TechMission Inc.

What if every Christian in the world could be connected to the poor in a way that brings transformation in Jesus’ name? That is the vision of TechMission—to use the Internet and innovation to connect the resources of the Body of Christ to minister to the poor. In the same way that websites like eBay connect millions of buyers and sellers, TechMission Online’s websites connect the resources of Christians to those most in need through ministries serving at-risk youth and addressing poverty to promote reconciliation and justice by addressing the following three areas of need:
1. Need for online volunteer matching: The Corporation for National and Community Service reports that the market value of the time served by faith-based volunteers in the USA is $58.2 billion, but only 7-15% of these volunteers serve the larger community outside the church. ChristianVolunteering.org is the largest Christian online volunteering matching website, and has provided 37,849 volunteer matches since 2008 (primarily to ministries serving the poor). One of the main ways ministries are handling the current economic downturn is by increasingly depending on interns, so there is especially a need for volunteer interns. TechMission has placed over 400 full-time interns in the past 10 years.
2. Need for online education for Christians serving the poor: Christians ministering to the poor often need additional education, but they cannot get it from traditional Christian colleges. This is because those in urban ministry are too busy, and the colleges often do not have affordable courses with the cultural relevance and practicality needed for urban ministry. City Vision College is meeting a unique niche as an online college that primarily targets parachurch leaders serving the poor.
3. Need for urban ministry interns: Because of the economic downturn, many urban ministries have had to significantly cut staffing; at the same time, demand for their services are growing due to increased poverty. To help meet this need, many ministries are turning to interns. With the down economy and a recent surge of interest in volunteering, we have had more than 10 applicants for every one position.

With the current economic downturn, there is a great need to generate alternative resources for ministries serving the poor. TechMission Online helps meet that need by using innovation to build the capacity of ministries serving the poor through the following three main initiatives:
1) ChristianVolunteering.org seeks to increase the number and quality of volunteers and interns serving in ministries that serve the poor by providing online volunteer matching, making it easier for them to find volunteer opportunities. ChristianVolunteering.org has become an aggregator of Christian volunteer opportunities, jobs and organizations from other websites (similar to how Kayak.com aggregates flight information). We currently have aggregated 9,775 Christian volunteer and missions opportunities (half syndicated) and 18,938 Christian jobs, 307,607 Christian organizations and 10,795 Christian and faith-friendly foundations. By providing this information, we are consolidating the data used by various ministries so that there is a common, open clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities providing a single source for volunteers and churches looking for opportunities.

2) City Vision College is an accredited distance learning college and will provide online classes to over 500 student enrollments for those actively ministering to the poor next year. City Vision offers Bachelor’s degree programs in Urban Missions, Nonprofit Management and Addiction Studies. Classes cost $600 and cover practical topics such as Theology of Urban Missions, Urban Evangelism, Nonprofit Accounting, Management, Fundraising, etc. We are viewing our UrbanMinistry.org website as the online library for City Vision College. This site provides archived audio and video of more than 15 years of urban ministry conference materials, including 150,000 pages of online sermon audios, conference videos, webcasts of workshop presentations and articles. City Vision contributes to building the knowledge in the UrbanMinistry.org library, and the content in that library is then used in City Vision courses.
• Masters in Science, Technology and Ministry: We have submitted to our accreditor our Master’s Degree in Science, Technology, Society and Ministry. We expect to start offering this degree in 2014. Our founder, Andrew Sears, received his Master’s from MIT within their Science, Technology and Society department and has the vision for creating a Christian counterpart degree called Science, Technology and Ministry. The degree program will focus on equipping Christians in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to use their skills in ministry to bring social change and help transform society. Some of the courses will include: Theology of Technology, Information Technology and the Poor, Systems Thinking in Ministry, Online Ministry and Evangelism, History & Case Studies of Technology in the Church.
• Online GED Program. We have partnered with ILS Nova to develop an online GED training progra

TechMission has 11 full-time staff/interns at our HQ and 50 full-time interns at Sites. Through this and the fact that our staff reflect backgrounds and demographics similar to the populations we serve, we are able to culturally contextualize our programs to the communities we serve.

At this point, our earned-income strategies are showing enough growth both for City Vision College and City Vision Internships for us to effectively transition off of government funding. Because most of our government funding was subgranted in the form of AmeriCorps stipends, we only needed moderate growth from our earned income activities to offset this loss. While our total organizational budget is decreasing from $906,252 in 2013 to $613,000 in 2014, most of this decrease is from funds that were subgranted to other organizations. Our current budget projects show that our increased revenue from other sources will enable our headquarters budget to remain level. The following is a list of our projected sources of funding for 2014:
• Foundation Funding. Next year, we anticipate securing a total of $134,000 in foundation funding, with some loss of funding anticipated from the foundations that only funded us to match our AmeriCorps grant.
• Earned Income: undergraduate tuition ($250,000), graduate tuition ($54,000), City Vision Internship Site Fees ($70,000) and tech consulting ($35,000).
• Individual Donations: We anticipate about $10,000 in donations from individuals and churches.
• In Kind Donations: We were awarded a Google Grant that we expect will provide us with $120,000 of free in-kind advertising. We will use this advertising to promote our internships, ChristianVolunteering.org and City Vision. This grant was awarded in January, 2013 and has provided our main source of growth. It is automatically renewed as long as we remain within the grant guidelines. In addition, we anticipate $80,000 of in-kind donations from other tech sources including Salesforce, Microsoft and Intuit.

In 2012, TechMission:
• Matched 9,995 volunteers through ChristianVolunteering.org & programs
• Funded 65 full-time interns for ministries serving 3,642 at-risk youth through TechMission Corps
• Served over 1.3 million unique visitors to UrbanMinistry.org & other websites
• Provided accredited college courses with 281 student registrations through City Vision College
• Provided $10.3 million in resources to sites only spending $1.5 million (674% return on investment)