If You Train Your Development Officer In Only One Area, Make Sure It’s This One

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Pastor Foley

I’m working out of our Korea office for the next few weeks, and while here I get to undertake one of my most favorite tasks:

The care and feeding of our new development officer.

Not meaning to sound melodramatic, but this is a new hire not only for our office here but really for the whole country. That’s because development is in its infancy here in Korea–especially among Christian organizations. So undertaking the process of hiring and training in an environment where everything is new and pristine and undisturbed by the polluting preconceptions of our profession is both exhilarating and daunting. One must consider every step of training really, really carefully in an effort to do as much as possible really, really intentionally.

So as I was reflecting on this today/tonight/this morning (jet lag r us), a question began to formulate itself in my head:

In training a development officer, do you begin by:

A. Teaching her about your organization?
B. Teaching her “the ropes of development”–the tools, techniques, and strategies necessary to raise money as quickly as possible?
C. Teaching her about the cause your organization champions?

If you’ve read even a post or two from this blog before, you’ll suspect immediately that I would choose Option C. But if you’ve read this blog for some time, you’ll know that when confronted with any set of Options A, B, and C, I’m definitely an Option D kind of guy.

And sure enough, the more I wrestled with this, the more I concluded that the correct answer really needs to be:

D. Engaging in comprehensive spiritual formation of the development officer

This is definitely not the trendy pick in a profession which typically prefers hiring people who have sales backgrounds or who are “good with people.” After all, most organizations hire development officers because the executive director is too busy to do development anymore. And many organizations that hire development officers do so because they need money yesterday, so the last thing they feel like they can afford to do is to focus on the spiritual development of anybody or anything–at least until the tide of checks come flowing in (which of course it will now that there’s a full-time development professional on staff…right?).

Given these criteria and conditions under which development pros are hired, two things become immediately clear:

  1. It’s clear why the organization will begin training the development professional in Options A and B. After all, understanding the organization and understanding fundraising techniques appear to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for raising money.
  2. Given point 1, it’s clear why the average tenure of a development officer is eighteen months. The approach may smack of common sense, but the uniform experience of organizations just like yours is that it doesn’t work and you shouldn’t be the latest to dash your head against that particular wheel as you reinvent it.

Transformational Giving would seem to favor Option C, helping the development officer to grow in the cause your organization is tasked with championing. And, indeed, there’s a lot to be said for that: hiring someone who is not at the O (Ownership) level of your cause, and then asking them to grow Owners of your cause doesn’t generally make a lot of sense.

But what I’m realizing more and more with each passing day is that what is lacking not only among most development officers but among most nonprofit leaders generally is comprehensive spiritual maturity:

  • Many of us don’t know the Gospel too well
  • Many of us don’t know the purpose of the church and the nonprofit’s role in helping to renew it (rather than being an alternative to it)
  • Many of us are just not that generous, and we have seriously questionable attitudes toward and practices of giving
  • Many of us are picture perfect images of imbalanced Christian leaders, whose ongoing spiritual formation practices have (if we’re even disciplined enough for this) shrunken down to a five-minute daily devotional time
  • Many of us give off a vibe that this is a good thing–we say that balance and spiritual maturity are good, but we want to be known as workaholics who never stop stumping for our organizations and doing what it takes to keep them afloat

And yet the equally significant (maybe even bigger) problem is:

  • Many of our donors are exactly the same way

So to corrupt a phrase from Jesus: Development officer, develop thyself…before thou triest to develop others.

As my wife and I have spent time this week with our new development coordinator, we’ve both come to the same conclusion:

If this person is going to be successful in coaching champions, she probably needs to come and live in our home with us for about a year, watching what we do, observing us as we coach champions, traveling with us to pick up the spiritual disciplines and habits we’ve developed for life on the road, and growing comprehensively as a Christian.

That may sound extreme–having your new development officer move in with you–and we’re still talking as an executive team about what it would mean for us to do this. But I’m not so sure it’s not a whole lot more realistic than most of our training programs. I mean, the sum total of our sector’s training programs has yielded an environment where development professionals get canned after eighteen months because they are not successful.

And I think the biggest cure for our own lack of balance as nonprofit leaders is to have someone living with us and watching our every move with the command to imitate us. There’s something about being watched that prompts one to renew–or perhaps develop for the first time–healthy habits that lead to comprehensive spiritual growth.

And maybe in the end that’s the best way to choose which development professional to hire: Ask yourself the question, “Do I want this person living with me and my family for the next year?”

If that’s the question you take to the hiring process, you might be a whole lot less likely to hire the shower curtain ring salesman with the gift of gab.

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Three New (Slightly Flawed) Signature Participation Projects I Like and How to Make Them Better

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s been six months or more since we last commended specific Signature Participation Projects (SPPs) to you via this blog, but three new good ones have come to my attention in the last few weeks that I want to share with you for our joint edification and encouragement along the TG Road. Each of these SPPs may be slightly or egregiously flawed, but you have to admire the chutzpah.

Here are brief summaries of each, along with my quick gloss on how I might tweak or totally rework each one in an effort to to make it better:

1. Tours of London, Led by the City’s Homeless

Inspired by London’s Sock Mob, which is a volunteer group that engages routinely with London’s homeless, Unseen Tours offer an entertaining and poignant walk through the streets of London with trained homeless guides, giving participants a historical but also unexplored perspective. The tours interweave the guides’ own stories and experiences, giving participants a view of the city through the lens of homelessness while introducing a new social consciousness into commercial walking tours. Four routes are currently available — more are coming soon, the group says — each culminating in a “merry pub trip” at the end.

Love it–the perfect SPP for a mission or homeless shelter. Helps prevent us from viewing homeless men and women as objects of pity and lets us see them as knowledgeable individuals whose insights on homelessness and poverty and grace are invaluable. For Christian orgs I’d use graduates of rehabilitation programs as the tour guides, and I’d replace the “merry pub trip” with a prayer and communion service back at the mission.

2. Journeys by the American Bible Society

Whether it’s a daily or weekly e-mail Bible study, audio, print, or a text message, you can explore the eternal truths of the Bible in the way that best fits your life. With a variety of topics topics to choose from, each journey contains verses and Bible studies each day of your journey—making God’s Word relevant and personal to you.

I like ABS’ setup which enables readers to build customized study plans of different lengths (7 days, 40 days, 100 days, ongoing) focused on different topics (Addictions, Anger, Anxiety, etc) using a variety of delivery methods (SMS, email, web, voice mail–my favorite, audio download) and searchable according to a variety of filters (themes, essentials, practices, faces, etc). My concern here would be the probability of users to fall into a perpetual “P” (participation) pattern of going from study to study rather than the study catapulting someone into an intentional formation process driven not by passing interest but rather by the desire to grow to full maturity in Christ across each Work of Mercy and Piety. An amazon.com-style “If you selected X, consider moving on to Y” could facilitate a workable Participation-to-Engagement-type conversion.

3. Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one another’s sins. After passing the application’s obligatory security PIN system (conventional online security measures are the app’s primary faith-orientation), you come to an interface resembling a confessional booth. Through the left door you can “confess,” offering your sins to whoever is listening; behind the closed door you can “absolve” any sins received; and at the far side you can “reflect,” considering the shared confessions of others, conveniently arranged like a pinball machine’s top-ten list.

The service requires that every user play both Sinner and Saint, and a novice is granted five bits of each one’s currency: Five Horns for confessing, and five Haloes for granting penances.

No. I like this. I really do. Well, I mean, as it currently stands it’s more atrocious than admirable, but there’s a germ of something good and helpful somewhere in here, currently wrapped up in something with all the delicacy and sophistication and health of deep fried butter.  I encourage you to read the rest of the post and see if you share my sense that if O (Ownership)-level guides mature in their faith were there to guide…and greater opportunities were given for coaching and instructing Participants…and if some decent theology could be worked in there, well, then you might have something here. I’m just saying.

In this still-innocent new church, maybe it is unsurprising that gluttons seem only to regret single instances of pizza, chicken nuggets, or cheesecake, never wrestling with longstanding food addictions, and the wrathful never repent of physical violence. But in the nearly empty pews we find traces of real pathos. One penitent doesn’t know how to forgive a friend who called him “a fat faggot” over the internet and then accused him of forging his evidence. Another was thrown out of a strip club for saying “God must hate strippers” to a dancer who confided that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts.

And you? See any good SPPs lately?

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“Dear Missionary, Please Stop Sending Prayer Letters. Sincerely, The 21st Century”

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Here’s a new year’s resolution for all missionaries:

Stop sending prayer letters. Switch completely to regular personalized electronic communication with your donors in 2011.

I know, I know. You have no time for communication while you’re in the field, etc etc. Older donors can’t use anything more electronic than a blender, etc etc. People treasure generic letters sent out with old news months behind schedule, etc etc.

These are all great reasons to stick to printed prayer letters, except for one thing:

They’re all based on data which is staler than the Christmas cookies still remaining on your counter.

Christianity Today ran a nice update piece on missionary/donor communication just in time to help you toss out old thinking about support raising and ring in the new. Among the insights:

  • A third of Wycliffe missionaries email daily from the field with supporters back home
  • Around 70 percent of those missionaries have 40+ hours of Internet access weekly from the field; 75% have high-speed connections
  • 50% of the missionaries Wycliffe surveyed are able to stay in the field longer and make furloughs shorter because of electronic communication

Those are staggering numbers with which most missionary communication strategies have yet to catch up.

Missionaries with older constituents may be tempted to disregard this data, consoled by the certainty of the incompatibility between the elderly and the ethernet cable.

But the times, they have a-changed.

  • Facebook use among those aged 65+ increased by 100% in the last year alone, which means a quarter of those in that age category are now Facebook active (half of those between the ages of 50 and 64 are as well)
  • 11% of adults aged 50 to 64 now use Twitter
  • Old people can’t read the prayer letters you send anyway because you always make the font so small so you can fit more in on a single page

OK, so the last one is just a personal rant. But as long as I’m indulging personal rants, permit me one final question:

Why is it that the missionaries who tell me that they’re too busy to communicate with their donors while in the field are the same ones whose Farmville and Mafia Wars updates are constantly clogging up my Facebook page?

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