspended because hey, we put a job posting up and that's a Christian job posting. And now all of a sudden that's considered discriminatory practices. I mean, just horror stories of what happens. You don't own your audience.

00:14:16
So that's great, great strategy advice. Create a channel where you as much as possible can own the audience. Email deliverability, just quick question, tax people, what service provider are you guys loving for that? Because I know this is a very recent development. We just started using cupspot for email, which I don't know how common that is for nonprofits to use that, but that is their bread and butter.

00:14:37
They do a lot of things while they've been around for a while. They offer really good nonprofit discounts because it's kind of expensive. It's like this ends up being pretty expensive. Yeah, we have a few clients who use HubSpot right now and love it and to different effects, some of them full blown. Everything for marketing is on HubSpot, which is a great use case for it.

00:14:58
One of them even like their CRM is on it too, which is not super common in nonprofit, but hey, it's got CRM functionality, might as well keep it unified. But HubSpot definitely that's always the thing, right? It's like we love HubSpot. It can be expensive and you're kind of limited based on what plugins work well with it. If you do have some other tools that you have to use outside of it's, kind of hope that HubSpot has an integration there.

00:15:18
Otherwise we're a little out of luck. But yeah, great for deliverability. We love a company out there and I just always like to no sponsorship. This is just for free. We have.

00:15:29
They're called access engagement. It's a Christian organization. It's a business. They have their own email domains that they set up for their clients just to literally give maximum deliverability and then they're able to actually give you analytics because they work with a lot of other Christian ministries across open rates for your audience versus they're able to give you real business intelligence, right? We know percent of your audience is actually opening emails from other Christian ministries.

00:15:55
These ones are not actually and so maybe you don't want to send to them anymore. So love those guys too. Over active engagement. I got to write that one down. Yeah, they're great.

00:16:03
They're fun little feel free to look them up. I'll make a connection if you want, but they're great. We love all right, we are cruising right through here. Talk strategies. Help me understand this.

00:16:16
What's a trend that you're seeing out there, Clayton, in kind of Christian nonprofit world marketing specifically, that's both got you excited, but then maybe let's also talk the reverse side. What's a trend out there that's got you a little bit concerned? Yeah, I think it's a trend that's not specific to Christian nonprofits necessarily, but it's one you can't ignore. But basically personalization, I think, is almost every aspect of everyone's life is personalized. You don't have to watch the normal news.

00:16:50
You watch the news that is cultivated specifically for the stuff that you click on and the stuff that you spend time reading. So personalization it feels scary at first. Well, maybe for people just 45 and older, it feels scary, like people under 40. That's just how it is. In fact, it's kind of hard to go back to stuff that's not personalized because I don't care about that stuff and the robots know I don't care.

00:17:20
Yeah. So personalization, I think, is exciting, and I think email personalization, we, as an organization, don't do it very well yet, but that's the direction we're heading. How can we present content to people about the topics that they're struggling with the most or that they're interested in the most? Which sounds like a ton of work, and it kind of is, but there are systems in place where we can automate some of the content delivery to people based on the feedback that they give us. So we're currently working with a consultant next after who put on the Neo Summit there.

00:18:02
And they're really good at what they do, and they're constantly testing that's basically all they do is test. And that's what we would also like to do, is constantly test so personalization, which is super exciting because it can get people really deeply engaged in God's word based on the stuff that they're specifically struggling with. But that's also the big concern there, too. Phrase it in a different way. If we just give people personalized spiritual journeys, are we just telling them what they want to hear?

00:18:33
Which I think is that can be a danger. So if we present this personalized data, personalized communication that's based on the Bible, in a way that gives them the whole truth, basically gives them both grace and truth, which is a big concept that Pastor Mike talks a lot about. 100% grace and 100% truth, which sounds like a paradox because you can't have 100% of two things and hold them in the same container, but they're both so important. So as long as we keep that in mind, I think we'll be okay. And we're not just like, giving people just all grace when they don't want to hear the truth, always having the truth in the content that we share.

00:19:14
Also. Yeah, one of the illustrations I use a lot with anyone I talk with or we consult with or we're doing work with is we almost use if you remember the books when you're a kid, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, right, which are great. That's kind of what we want to do for personalization, which is if you actually I know this because I have a six year old who has a goosebumps. Choose Your Own adventure book. Got out Halloween yesterday.

00:19:35
I don't know why I'm shouting at Halloween, but it happened. Let's acknowledge that. So he goosebumps. Choose Your Own Adventure and what you actually find if you actually deconstruct it is there's actually only like four or five pages that are actually customizable, and then everything else is pretty much just a straight temple that's going to lead you back in loops to the same thing anyway. But it's all about that striking the balance between, okay, where are the places where we want to personalize and where we want to feel very attuned to where they are spiritually and in life, but then ultimately, we're still going to zoom out and pull them back to the main user journey that we want them on.

00:20:09
And so that's kind of how we always talk about, like, hey, you've got to have those choose Your Own Adventure moments where it really makes it feel personal and come alive for them. But still it's got to especially for you all, you kind of have a spiritual calling to that, right? Like a real word of God calling to say, hey, no, we want to present the whole truth of the scripture years. You want to pull them back to more than just, oh, well, here's the one thing that if you're struggling with depression, we're going to talk to you about depression from the Bible for a year straight. It's like, probably want to talk to you about other things that can get you out of that, right.

00:20:35
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00:21:12
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00:21:43
Okay, so resources, talk to me. I know you said you were hired for your job, and they had to kind of go learn how to do it. I'm sure along with that, you just had to do a ton of exploring, researching, reading, finding anything out there. What are some resources, best practices you like to recommend to folks who are in kind of Christian nonprofit marketing? Yeah, so I think probably the number one resource that I had discovered through a webinar, I think it was back in 2018 or 2019.

00:22:09
A lot of the advice next after, a consulting group called Next After, they have a lot of ebooks that you can download and a whole lot of templates of, like, here's how to create a great effective donation page. Here's how to create a great effective welcome email series. And they have all that stuff that they make a lot of that available for free, the concepts. And if you have the ambition to take it on yourself, like, you can do a lot of this yourself. But I did mention that we're actually working with them now because it does take a lot of bandwidth to create a lot of, say, personalized welcome series or a whole bunch of these tests.

00:22:49
So it helps to have people who live and breathe it, and that can do a lot of that work for you. So I would say that's kind of the number one resources is Next After, which I don't want to make this. A Next After ad, but because you brought this up, it's come up almost every podcast episode that we've recorded, everyone's like, Next After, Next. I just need to reach out to Tim over there. Hey, shout out, Tim.

00:23:07
If you're watching this podcast. Their founder, maybe you guys just love some podcast because you're getting free advertising every time. So they're great. We love them. A lot of connections I have are through their Neo conference and through them, huge fans of Next After and what they do.

00:23:20
Yeah. And if you ask literally any of our other employees here, you got time of grace. Clay is the next after guy. He's always talking about next after this, next after that. Now we're finally working with him.

00:23:32
That's awesome. Good stuff, man. Very cool. Well, Clayton, if people want to connect with you, if they've enjoyed the conversation, they're just like, hey, I'd love, like, pick your brain or, know, grab a virtual coffee. Or maybe they're up in Wisconsin.

00:23:42
They're like, hey, let's actually grab a coffee. What's the best way to connect with you? What's the best way to reach out? Are you on social media? Big kind of TikTok guy.

00:23:50
What's the best place to connect with you? I'm not a big social media guy. I do have a couple of accounts, but I'm not super active on them. So since I've been preaching email, I'll just say email. So I would email Clay Clay@timeofgrace.org to reach out to me, and I'd be happy to connect.

00:24:07
I love brainstorming and kicking around ideas. Love it, love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Clayton. Seriously, man, such a great conversation. Definitely something unique in the conversations we've gotten to have on this podcast.

00:24:19
So really appreciate, enjoyed the time and yeah, thank you so much for joining us again. Okay, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Matt.