Speaker 1: Hi everyone, my name is Jenna Lynch and this nonprofit spotlight moment is brought to you by DonorBox. Today I am so excited to be joined by Jan Willem Boosman, Executive Director at Jesus.net. Jesus.net and its ministry partners have a common dream to give every single person in the world the opportunity to know God, grow in Jesus and to share their faith easily. Jan Willem, welcome, thank you for being here.

Speaker 2: Thank you Jenna, it's so good to be with you and I'm excited to share about what we've learned and what the challenges are in our daily ministry.

Speaker 1: So I want to go ahead and get started with asking you about the inspiration behind Jesus.net.

Speaker 2: Years ago and in fact it started in 2000, I was working for a broadcaster and we found out that people are watching things and then have questions and traditionally they were calling to the broadcaster with their questions and we started to give an opportunity for people to go to the internet and subscribe to an online course that we created and we saw that thousands of people were subscribing to this course. Like you want to know what is the recipe for an apple pie or what is the weather in my holiday destination, people are also asking more deeper questions like what is the essence of life, if I want to pray, how can I pray, I feel depressed and even very heavy topics like what we also discovered people are typing in questions like I want to die and what we realized and that drove really our passion is that when those people came to places there's not always a place of hope and we wanted to create places of hope that people can be inspired that there is an another view on a topic like that and there is someone to listen to you. So a key element in Jesus.net is that we always try to make a connection, to offer a connection, to talk with someone or to connect with someone, to email with

Speaker 1: someone and that's what inspired us. And hope is universal and it sounds like you were catering to massive audience. How do you focus your messages or create enough messages to help so many people through questions of doubt or moments of sadness or wanting to learn more or gain inspiration?

Speaker 2: You're right, it's important to really focus on the audience. So one of the key things is that we want to have the searcher put central. So we don't want to bring a message from our organization but we want to focus on the searcher. So the method we're using also for our coaches, we have a few thousand coaches around the world because Jesus.net is in at this moment in 34 languages with more than 100 organizations we work together. But every volunteer is working according to what we call question-driven coaching. So we train them not to bring their own message or to preach but to listen to the people and to keep on asking questions so that you can find out what is the

Speaker 1: real question behind the question. Thinking about trial and error, of course you've seen a lot of growth from the conception of this to now. Can you talk about some of your high points in your growth story or some of the challenges that you faced getting to this point?

Speaker 2: It's not a commercial product. So we don't sell products. We want to help people. It started as volunteer work and people who were missionaries in fact you could say. But when it starts to grow you also need to professionalize it, you need to have good hosting partners, you need to have security in place. So we started to get more, we needed to have more finances and what I think everyone also in the podcast understands when you have a good idea there are always people who want to invest in the beginning. So you have those seed investors and they say, wow, great idea and here you have some money you can start. That's how it started in the beginning but then when you are four years on a working then it's more harder and then raising funds for keeping an organization going, that's harder. So in a few years ago we said, okay, we need to involve those people that we reached who really said to us, you've been a blessing for us, you helped us so much, how can we help you and we didn't have the answer. So it was really by accident and then we started to offer them possibilities to donate but we were not used to it, we were not experienced fundraisers for crowdfunding, etc. and we tried several things, we tried all kind of tools but it was complicated, we had to dive into it and it's really a blessing to work with DonorBox because that was the open door for us to to make it very simple to start campaigns easily and so that also helped us to overcome

Speaker 1: that challenge. So thinking about your growth before you started fundraising and thinking about where it has brought you now, what have you been able to accomplish with those funds that you've

Speaker 2: been able to raise through DonorBox? It's more than just fundraising, that's one of the things that I learned, you start to involve people into your ministry or your organization, your goals and since that time and we had some help of some good people, we had much more people being involved, becoming ambassadors of the work we're doing. So from starting to connect to people to involve them in the ministry, we also have people who help us to do more translations to become those coaches and volunteers. We have a lot of people who are involved in a prayer network, so who pray for subjects that people have and they connect with the people. So the army of volunteers grew from I would say and I don't count the donors as a volunteer but the number of really volunteers who put time and effort into gs.net has grown from I would say to 20,000 in one year time. That's one of the things that happens. Secondly is that when you involve people in the work and they feel it's not just paying for something but being involved and having a responsibility. We have had several people who said, if you want to start in this language, you can count on me. So that was also a sort of spiritual direction. If we saw okay, we have now let's say 10 people who ask us or who say if you want to start in Farsi language, we want to help. So that helped us to I would say to listen to the message that God gives for people to drive into such a direction. So it helped us I would say to start this year with five new languages because of this new involvement of people.

Speaker 1: I love that and I love how you said it's more than just fundraising. It's connecting with people on a deeper level and that is so very true. Okay, we've talked about a lot of things but I want to give everybody a big picture of Jesus.net. I want to talk about some of your top programs and how folks can learn more. One of my favorite programs of yours is the Miracle Every Day. I love that movement. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, that's indeed one of also my

Speaker 2: favorites. A Miracle Every Day is a daily newsletter that you can receive. You can subscribe to it and it inspires you on a daily basis, gives you input, challenges but it's really written from, it's not a sort of corporate devotional or something like that. It feels like the writer is making a connection with you and that's what we try to do. You see often in the business side that you're talking about B2B and B2C, business to consumer, business to business. What we thought of it's more B2B, it's person to person. So we train our writers and it's now in 16 languages to train the writers to always have people in mind and to be vulnerable about their own experiences and how they saw that faith was playing a role in this. They really do that to inspire people and to trigger them. Within the Miracle Every Day, we always also have a trigger for people. If they want to know more, we guide them into next steps and other directions. Is there a message that you would like to share

Speaker 1: with our audience about maybe what's coming next for Jesus.net or any exciting projects that you

Speaker 2: have in the works? What we believe really is about is in personalization. I shared a little bit about it but more and more we want to make every message that we have that it's really personal. We want to move away from a broadcasting perspective to a really personalized, tailor-made approach. So not one size fits all but a really personalized approach. That's I think the biggest development we're in. Of course, there are other projects that I could share but I think this is the key element that we want to work on in the future. It sounds like it's a very exciting

Speaker 1: time. I'm really excited to follow along on this journey as you continue to personalize this experience, touch others with your messages and your programs and inspire others to learn more about hope and find a community that supports them. So thank you for all that you do. Thank you for sharing with us today and thank you for trusting DonorBox to be a part of this story with

Speaker 2: you. Thank you. It's really good to stay connected and more than willing to help other organizations because we want to make the world a better place.