How to Coach Your Champions Corporately, Step II: Assign Your Group a Month of Scripture Study on the Cause

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Pastor Foley

We’re working step-by-step through how to convert your individually-focused fundraising/development function into a corporate coaching process. Ready for the second step?

Give each of these 20 to 30 champions you identified in our previous post a month-long assignment to Search The Scripture in order to determine how God performs your ministry’s cause–or “Work of Mercy”–on them, as well as what explicit guidance he gives them on how to mirror this specific form of his mercy to the world.

In collaboration with Larry Lloyd and our pals from the Memphis Leadership Foundation we’ve drawn up an example for ABC Mission, a (fictitious…we hope) homeless shelter in Memphis, and how they might go about doing this with their champions.

Just click to download the Sample Scripture Search Worksheet.

Note that the worksheet contains answers written in from a particular champion (likely Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert given the font the champion used here…)

In the sample, pay particular attention to the questions that follow each of the verses on the worksheet.  It’s extremely important to give your champions clear guidance in how to study the Scripture in relation to your particular cause/Work of Mercy. This is not free-form Bible study. It’s prayerful study designed to help your champions grow in (1) receiving God’s mercy in a particular cause area, and (2) passing that specific mercy on to others as a way of glorifying God’s name and highlighting his generosity.

And for this reason, a worksheet can only be the beginning. Use the downloadable sample above to develop your own version, and then let’s talk in our next post about your role as a coach in guiding each of the participants through the process.

Special thanks to .W’s Jesse Medina and Memphis Leadership Foundation’s Larry Lloyd for lifting the barge and toting the bale with me to make this mini-series possible!

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How to Coach Your Champions Corporately, Step I: Gather a Group Interested in Personal Growth in the Cause

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Pastor Foley

We’ve spent the past week of posts talking about the why of corporate coaching of champions. Now we’re going to walk step-by-step through how this process should look from your perspective as a nonprofit “platform.”

Today, let’s take the first step:

Identify a group of 20-30 champions who are interested in growing to full maturity in the cause.

This is literally as simple as working through your contact list (note that I didn’t say “donor list,” and it’s not just because I dislike the word; it’s because you need to consider drawing more widely than that–more on this below.)

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t be trying to persuade anybody to participate in this process.  If champions join this process grudgingly, neither you or them is going to experience much growth.  Some of your closest and most committed donors will decline your offer and you may be surprised to find that some of those who you might have considered to be marginal or disinterested will jump at the opportunity.

Be indiscriminate in your invitation and even go for unlikely targets – folks like the leader of a “competing” nonprofit (if you’re both involved in the same cause, it is to your benefit that they become mature, too), or a pastor of a local church who has never been involved with your organization, or even a non-Christian.

Alright–20 to 30. Got it? Take a day or two to prayerfully assemble your list (notepad by bed works well for me in this regard), and then let’s reconnoiter for the next post in order to consider the next step.

 

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

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Coach Your Champions Corporately, Part II: Individually Mature Donors and Disciples are “Unimaginable”

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Pastor Foley

All churches and nonprofits dream of having mature champions who contribute in mature and $ignificant ways to the mission of the organization. The challenge is, few organizations seem to have latched on to a method to predictably find or generate such people. Good donors and strong members remain the achingly rare exception rather than the rule.

But why?

Gerald Schlabach, author of Unlearning Protestantism, a brilliant book on how to be Protestant in all of the right ways and none of the wrong ones (after all, knowing what to protest and what not to is half the battle), suggests it’s because we moderns “have ever fewer resources for forming lives of Christian discipleship or communities of Christian witness.”

Or, as he puts it more bluntly later on down the same page (43):

After all, the formation of authentically Christian lives is unimaginable apart from communities of Christian character. If one is being formed, then one is not simply making discrete decisions but is developing habits that extend the character of one action into later ones. [Editor’s note: In Transformational Giving parlance, we would call this the P to E move.]

Habits require training, as one internalizes moral motor skills that one can only clumsily imitate at first, based on the example of others. If those habits are to be good rather than bad, however, practitioners must apprentice with those more advanced in the craft–in this case, the craftlike practice of Christian discipleship.

Having built a preliminary case over these last couple of posts for the “why” of coaching your champions corporately, we’ll begin to turn in our next post to the “how,” using a model I’ve been developing for years but am just now writing out in training form as part of a year-long workshop series I’m authoring in cooperation with the Memphis Leadership Foundation and my good bud, Larry “Cap” Lloyd.

If you’re tired of waiting for individually mature donors and disciples to drop out of the sky and your current development methods aren’t bearing much fruit in growing them up from the seed form in which they typically come, let’s meet up again on the other side of the weekend, right here on your favorite Transformational Giving blog, for Part III of Coaching Your Champions Corporately.

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