Prior to becoming President of the Los Angeles Mission a job transition or two ago, I was serving as Vice President at the Russ Reid Company, overseeing the agency’s work with rescue missons, including the Los Angeles Mission.

At that time, the mission was going through a “If one direct mail appeal letter a month is good, two appeal letters a month can only be better” phase.

No exaggeration. And most months there was also a newsletter thrown in for good measure.

And the weird thing was, it was working–at least according to all of the metrics that are typically employed to measure fundraising. The mission was generating not only more gross income, but more net income, and its overall cost of fundraising was remaining well within the bounds of acceptability.

I wanted to protest that donor fatigue would derail the mission’s approach sooner or later, but the mission’s lapsed and inactive donor reactivation program steadily, predictably, and efficiently gathered the donors up who fell out of the clown car and stuffed them back in again, all while the car veered wildly down the Hollywood Freeway.

It was amazing. Disgusting, alarming, and yucky. But amazing. It was one of the few times in history that a direct mail agency was alarmed that its client was mailing too much.

Even back in those pre-Transformational Giving days, there were some mission fundraising folks (including Seattle Union Gospel Mission’s Jenny Printz and Los Angeles Mission’s Matt Bates, now not coincidentally both Regional Giving and Training Officers with Mission Increase Foundation) who knew that there must be more to fundraising measurement than gross income, net income, net yield per donor, and cost of fundraising. Out of that vague sense of discontent, we each began on our own to try some different things that would eventually crystallize into the movement known as Transformational Giving (TG).

Transformational Giving has become quite the detailed system of development in the last ten years. In one area, however, Transformational Giving remains quite undefined:

Measurement.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there is any dearth of proof or statistical evidence that Transformational Giving ‘works’, or that it works ‘better’ than traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf). Mission Increase Foundation maintains one heckuva impressive statistical database that tracks just that. And there are no shortage of organizations successfully exemplifying TG principles; we regularly chronicle ’em in these pages here.

When I say that measurement is the great undefined frontier for Transformational Giving, what I mean is that Transformational Giving is different from traditional/transactional fundraising not just in degree, but in kind. As a result, it ought to be doing more than just showing it can hold its own in measurements like income growth and cost of fundraising.

It needs to determine what from a TG standpoint is worth measuring in the first place.

Principle 8 of the Transformational Giving Ten says, ‘Giving is not the process but rather one vital result of the process of a champion being comprehensively coached to share the cause effectively within his or her sphere of influence’. That certainly suggests, and rightly so, that the results of TG are seen first and always most prominently in the champion himself or herself, and secondarily in the bank account of the nonprofit. If so, TG ought to be determining, promoting, and popularizing measurements that relate to that.

It ought to be doing that. But so far it’s not.

Sadly, I suspect that’s because we TG folks are too busy trying to sell TG to nonprofits and missionaries who were raised on traditional/transactional fundraising. Proving that TG beats ttf  requires that we use ttf’s metrics: income and cost of fundraising. That’s not all bad, but, on the other hand, it’s not all good. For example, if a ministry can generate more income at a better cost of fundraising through traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf), should they simply continue to do so? If not, why not?

I think there are plenty of reasons why not, and they’re not simply abstract theological reasons (though the abstract theological reasons in and of themselves ought to be enough to keep any self-respecting Christian up at least half the night). But until we development TG measurements and subject ttf to them, we’ll simply be accused of being idealistic and not understanding that ‘my organization is going down the drain, and we need MONEY! Please tell me how the LA Mission managed to make so much money doing two appeal letters and a newsletter every month. We definitely need to do that. And please give us a grant while we’re waiting.’

So this week we turn our attention to questions of measurement and Transformational Giving. Our goal: the development of metrics that reveal TG’s true potency, especially when compared to traditional/transactional fundraising. Some will say it’s not the sexiest topic we’ve ever covered, yet I’m not so sure it’s not quite literally the most important. The future of TG likely depends on our being able to make a case to nonprofit executive A or missionary B that they should care about anything other than gross income, net income, and cost of fundraising.

Our text for the week will be Douglas W. Hubbard’s How To Measure Anything: Finding The Value Of Intangibles In Business. Not a light tome by any measure, but it’s the good pleasure of this blog to make it interesting and applicable to you.

So grab your champions and a ruler and get set for this week’s Adventures In Measurement!