Gather Donors/Volunteers Together not to Appreciate them but to Discuss and Debate the Cause

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Pastor Foley

James Howell at Call & Response provides a perfect postscript to our recently completed series on coaching your champions corporately. His topic is clergy gatherings rather than donor/volunteer events, but the principle is the same: gather your constituents together to genuinely discuss and debate issues of real substance, not merely to affirm, encourage, or relax the attendees.

Recently our church hosted a big conference for clergy, with great speakers, lots of enthusiastic buzz, warm feelings, and expressions of gratitude once it was over.  But what is the purpose of such functions?  Do they really help? Or just bolster our feelings and sense of vocation a bit?

I was left wondering this because I left the event to fly to Germany to represent the Methodists in a conversation with Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed on the Doctrine of Justification.  When I tell people (clergy or laity) of my destination and work, they gaze a bit vaguely past me in puzzlement.  We don’t care much about doctrine.  We care very much about technique:  at our clergy event, if we’d offered some handy tips on how to increase giving, attenders would have been even more giddy.  But if the event had been about the doctrine of Justification, nobody much would have come.

The cognitive dissonance on this was underlined for me in that one of our event speakers, Philip Jenkins, has a new book entitled “Jesus Wars” — so I downloaded it into my Kindle to read on the plane.  In the 5th century, Jenkins reminds us, people travelled to big clergy events, not to be “inspired” or to bask in much-needed fellowship.  They came to do what I went to Wittenberg to do:  argue doctrine.  They even hired armed thugs, riots broke out, politicians got involved, and regular shopkeepers and laborers all over the world were abuzz over the debates.

What topic of substance could you convene your donors–and public officials and even leaders of other nonprofits that work in the same cause you do–to discuss and debate?

Delete your next charity auction or golf scramble–the world is already groaning under the weight of a few million too many of those. Instead, convene a summit around a topic of genuine value and controversy related to your cause.

If armed thugs show up and a riot breaks out, rejoice: you’re in the company of no less than the early church fathers themselves.

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People Don’t Want to Rate Charities. They Want to Become Charity.

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Pastor Foley

The enthusiasm for charity rating sites is untiring…among charity professionals.

Among the general public?

Meh. Not so much.

The main problem with charity rating sites is that they presume a particular relationship between donors and charities that is passing away, namely, the relationship of supporter to supported, where the assumption is that people would give more if they knew more.

Forget that this is a premise that was disproved by social marketing two decades ago (information, it turns out, does not drive behavioral change; instead, small behavior change drives larger behavior change). Instead, try to imagine anyone under the age of 35 getting excited about the charity rating system for which Dan Pallotta casts a vision in his HBR post, An iTunes for Choosing Charities:

Imagine this. You log onto Everycharity.org (or whatever it ends up being called). A website opens: Instead of looking like it was designed by PhD candidates in MIT’s accounting program, it’s as visually seductive and appealing as iTunes…

On the home page, there’s a giant heart where you type in the name of the charity you want to learn about… A video pops up with a great big “play” button. You click to watch the executive director of the charity talk for five minutes about the organization’s goals, the progress it’s making — or not making — toward those goals, and what information the organization uses to gauge whether it’s getting results.

Don’t feel like watching the video? Just click the button that says “Dreams,” and you’ll see information about the organization’s goal for the year and its goal for the next five years.

Watch the executive director talk for five minutes about his or her nonprofit? Read five years of someone else’s goals?

When was the last time you saw someone under 35 interested in doing that?

Now imagine someone under the age of 35 clicking to a site that leads with the following:

Forming a nonprofit organization is a powerful way to support a worthwhile cause. As a nonprofit entity, you are eligible to receive private and public grants and apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS. When you have applied for tax exempt status you can solicit tax-deductible donations, which is critical to fundraising.

Preliminary name search to confirm organization name is available
Preparation and filing of articles of incorporation
Optional preparation of Tax ID
Optional preparation of 501(c)3 application for tax exempt status
More than 1 million satisfied customers
Access to online status center
World-class customer support
FREE Sage Peachtree accounting software
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No contest. Legalzoom.com wins by a mile. And until we understand that people (the group formally known as “donors”) are interested in their dreams (not our own), and until we can serve as a platform (not the main attraction) for their ability to impact the causes they love, we will forever mislead ourselves into thinking that an enhanced income stream is just a few positive charity reviews away.

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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!

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