Tom at The Agitator sounds almost like a secularized St. Paul a la the 1 Corinthians quote we shared yesterday when he speaks in praise of imitation in his post today:

To grow an organization, the first thing I would try to do is identify my best donors and figure out how to clone them. What common demographic or attitudinal characteristics do they share? What kinds of appeals attracted them? Exactly how/where did I acquire them? As I listened to these best donors, I’d be trying to hear and distill the essential basis of their support — emotional and rational — for my organization.

Simply put, I’d apply the marketing truism: birds of a feather …! I’d expect to be able to achieve some decent, cost-effective growth following that strategy.

When we Christian fundraisers finally ascend to the summit of Biblical Fundraising Mountain, I fear we’ll find that all the secular fundraisers made it there first. Maybe that’s because we’re much more comfortable following the AFPs and CFREs and secular development gurus than we are leading the way based on the treasure trove of amazing insight into human development that fairly well bleeds out of each page of the Scriptures. Understandable…but sad.

In any case, there’s a whole chapter in our new Coach Your Champions book about how to do exactly the kind of cloning Tom is recommending–only in a Christian context that makes the process far more robust, in my view.

The folks at MIF HQ tell me we are within days of having the book available for sale online. Until then, here’s my Word doc draft of that chapter for your, um, imitation:

chapter-7-final

And this month we’re teaching this process as part of our workshop/lab series on how to stop soliciting major donors and start coaching champions. So make sure to sign up for the free workshop near you.