If you are like most every other ministry or charity in the world, you spend a good chunk of your time developing a donor network. Your ‘network’, though, isn’t really a network. Instead, it’s a list of 1:1 relationships. You send out a request letter, and the donors read it (or not) and maybe they send a check (or not). Your donors aren’t inspired to become filled with the spirit of your ministry and to go and do likewise. Instead, they’re encouraged to admire how effective YOU are in doing the work, and to financially support YOUR wonderful efforts!

If your website—or TV station or 800 number or whatever—is built this way, so that it only broadcasts (in other words, the communication is one way and one focus: From you, out, about you, out), in order to make any money you’re going to have to have a really large audience.

The larger the audience, the more the money. The smaller the audience, well, you know.

But…

If your website or TV station or 800 number is built so that it facilitates genuine two-way conversation, it takes a much smaller network of people to generate a serious impact. Some ministries are beginning to realize this, and are developing these kind of networks, where there is genuine communication from the people in the field to the people in the office, as well as the requests that run the other way.

But even those ministries aren’t on to the real jet fuel. They’re still playing around with something that resembles the old computer bulletin board systems of the 1980s – systems where one or two people could be ‘online’ together at a time. Fun – and a lot more fun than playing on a computer by yourself – but still limited.

The real power to transform the finances and futures of non-profit ministries comes from an n-way network, where n equals the total number of users on the network. A network built for the purpose of enabling and encouraging every donor to talk with every other donor. A network where everyone in it loves the network – because the network is the physical expression of the spiritual vision held by its members.

According to our friends in the world of computer networking, the value of a network wired primarily for the purpose of enabling each of the users to communicate with each of the other users is exponentially more valuable than a much larger series of two-way communication loops.

In our next post we’ll translate that into English and offer a real-world example.