Introducing a New Mini-series: Coach Your Champions Corporately

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Today we launch into a multi-part series on a donor development (and, for churches, member discipleship) topic which may be the most important development/discipleship topic that almost no one is talking about.

I have in mind the corporate coaching of champions: a fundamental commitment to turn away from (yes–I mean, repent of) doing donor development as a one-to-one or one-to-many process and a decisive turn toward coaching and equipping all of your champions simultaneously, in one another’s presence, where their substantive, cause-focused interaction with you and with each other forms the length and breadth of your development undertaking, and where the growth of one leads to the growth of all (yourself included).

At root is the recognition that things happen in groups that don’t happen individually. Groups have resources on which we may draw, resources about which modern donor development and, sadly, member discipleship are woefully ignorant and negligent.

It’s not that we don’t bring our donors and members together. We do. There are banquets, auctions, wine and cheese benefits, volunteer appreciation luncheons, and even volunteer training events. In churches there is the, you know, Sunday service among other gatherings.

But for the most part, to draw on language Luke Stamps shares from Michael Horton, these gatherings aggregate individual experience and donor/organization (or member/church) relationships rather than serving as platforms where shared knowledge and skills and resources and giftings are expected and enabled to cascade from the corporate or collective that is gathered onto the individual (including the pastor or nonprofit exec):

It is well worth exploring Christian piety as a cascading phenomenon. Reformation piety . . . rather than expressing Christian life as flowing outward from the individual to broader relationships (i.e., the church as the aggregate of the individually regenerate), sees it as cascading down from the church and the family to the individual.

The basic unit of donor/member development, in other words, is the collective–the champion network of the nonprofit or the congregation of the church. The collective experiences the cause together. The collective processes the challenges and opportunities together, learning from each other and from a variety of resources under the guidance of mature facilitators. The collective makes decisions together, allocating resources like the collective’s time, money, and attention, in its work of attending to the cause or causes to which it is called.

As we’ll see in this series, this is something altogether different from a pastor preaching at a congregation or a nonprofit exec leading a training event. And on the other hand, it is also something altogether different from crowdsourcing. This is not a “donor cloud” of shared bias and ignorance that we are seeding.

Instead, what we have in mind is something old and new brought back out of the treasure chest: A practical way for all donor/member development to be daisy-chained together so that no one’s development is an end in itself but rather each one’s development is drawn upon fully and directly and intentionally as the primary machinery on which we rely to further the development of all the rest.

Donors developing donors, as it were–members developing members.

Or, if that doesn’t sound radical enough:

Only donors developing donors. And only members developing members.

Should be a fun series. It will definitely be best read…corporately.

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Two Videos: How Donors Connect…and How They Don’t

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Most of us in the nonprofit world exhibit a skewed, inaccurately idealized image of:

  • how donors are connected
  • what they are connected to
  • what passes along those connections

Our idealized fundraising models are based on a Matrix-like image of donor connectivity. In our models, information generated by a nonprofit–in the form of a newsletter or email or tweet–tumbles outward from us on a straight-line path to a donor, who receives it and passes it on to others in his or her sphere of influence in the way and for the purpose the nonprofit intended.

That idealized model is flawed in several ways:

  • In reality, donors pass on very little of the information they receive from and about organizations
  • Of the information they do pass on, they rarely pass it on in a straight-line fashion, i.e., even a retweet reshapes the information through the change in context (from nonprofit to donor)
  • Donors pass on information for their own purposes, not those of the nonprofits originating the information (think of this as a kind of information mashup, which is the typical way information is transferred by human beings). Since nonprofits rarely think in terms of the things that might motivate donors to pass on information, they can’t imagine either the content or the form that is most conducive to information transfer

A far more accurate illustration of donor connectivity comes from the following video, which, while designed to depict (of all things) traffic patterns in Lisbon, perfectly conveys a number of profound truths about how donors connect. First watch the video, then consider these truths:

  • People are not discrete nodes on an idealized information transfer network but are instead more like blood vessels, smooshed up into each other through densely packed relationships (both casual and formal) as they (not simply strands of information) tumble along through life.
  • In other words, people don’t simply pass on information but instead pass on themselves in a million small ways everyday. Sure there are transactions, but these are far and away the least common (though must studied) way humans share. The main way humans share is that their characters/natures/personalities simply smoosh into each other as they “do life” together and side by side.
  • The most effective way to impact your cause, then, is not to supply donors with information, as if they dutifully pass it along to others, but to support donors in their own character/nature/personality transformation as relates to the cause itself.
  • Remember that these kinds of transformations are never individual in nature: when something truly impacts our character/nature/personality, we will pass it along to others as a matter of course, simply by rubbing up against them as we live.

Sum it up in two observations:

  • The modern fundraising model is fundamentally flawed because it thinks in terms of information transfer leading to financial transactions. Life is far more organic than that. Fundraising must think in terms of personal transformations that–of necessity–impact all those who come in contact with the one who has been/is being transformed.
  • Because modern fundraising traffics in idealized (read: “badly flawed”) ways of thinking of human beings as discrete containers of meaning and interest, it overlooks that fundraising is inherently communal/corporate and must be comprehended and practiced as such.

Next week we launch a mini-series on this blog that I think will rank as one of the top four or five that we’ve yet done on this site. In essence, it will be a call to shift fundraising from a Matrix-like informational flow conception to a blood vessel-like process of corporate transformation.

I realize that may sound rather abstract or theoretical at the moment, but just extend a little trust my way, give the above videos one more view as you muse over these things, and then join me as we reconvene next week to talk about Coaching Champions Corporately.

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Expect the Volunteer Boom to Show Up at Your Organization Right After the Massive Generational Wealth Transfer

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Pastor Foley

The red nonprofit herring of our time was the Great Wealth Transfer, in which trillions of dollars would seep out of the wills and estates of people who were not terribly charitable during their lifetime but would apparently become so in their deaths, thus freeing nonprofits from having to do, you know, actual work to help champions develop philanthropically.

Next up in the nonprofit myth cycle?

The Great Volunteer Boom, in which millions of baby boomers will stream into nonprofit organizations to offer countless hours of service.

One of my favorite bloggers, Joanne Fritz, brings two articles on voluntarism to our attention, and the one does a great job of preventing us from misreading the other.

The first, Wild Apricot’s Are Your Ready for the Volunteer Boom?, contains data well worth reviewing:

There are 77 million Baby Boomers – between the ages of 46 and 64 – in the US and another 10 million across Canada. Based on sheer numbers alone, this group represents a boon to the volunteer world. But it gets even better – “boomers” are also generally well educated, wealthy and skilled individuals who have already proven their willingness to volunteer – with nearly a third of boomers volunteering for formal organizations. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service’s “Baby Boomers & Volunteering” issue brief, these Boomer volunteers:

  • Have the highest volunteer rate of any age group. The volunteer rates for boomers – 33.2% – is the highest of any age group.
  • Volunteer an average of 51 hours a year. With the exception of people over the age of 65, boomers volunteer the most of any group.

The predicted volunteer boom turns on the same failed logic as the generational wealth transfer, namely, that individuals who have not chosen to volunteer before the age of 65–which would encompass the time their children were in school, their membership in a faith community (which, statistically, is not likely to change much at retirement), and their holiday celebration patterns (like volunteering at a rescue mission at Thanksgiving)–are now going to become voluntaristic when they retire, as opposed to remaining as self-focused as they have been in the 65 years prior.

Anyone want to take that bet?

At the other end of the spectrum, Joanne notes a great article on Philanthro-teens delving into the nonprofit world.

But guess what? It’s not your nonprofit world they’re delving into:

Borrowing from trends in celebrity charity, kids are mobilizing their peers to address everything from infant mortality in developing nations to neighborhood concerns. They’re donating presents to charity, and they’re establishing their own nonprofits.

“The number of kids creating their own organizations and taking action for causes they care about is skyrocketing,” said Nancy Lublin, chief executive of DoSomething.org, a New York-based nonprofit that helps young people to engage in philanthropy.

“Kids today just saw their parents go through a recession, get laid off and struggle,” Ms. Lublin said. “They look around and say: ‘What’s the point? I don’t just want a second car in my driveway. I want a life of purpose.’ ”

And that life of purpose means starting a nonprofit organization of one’s own rather than getting a job that yields the cash to fund not only the second car in the driveway but the support of other people’s nonprofits.

Where does it all point?

Well, definitely away from a boom of people–young or old–eager to support you as you live out your dream of professional nonprofit service.

But towards success for any nonprofit bold and savvy enough to exist as a platform where people young and old can be equipped to tackle the cause drawing on their own unique insights using their own unique gifts.

A nonprofit that serves as the stage and not the actor can definitely expect a major boom in the years to come.

But a nonprofit that serves as the actor?

That boom is just about to go bust.

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