Nice piece by the folks at Hanopolis on the recent coming-of-age ceremony of a group of Korean students as they finished their college exams. Has me thinking about what occasions we mark–and don’t mark–for our donors and church members as they grow to fullness in the cause.

High school seniors who took their college exams in November in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, participated in a ceremony marking their transition from childhood to adulthood, Dec. 7, Tuesday.

Participants in the so-called “Coming-of-age Ceremony” included both male and female students who put on traditional clothes intended for “grown men”, strictly speaking.

In a world with fewer ceremonies marking life’s transitions, the event was arranged with the help of a Confucian school in order for teens to experience traditional culture as well as help them in the next phase of their lives.

While ceremonies are often seen as pointless and empty, acts pregnant with symbolism and metaphor have important psychological impact on participants.

What “acts pregnant with symbolism and metaphor” do we undertake with our donors?

Gayle Gifford and Jonathan Howard at Cause and Effect have written one of the few posts on this subject of donor rituals:

“On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.”

All Girl Scouts events, with donors or volunteers, include a flag ceremony with a reciting of the Girl Scout Promise. Through this simple ritual, donors internalize Girl Scouts’ values and symbolically re-affirm their support for the history and tradition of this 90 year-old organization.

The Jewish Foundation of Manitoba set out to create a meaning experience for donors when it created its Endowment Book of Life. Donors create a written story of their lives which they sign at a special Signing Ceremony in front of family, friends and peers.

Their story is then displayed at the Foundation through an interactive, web-based kiosk and the stories are also posted on the organization’s website. Signers receive a commemorative gift of their story mounted on specially-designed plaque.

Since 1998, the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba has averaged 56 new signers a year and generated $2 million in received gifts with legacy commitments from 255 more (as of 2004).

Sadly, however, the only donor development milestones that are marked in most organizations are donations, which are marked through receipts and thank you calls, and annual years of volunteering, marked through appreciation banquets. These are generally not bad things, but they hardly exhaust the possibilities.

Peter Bregman just did a thoughtful post in HBR on The Value of Ritual in Your Workday. He notes that the first step in marking development milestones is really just paying attention to the development that is happening around you.

Rituals are about paying attention. They’re about stopping for a moment and noticing what you’re about to do, what you’ve just done, or both. They’re about making the most of a particular moment. And that’s something we could use a lot more of in the business world.

True, that.

But what is it that we notice when it comes to donors and members?

Typically only the actions of direct and immediate benefit to our organization. As a result, our donor and member development programs bear more resemblance to operant conditioning schemes than efforts to help people grow in the cause. That is, we pay attention to whatever leads to greater and more frequent giving.

But donor and member development rituals should be something more and other than self-serving moments. At its heart, Transformational Giving (TG) is about recognizing and ritualizing moments of growth for donors and members. What is recognized and ritualized in TG is any step intentionally undertaken by the donor or member on the path to full maturity in the cause.

Are you paying attention to those? Do you have the kind of relationship with your donors or members that you would know when such steps happen? Would they even think to share those with your organization?

As Bregman notes, the first step in that process is to commit to a mindfulness to pay attention to the donor’s/member’s relationship to the cause, not just your organization’s needs.