I and my Mission Increase Foundation Giving and Training Officer posse are hotly and heavily planning now for what I have the sneaking suspicion will be the most important workshop in last three years in the development of Transformational Giving, namely:

A January 2010 workshop on Engagement.

I think the Engagement workshop will be even more seminal than the newly updated Transformational Giving (TG) seminar (now on DVD) and the Coach Your Champions book, and here’s why:

The TG seminar and the Coach Your Champions book are TG through and through, and yet both have diggable nuggets that can be dislodged and applied by nonprofits that are still straddling the great gulf between traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) and TG.

Engagement, on the other hand, is a thoroughly crazy body of practice that no one in their right ttf mind would contemplate. To do the kinds of things we’re going to advocate you do in Engagement, you have to have the Apostle Thomas level of commitment to TG:

Then Thomas (called Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

To plunge into Engagement with your champions is to drink the TG Kool-Aid without a sippy cup lid. I’ve seen ttf devotees who profess interest in Signature Participation Projects and the Realm of P. I’ve even had chats with ttf’ers who nod in agreement when I talk about Ownership, Replication and the Realm of O.

But I’ve never seen a ttf practitioner be able to avoid making the Bill the Cat face when we talk about Engagement.

That’s because Engagement is the sine qua non of Transformational Giving, which is the fancy Latin way of saying that unless we’re doing Engagement as the central element of our development program, we’re really not doing TG.

Much of the cool stuff we’ll be saving for the Engagement workshop. But in the interest of spilling a bean or two, I’ll be devoting my posts over the next two weeks to sharing a thing or two about Engagement, the best and most distinctive part of TG.

We’ll start Monday by asking the crucial core question:

Um, which one is “E” anyway?