“Long before Google Maps, GMI began as an innovative way to support the church, helping foreign missionaries become more effective with custom maps, infographics, and other resources. This week, the organization announced that its changing funding structure—underscored by a changing approach to mission—will force it to close.”

Global Mapping International (GMI) will close its doors on June 30, more than three decades after it began as a two-year global mapping project.

“We thought we’d get it done and disband in two years,” GMI president and CEO Jon Hirst told CT. “Then we realized the monumental nature of gathering information for the Great Commission was essentially never-ending, and that led to GMI becoming a third-party independent research organization supporting the global church.”

Long before Google Maps, GMI began as an innovative way to support the church, helping foreign missionaries become more effective with custom maps, infographics, and other resources. This week, the organization announced that its changing funding structure—underscored by a changing approach to mission—will force it to close.

GMI relied too heavily on donors who would rather see it lean on service and product pricing for revenue. “Donors now tend to come out of the business world or entrepreneurial environments,” Hirst said. “They look at GMI and say, ‘We love what you do. But you should be charging ministries for that.’”

“The easiest way to describe what happened is that research costs a lot of money to do well, and it was always dramatically subsidized,” he said. “When we tried to make the transition to multiple revenues streams, we couldn’t make it quickly enough to stay sustainable.”

The organization is best known for its work on the resources in Operation World and for producing mission infographics. Over the past 33 years, GMI also pioneered digital mapping, researched Christianity in India, and taught many missions organizations how to conduct research.

“In some ways, we worked ourselves out of a job,” Hirst said. “Many of those we helped now have full mapping or researching departments.”

GMI’s research services have been acquired by consulting firm Calvin Edwards & Company.

Financially, “GMI has always lived on the edge,” Hirst wrote. Raising money for missionary researchers is a lot harder than raising money for missionaries themselves, because “GMI requires highly skilled experts to invest long periods of time in doing ministry that is behind the scenes and whose impact is difficult to demonstrate.”

That’s an even tougher sell to millennial givers, who prefer to give to causes that provide food, water, shelter, and sanitation. Millennials also prefer to support ministries that operate in their community and give them a chance to volunteer.

Larger trends of mission professionalization and de-professionalization also play a role, Hirst said. On one hand, the proliferation of organizations providing support to missionaries and the rising standards of professionalization across the globe has upped the expectations of what places like GMI should provide, he said.

On the other hand, a deprofessionalization of missionaries themselves—many more lay people are now involved in evangelism—means there are fewer trained missionaries asking for GMI’s services.

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