Let’s face it. Your church puts a lot of work into mission trips. By the time you get back home, you’ve spent hours upon hours planning an itinerary, making travel arrangements, training your team, etc. Once you get to the mission field, you likely had one of the busiest weeks you can remember.
It’s easy to get back home and breathe a big sigh of relief. You’re done. It’s time to move on to what’s next.
Not so fast.
The days and weeks following your return are a critical time to reflect on the trip and pencil in some insights on what went well and what didn’t — so you know how to make your next mission trip even better.
As you sit down to do that, here are five important keys to remember.
Key #1: Define Success Beforehand
An effective evaluation process starts long before you return home—even before you set foot on the field.
You can’t evaluate success if you don’t know what it is. Success will look different for every church and project, and it’s notoriously tough to define for mission trips. The unexpected is inevitable, and you’ll discover needs and opportunities on the field you couldn’t foresee beforehand.
But defining success—even if it’s only in pencil—is still crucial. A clear vision of success provides a foundation for adapting when things change.
You’ll want to set realistic, field-informed goals. You’re serving your partners on the field. Ask them what would make your church’s involvement a success for them. Try to take that input and form as tangible of goals as possible. (For example, we’ll share the gospel 50 times or dig 25 wells.)
Remember though, your goals shouldn’t define your trip. It’s a safe bet that the priest and the Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan had a list of great goals they were on the way to do. Those goals stood between them and a great ministry opportunity. Don’t let that happen to you.
Key #2: Gather Diverse Feedback
If you really want to get an idea of how effective your trip was, you need to invite many different voices into the evaluation process. That includes participants, mission partners, team members, etc.
No single perspective on your mission trip can (or should) tell the whole story. Participants will have a different experience from your partners. Both of them are valid.
The same is true for your team. Someone who is an experienced mission team member will see your trip differently than someone who participated for the first time.
Getting diverse feedback means you need to use a variety of collecting options. These options will likely top the list.
- Group debriefs: Provides opportunities for open discussion where everyone can share.
- Anonymous surveys: Lets people give honest feedback without any pressure. Online survey software like Survey Monkey can help you do this easily.
- Informal conversations: These less formal discussions with team members can often provide the most helpful feedback.
Regardless of how you gather the feedback, make it as easy as possible so you have the best chance to hear from as many people as possible.
Key #3: Look Beyond the Immediate Impact
It’s tempting to focus only on the immediate and visible outcomes like how many projects you complete and how many people you serve). Those are certainly important. But they aren’t the only outcomes that are important. You want to see long-term impact on your team, your partners, and the community you served.
How do you do this?
- Keep some constants as you evaluate year after year. Even if you’re going to different places each trip, evaluating similar things year after year helps you see growth in how your teams are progressing (particularly in how the trips are affecting the lives of participants).
- Send out another assessment survey six months after you return. This will help you track the impact the trip is making on team members. Have they continued to grow in their understanding of God’s mission? Have they been more involved in local missions? This can help you refine your follow-up tactics.
- Set up a follow-up chat with the mission partners you worked with about three to six months after your trip. This is a great chance to ask questions like, “Now that you’ve had some time to think about it, what could we have done differently to better prepare our team?” or “How has the community been impacted by the work we did together?” The goal here is to really understand how your efforts made a difference and gather ideas to make future projects even better. Keep the conversation relaxed and meaningful—this is all about learning and growing together. Oh, and don’t forget to share some of the feedback with your team when you can—they’ll probably love hearing how their work made an impact!
Evaluating your mission trips with a long-term perspective will get missed if you’re not intentional about asking questions of participants and partners months (if not years) later. Doing so can yield the kind of long-term results every short-term missions team wants to see.
Key #4: Reflect on Team Growth
Mission trips don’t just change the lives of the people you’re engaging. Team members’ lives also change forever, too. Understanding how they’re changing (and maybe how they’re not) can help participants take their next steps for further growth.
When you get back from the trip, ask questions like this.
- How did your view of missions change during the trip?
- What ways were you challenged during the trip and how did you overcome those challenges?
- How did your view of God and other people change during the trip?
Capturing your team members’ responses to these questions and more can help you lay a foundation for further growth.
Key #5: Apply What You’ve Learned
Evaluating your mission trip experience won’t help your church (or your team members and mission partners) at all if you never apply the lessons learned to future trips.
Once you’ve gathered feedback, consider creating a written document that describes what you learned. The report doesn’t need to be long to be thorough. Make sure the report includes a list of action items to apply the feedback to future trips. These could include:
- Improvements to your pre-trip training process.
- Clearer communication with your mission partners in the field.
- Logistical hurdles to avoid.
Next time you prepare for a mission trip, look at those action items beforehand. Prepare differently because of what you learned.
Keep the Conversation Going
Your church’s short-term mission trips have incredible potential for good. The only way to cultivate the best possible outcomes for your trip, though, is continuous improvements. You won’t get better without evaluating where you’ve been.
If you want to learn more about how to get long-term impact for your team and partners from your mission trips, check out our new FREE guide, Mission Trip Follow-Up: Keeping the Momentum Going After the Trip.
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