Here’s a pop quiz:

When you send out a fund raising letter to your donors, what do you want them to do with it?

If your answer is, ‘Send it back to me with a check in the conveniently provided postage paid business reply envelope,’ guess what – that’s the wrong answer.

‘Huh?’ you may say. ‘But what else would you want them to do with it?’

First, whatever we send to our donor/champions, we should want them to send it on to somebody else. We don’t want them to simply write us a check. It’s great if they do, but what we really want them to do is to take that letter and share the involvement opportunity it describes with everyone they know – and we want them to co-own and collaborate in the execution of the vision, not just enjoy how nicely we describe it. We want them down at the coffee shop saying, ‘Larry, I know your family doesn’t always enjoy the Christmas holidays because of all the conflict and strife – I have this Peacemaker Calendar that really helped my family last year, and I want to share it with you now…’ And the year after that, we want Larry sharing the calendar with his network of friends.

Second of all, we should want fewer and fewer of the fund raising letters to come from us and more and more of the fund raising letters to come from them. From them to them. I don’t want my recipient to stop at bringing Larry into the circle; I want him to go out and find people who need help, and send ­them letters asking to make a donation through me. I want to transform him into someone who is an active agent for Christian change – to turn him from a blank file in a donor list into a living, breathing servant of the Lord.

‘Oh, I know what you’re talking about,’ you might be thinking. ‘That’s a Sponsor Get A Sponsor program. We’ve done that before.’

But ‘Sponsor get a sponsor’ is not what we’re talking about. Sponsor get a sponsor is fine as far as it goes – it’s one of the best ways to create more two-way communications loops. (I’m describing the kind of campaign where each donor gets a stack of envelopes and letters, and we ask him or her to hand-address them and give them to everyone on their street or neighborhood.) This is a generally effective approach, and it gets even better responses than the very best direct mail approaches, because most people are automatically willing to consider what their neighbor has to say.

But the weakness of this, without a transformational foundation, is that once the new sponsor is ‘gotten’, they just go into the same two-way file – their relationship is with the ministry, not with the man or woman who personally brought them into it. Instead of taking over the relationship, it should be left in the hands of the recruiter – with the ministry constantly giving these agents tools and ideas to communicate with our new ministry partners. We want to be in the loop – we just don’t want to be the loop.

Forget friend raising and relationship building! Forget getting people to support you! Forget building a network with you at the hub! Focus instead on observing existing networks, and then injecting meaning into them, with you as the convening mechanism, the agitator, the play-by-play guy, the buttonholer.

Our failure to do this points to the most fundamental problem with traditional fundraising, which we’ll disclose in the next post.