Director’s Address: Reflecting on 2021 and Welcoming the New Year

Dearest alumni and partners,

What a year 2021 was! Going into a second lockdown after coming out of the first was quite a challenge, but throughout all the ups and downs God has made it very clear that He is, as has always been, firmly in control.

Despite some of the external challenges, He’s blessed SOW in many ways - with a growing staff team, growing campus leadership between made up of student execs and leaders, and a growing network of partners in the gospel.

Looking into 2022, please continue to pray and journey with us in seeing what God might do through this underdog of a ministry. God-willing we’ll continue to engage with more uni students with the gospel as well as preparing ourselves to reach more uni students across the rest of Sydney too.

We only could have done what we did in 2021 thanks to God working in and through you, our alumni and partners. Your ongoing prayer and financial support has made such an impact in the lives of many uni students and beyond.

Thank you again, and here’s to another great year in the Lord’s service!

In Christ,

Sijin

Campus Department Annual Report

2021 Focus

The overall aim of campus department is to support our campus leaders and members in doing campus ministry, provide opportunities to grow and serve and lastly to encourage our members and leaders in the way they serve and grow. In 2021, we have focussed on a few key events including Forum, TWIG and Year 12 Welcome Night.

Forum

Due to COVID, our recurring events had to be adjusted according to the changing circumstances. For this reason, Forum only occurred three times (instead of the pre-planned four) on the month of March, May and September.

Month	Topic	Speaker
March	Living as Christians in a Secular World: Lessons from Daniel	Ian Smith
May	God’s Mission in Every Season	David Burke
September	Christian Leadership	Jonathan Pratt

TWIG

TWIG, which stands for Training and Worshipping In Godliness, is a new initiative we’ve launched in 2021 to provide leadership training on specific topics for both campus execs and student leaders. We also wanted to provide a time and place for our leaders to praise God and pray for our ministry. This initiative alternated monthly with the Forum and initially was done face to face but had to be changed online with the impact of COVID throughout the year.

Month	Executives	Student Leaders	Praise and Prayer Night
February	Orientation/ Fellowship Night	Orientation/ Fellowship Night	-
April	Culture & Change	Discipleship	Culture, Change and Discipleship
June	Raising New Leaders	Maturing as Leaders	Legacy
August	Leadership Integrity	Leadership Integrity	Abide
October	‘WHY’	‘WHY’	‘WHY’
November	Planning for the Year Ahead	Servant Hearted Team Membership	Unite

Year 12 Welcome Night
At the end of 2021, campus department tried out a new initiative called ‘Year 12 Welcome Night’ which was a time for the graduating year 12s to experience and encounter leaders and other Year 12’s prior to SOW Camp to increase familiarity with others and to learn what SOW is about. We envisioned this night to be a great opportunity to reach out and invite first years to be plugged into SOW.

2022 Focus
For 2022, Campus Department would continuously focus on the development, training, and support for our leaders as they serve in the ministry of SOW. We would also like to achieve greater influx of members in each campuses this year and equip our leaders to be prepared for the increasing number of members.

In 2022, we would like to provide specific care for our campuses. We provide support by providing events like TWIG overall to all campuses but as all the campuses struggle with different issues, we thought it’ll be good to provide support and training in needs specific for them. This will be achieved through constant interaction with the campus P/VPs, brainstorming and determining in what way campus department can support each campus with their needs.

Management Department Annual Report

The central goal of Management Team focuses on making SOW a socially acceptable and legally compliant organisation to protect our work, staff and members. We aim to ensure that SOW is an organisation that is trusted by the members of the organisation, partners and the wider local churches and society at large. As such, the scope of the Management Team’s work in 2021 was to lay a firm legal foundation for future years to build upon. Our primary objectives were to strengthen our internal governance and enhance our external management of affairs.

To achieve the former, we first undertook the task of ensuring that SOW inc. was legally compliant to our legal obligations as an entity. By ensuring that we became compliant under ASIC, this allowed the organisation to be able to apply to become a non-for-profit Charity under ACNC. Next, we successfully reclaimed the lost funds in the Student Outreach to the World v Clubqnect Pty Ltd case. This win placed the organisation in a financially favourable position, therefore, improving the overall internal governance and resource issues. To enhance our external management, the team began the process of affiliating our university campuses and growing our partnerships with local churches and Christian organisations such as Christ College and Missions Interlink.

In 2022, the team aims to further build upon the progresses made in 2021. We will continue to strengthen our internal and external governance by working on the university affiliation, drafting a broad range of policies, securing SOW inc.’s charitable status and enriching our external partnerships.

HUMAN RESOURCES AND MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT Annual Report

This year, the main areas we focused on as the HRMD team were organising staff socials, town hall meetings, staff retreat and also introducing a recruitment process. These were intentional items we focused on to help create a positive culture with greater communication amongst the team, unity and also an avenue to appreciate and acknowledge our staff team. Although ‘culture’ is not tangible and quite difficult to measure, we were greatly encouraged through the high attendance rates for each meeting and event that was hosted.

One of the bigger projects was the recruitment process for our staff team. There was a greater focus on the steps throughout the process to make the recruitment experience a positive one. We introduced expression of interest forms, an online application form and a casual catch-up interview and new staff orientation session. Although it may sound a lot more formal, we wanted to make sure that expectations and commitments were clear and that all candidates were plugged in and involved with a local church. The rationale behind this was to increase transparency, fairness and to ensure that people who are interested in serving within our ministry were aware of the process and could have a streamlined approach.

Overall, it was really helpful for us to align our values, have candid conversations and get to know the staff candidates better before on-boarding them into the team. By having multiple touch points with them, we were able to remove any ambiguity or confusion that they may have had. And finally, help all our on-boarded staff feel welcomed, equipped and informed about what to expect over the next month or two.

Another thing to highlight was that 74% of our existing staff team decided to stay on board for another year! This has been really encouraging for myself and the team, but we recognise that it wasn’t what we did and we are thankful to God for working in the lives of all our staff members and sustaining their eagerness to serve His kingdom through SOW.

In the next year, we are hoping to:

Smooth out any kinks in our recruitment and handover process
Assist the Campus team with their campus leadership team recruitment process
Focus on staff training to help equip our staff team more and more
Continue building on the staff culture we have now and grow in unity and support for one another
Organise bigger and better staff socials!

Events Department Annual Report

Events had a turbulent year with the ongoing pandemic and another round of lockdowns. Yet as always, God has been so good and gracious. We finished off 2020 with SOWcial themed ‘Farewell 2020’. We had about 120 people come together to celebrate, congratulate and recognise the service of students, and thank God for the year. After saying our farewells to the year 2020, we started off 2021 with our annual SOW Training Camp which was themed ‘Freedom’.

Despite having regional lockdowns and clouded by uncertainty, we were privileged to hold a camp and have our guest speaker Pastor Alex Kim speak to 120 camp attendees. As the year progressed, Events was gearing up for a new SOW fundraising event ‘SAT 21’ which unfortunately had to be postponed to the following year due to an ongoing lockdown. By God’s grace we were able to end the year on a high note and squeezed in another SOWcial themed, ‘VIPs only’. On the 31st Jan - 4th Feb 2022 we will be holding our annual SOW Training Camp at Naamaroo. The theme is ‘Alpha and Omega’ with the Key Note speaker as Pastor David Burke. We are cautious due to the current circumstances with COVID, but very excited and thankful to be able to run a camp to start the year : ) We aim to hold our very first external SOW fundraiser ‘SAT 22’ later in the year.

Finance and IT Department Annual Report

In 2021, SOW Finance started to focus on the things listed below

Restructure in Accounting to prepare for ACNC compliance and useful data analytics
Aim for net profit/financial sustainability through responsible budget monitoring
Introduce technological competency (IT Department setup)

Despite the various disruptions due to COVID-19, SOW Finance was able to maintain profit in the calendar year thanks to all the people who generously donate to the ministry. We would like to extend our deepest gratitude and thank you for continuously supporting the ministry. Compared to 2020, total donations to SOW have increased by ~58%, leading towards having net profit. In this calendar year, we have also created and introduced an intranet page for Staff and leaders (The SHED) to house various materials, administration, and relevant information.

Plans and Goals for 2022

We will continue to aim to be financially sustainable to ensure we can provide the best quality in all activities SOW provides
We have set clear targets in revenue and expenses for this financial year. We are taking a proactive approach to achieve these targets by working with other cross-functionally to devise strategies to achieve such targets
Upgrade and maintain current software infrastructure to house all financial data, providing key data analytics and maintain compliance as SOW prepares to become a charity entity.
Continuing to expand the IT sub-department to increase SOW's technological capability. This will allow us to be more efficient and effective as a small organisation.
Host a workshop for the new 2022 Campus Treasurers to become more comfortable with handling campus finances.

Marketing Department Annual Report

This year the Marketing team has been working on various projects to improve our marketing strategies within our social platforms Instagram, Facebook and website. This is to improve our engagement and communications with not only our members but with the public, alumni and partners. Data analysis on our media platforms was an area we worked on this year to see how effective our marketing was and how many people it has reached. Some projects we have worked on included making Donorbox subscriptions available on the website.

For next year our focus will be mainly on our image as an organisation which includes re-vamping our website, branding, PR, increasing awareness and engagement with alumni. Many of these areas are currently in action however there is more room for improvement. We want to be an organisation where people can trust and partner with us which is where the marketing team comes in. We want to better understand our audience and be able to communicate with them in the best way possible.

Instagram Data
Followers : 346 Followers (Increased by 18 since July 31st)
Total accounts reached : 539

Facebook Data
Total Page likes : 624
Total reach : 782 (Month of December)

MailChimp Data
Total Subscribers : 92 (as of 28th December)
Audience Growth : 3 Subscribers since May 2021
Average Open Rate : 59.9%

January Edition (2021 Annual Report)