How to Coach Your Champions Corporately, Step VI: Set Your Champions Loose!

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Graduation time! If you’ve made it all the way through this month-long mini-series on coaching your champions corporately, don your mortarboard: It’s time to walk across the stage and recieve your diploma. In fact, that’s really the final step:

After you’ve answered those ten questions together over the next ten months, get together one final time (this will result in a twelve month process altogether).  And in this final meeting, work with participants to create a personal plan of action related to the cause.

Laying out a personal plan of action related to the cause need not be scary or doctoral thesis-like. It’s simply an answer to the question, What will you do differently as a result of this process we’ve just completed?

Ask participants to each raise up a group of their own that they can lead through this same process – with your help, of course–composed of people in their sphere of influence (friends, family, co-workers). Help them to identify the people they want to invite and then hold them accountable to do the inviting and calendar the process.

As these champions go back into their sphere of influence, taking their own friends and family through this process, the cause becomes replete with champions who are becoming fully mature–champions, who, ideally, you will never meet, since they’re being coached by the champions that you are fully focused on continuing to coach!

And this leads to one cardinal caution:

As a facilitator, and especially as an owner of the cause who has likely been at this for a number of years, it can be tempting for you to agree to let them bring their friends to you to train, rather than them leading a group themselves.

But counter that temptation with this realization:

There’s no leap-frogging ahead in this process. Everyone struggles as a leader their first time out, particularly in a process like this one that is likely so new to them. And that’s totally OK. Let them embark on a group process with your full support…but not your commitment to lead their group for them. Offer to meet with them regularly during the time they are leading. Agree to drop by their meetings now and then.

But don’t shortchange their growth to maturity by leading in their stead.

Instead, provide them with resources for prayer and worship, service, and giving in order to enable their groups to be the best groups they can lead.

And fortunately there’s a resource designed to do just that!

It happens to be a book that I just completed, designed to help you facilitate this process for your champions, no matter what your cause happens to be.

That book, The Whole Life Offering: Christianity as Philanthropy goes on sale in early April. So go ahead and start making the transition to coaching your champions corporately whenever you’re ready. If you do end up getting stumped, let’s get stumped together: the book is actually perfect for reading together with your champions, and I’m never much further away than this blog.

And final thanks to .W’s Jesse Medina and Memphis Leadership Foundation’s Larry Lloyd for Powerpointing with me–rather than fingerpointing at me–to make this mini-series possible!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Coach Your Champions Corporately, Step V: Hold a Monthly Two Hour Meeting on Each Question

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

We’re four steps in to a comprehensive process to transform your individually focused fundraising/development function into a corporate coaching process. In Step 5, all your hard preparation and change begins to pay off, as champions undertake a year-long process of personal growth and transformation in the cause–a process that gathers momentum every month:

Every month hold a meeting to work through the next of the ten questions generated by the champions.  The homework that each champion (including yourself) should be completing is brought to the meeting, and discussion ensues–along with personal growth in every meeting for each champion.

The homework preparation sheet we recommend is one we created call The Quad Worksheet. It’s based on John Wesley’s Quadrilateral–the idea that each of us brings lenses of Reason, Tradition, Experience, and Revelation to our reading of the Scriptures. As you’ll see when you download the worksheet, it provides a great framework for gathering–and then sharing–information in a group discussion.

For each part of the quadrilateral, your champions should spend time before the meeting answering the question listed, using the sample Quadrilateral worksheet provided.  This is a simple way for your champions (and you!) to work through their own lenses – both in an effort to identify the assumptions they carry in, and in an effort to use those lenses as tools to help answer the questions that Scripture raises.

You’ll want to emphasize with your champions that the goal is not to complete this in the shortest amount of time possible.  Rather, it is to commit to thorough research on each point.

These guidelines might help:

  • Coach champions to spend a minimum of one hour on each of the four corners, one corner per week during the month that the group is setting out to find answers to one of the ten questions.
  • Challenge your champions to commit to consulting at least one resource for each corner.  It doesn’t matter whether it is a book, a website, a pastor, a nonprofit leader (encourage them to talk not just to you, but to individuals from other organizations involved in the cause), and, of course, friends and family members.
  • Encourage them to continue to study the Scriptures during the ten months, in their personal devotional time. Ask them at the start of each meeting to share any insights that have arisen from this process.
  • Suggest to champions that they each convene a small group of their own – either of their friends or family or church members – to discuss these questions at the same time that they’re participating in the group.

Here are a couple ideas to pack your meetings with power:

  • As the facilitator, follow up with your champions.  Call them during the month and ask what they’re learning.  Challenge them with your own learning, and help them to identify their assumptions.
  • Send out articles to your champions – whether they take a favorable position towards what you’re trying to accomplish or not – and help stir the soup.
  • During the meeting, don’t just go “around the table” asking each champion to share what they wrote.  Stimulate discussion.  Ask your champions to challenge one another’s findings with findings of their own.  Make every effort to turn your meetings into a place of growth by stimulating friendly and respectful debate.
  • Invite guests into the discussion: someone who has participated in one of your programs (not to offer a testimony, but to give their unique perspective as a result of their participation), other nonprofit leaders, a member of the community you are serving or trying to reach.

So where does ten months of these kind of meetings lead? To our next and final post (for now) on the subject of coaching your champions corporately–the “O” (Ownership) level step of helping them to share the process you’ve just modeled for them with others.

Special thanks to .W’s Jesse Medina and Memphis Leadership Foundation’s Larry Lloyd for becoming development blood brothers with me to make this mini-series possible!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Coach Your Champions Corporately, Step IV: Gather Your Champions to Develop Ten Questions

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Once you’ve identified champions who have completed the Searching Scripture worksheet you created (from the sample we provided in a previous post), you’re ready for the next step in the transition from individual to corporate coaching of champions:

Gather all of them together – whether it be in-person, over a conference call, or with video teleconferencing over the web – to identify the ten most pressing questions about your cause/Work of Mercy raised by their study of Scripture.

The reason why you want ten questions (and not answers…or even statements), is because, as you’ll see in a moment, each question is going to become a crucial element in a year-long learning process.

But first, let’s talk nuts and bolts.

We suggest making this a two-hour meeting, facilitated by you, the nonprofit leader.  Keep in mind that even while the nonprofit leader is holding this meeting and the nonprofit is acting as the platform for the champions to convene and talk to each other, the nonprofit leader is not there to provide answers or stump for money for the nonprofit.  In fact, you are there to act as a fellow learner, even while giving structure to the meeting itself.

As the leader, attention should be given to keeping the discussion on track and helping people to identify the lenses they are wearing (as a result of their tradition, experience, reason or revelation) so that they can relativize them and put them back under the authority of Scripture.

When our fictitious ABC Mission went through this process, the following ten questions were identified as the most pressing:

  1. How can we dispel the fear of homeless people that many have in our city?
  2. Should money be given to the homeless when they can use that money to purchase drugs, alcohol, etc.?
  3. How can the homeless become gainfully employed?
  4. What should be done about homeless panhandling and the problem it creates for local businesses?
  5. How can the health of the homeless in our area be preserved without creating either dependence or enormous debt?
  6. How can the homeless get plugged into a church community?
  7. Is there a way for the homeless in the area to become productive members of society?
  8. What is the best help an average family can give to a homeless person?
  9. What help can be offered to a family that is on the brink of homelessness?
  10. How can the strengths, education, leadership, work ethic, and experiences of the homeless serve both their own and our community’s interest?

These ten questions form the agenda of a monthly two-hour meeting with these same champions – one question per month.  You’ll want to ask champions to commit to:

  1. Coming to the meeting (or calling in, or logging on, etc.)
  2. Doing the preparation required before the meeting.

You’ll be tempted to bypass this process saying, “Oh, this is way too much work.  None of my champions will even want to do this.  Instead, I’ll hold a cheese and wine event and people will give me millions that night.”

First of all, that won’t happen, and you know it.

Second, these days, people are actually more likely to respond to requests for high commitment that results in their own personal transformation.

In her post titled Science of Giving 3: Do people give more if it’s painful?, Katya Andresen summarizes research from the book, The Science of Giving.  While most of us are inclined to believe that giving is done with a sort of “looking out for number one” mentality, Katya points out that just the opposite is often true.  The martyrdom effect (no insignificant language there) is the belief, from much research, that people often most value things that are difficult to achieve.

This means that, for us, they are more likely to enter into a demanding and involved process than a wine and cheese soiree…provided that they get to participate in a cause they care deeply about and that they will be able to grow as a result.

And this goes back to your job as the nonprofit leader that this is about the transformation of your champions.  If you haven’t strong-armed anyone into this process, it should be no problem.

And as you’ll see in the next post, those monthly meetings are not only powerful, productive, and a lot of fun; they’re also the key to this learning process “going viral,” as through your modeling of the process, champions become equipped to undertake this same process with others in their own sphere of influence.

Special thanks to .W’s Jesse Medina and Memphis Leadership Foundation’s Larry Lloyd for raising the fundraising pirate flag with me to make this mini-series possible!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment