The Big Idea in the free Marketing Your Ministry workshops and labs we’re teaching this month and next is this:

The work of recruiting new champions for your cause does not belong to you. It belongs to your champions. Your job is to comprehensively equip your champions in relation to the cause so that they become living brochures for the cause (not for your organization) in your sphere of influence. (Your organization makes a great stage but a terrible actor.)

If that approach sounds familiar, I hope it’s because it’s nothing other than an effort to take 2 Timothy 2:2 and Ephesians 4:11-13 seriously.

It may, however, sound familiar because more and more secular nonprofits are beating us to our own punch, applying things that we Christians have known for years but have been afraid to apply in a development context because we were too busy clinging tenaciously to the very tactics that secular nonprofits have been busily abandoning because they don’t work anymore.

In the spirit of making us jealous unto good works, then, I share with you this post from Beth’s Blog in which she perfectly describes from a secular standpoint what we in Transformational Giving call “marketing as an O to P move”–in other words, a champion owning the cause in their sphere of influence to such a degree that they recruit new participants to the cause.

Beth calls this being an “imbedded free agent fundraiser”!

It’s a fabulous article. Read it not only to see a real-life example of a “living brochure”–an O-level champion recruiting new P’s for the cause of helping children in Cambodia–but also to soak in Beth’s tips about how nonprofits can support the “imbedded free agent fundraisers” in their own network.