Just finished recording the Mission Increase Foundation DVD on reactivation of lapsed champions. I’ve always liked the subject, but teaching the material really choked me up emotionally in ways I wasn’t expecting.
In next week’s posts I want to share some specific thoughts and counsel from that workshop regarding the reactivation of lapsed champions (the DVD should be ready in two months, Lord permitting, and there’s still time for you to register for the live workshop and next month’s labs all across the MIFsphere).
But what I wanted to highlight today about the subject really does center around the subject of emotion; namely:
What emotion do you feel when you think about champions who have lapsed from involvement in the cause through your ministry?
Do you feel like…
Or do you feel like…
There’s a lot of recession-motivated talk these days on blogs and in fundraising books and mags about how reactivation of lapsed donors is an efficient, cost-effective way to generate net income more efficiently than new donor acquisition.
And it’s all true.
But when I hear lapsed champions being talked about in that way, I can’t help but be reminded of that first video, above.
And I don’t say that from any high horse. That’s the way I thought about lapsed donor reactivation as recently as a few years ago, as one of my staff reminded me when they showed me the “We haven’t heard from you in the last year, and frankly we’re concerned” letter I had recently recommended to ministries.
But one can’t study Transformational Giving in the Bible without being absolutely whalloped by the reality that God is the God of lost sheep. For crying out loud, Jesus even defines His mission as one of lapsed champion reactivation when He talks about being sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
So in preparation for next week’s posts on lapsed champions, I invite you to join me in praying that God gives us a heart more akin to the second video noted above rather than the first.
It’s with such a heart that tools, techniques, and strategies lose their luster and fade to black, and we tuck the airplane ticket in our shirt pocket and head out to the door to renew a broken relationship, not focused on generating cost effective net income.
Do the Word 
Amen!
Hi Eric. I went to your seminar a couple weeks back in Bellflower. I was really challenged in my thinking (paradigm) about fundraising. I’m fairly new at all of this as I was hired one year ago to establish a stateside office for a ministry I had never visited in Uganda. I had no non-prof experience and the whole thing has been a really hard learning curve. But God has been gracious in teaching me. I just want you to know I appreciate your teaching and your blog and will be visiting regularly to keep trying to shift my organizations focus into a more Biblical paradigm.
Thanks for all you do.