The Award for the Best Transformation Giving Year-End Appeal Goes to…

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Pastor Foley

…Greg Stier at Dare2Share Ministries!

Check out Greg’s year-end tremendous appeal, Please DON’T Give to Our “Emergency Need.”

The whole post is great, so make sure to click through. I especially like this part:

Now, if anyone had an emergency need it was the Apostle Paul. Waiting to appeal to the Emperor of Insanity (aka “Nero”) Paul is under house arrest. He is chained to another soldier as he pens his fundraising appeal letter to the Philippian believers. Can you imagine his letter reading this way:

“Dear Brothers and sisters in Christ, I have an urgent need. As I write this letter to you I am imprisoned. The conditions are not good and I need your immediate help. If I am not able to raise enough money for bail in the next thirty days I could die in prison or, worse yet, be executed by Nero. You hold the key to my freedom. Your generous gift will rescue me from prison and allow me to preach the gospel. Without it the gospel is imprisoned as well. Without it I could die and the spread of the gospel could come to a standstill. Please give as much as you can right away…before it’s too late.”

Instead he writes,

“Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.” Philippians 1:12-14

Even though Paul is in a true emergency situation he never calls it that. Why? Because he knows that God is large and in charge and is using it in powerful ways to spread the gospel in ways that he could have never anticipated.

Great work, Greg! You have truly illustrated the difference between traditional transactional fundraising and biblical discipleship through Transformational Giving.

As you close the year, dear reader, may you be able to say with Greg:

I can say with confidence that the economic downturn that America has suffered over the last few years“…has actually served to advance the gospel” through Dare 2 Share as well. Although we are smaller in budget and staff than we were a few years ago God has clarified our focus, deepened our dependencey on him and opened up new opportunities to spread the gospel in ways we never could have dreamed of. To be honest, I thank God for the challenging times he has put us through. It has softened our hearts and toughend our skin.

May God grant us all soft hearts and tough skins in 2011!

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Tithing is the New Thing in SECULAR Giving

Posted on December 27, 2010 by Pastor Foley

One of my least favorite arguments among Christians involves the question of whether Christians should tithe or not. Both sides of the debate get all hot and bothered, and nothing ever changes…

…in the church, anyway.

Outside the church, however, tithing is picking up steam. Thanks, Kirsten Bullock (her blog is the best weekly aggregator of articles on fundraising, by the way), for the link to the story on the launch of the Rutgers University chapter of Giving What We Can. Let me quote at length and assure you that the whole thing is a must-read:

By American standards, Nick Beckstead’s current salary is pretty small.

The Rutgers University graduate student earns less than $25,000 a year from his university stipend and the extra cash he picks up doing various academic jobs on campus.

But Beckstead has big plans. The philosophy student is pledging to donate everything he earns above $20,000 to charity while he’s a student, then give away 50 percent of his take-home pay for the rest of his life once he graduates and gets a job.

“People making an ordinary income can make a massive difference by donating,” said Beckstead, 25, of North Brunswick. “Most of us in the United States are among the richest in the world.”

Beckstead is part of Giving What We Can, a growing charity movement started by an Oxford University philosopher. Members pledge to give away 10 percent or more of their income for life to the most effective charities they can find, usually in developing countries where small amounts of money can directly save lives.

Thursday night, a group of Rutgers University students launched Giving What We Can’s first U.S. chapter with a rally and lecture at the Livingston Student Center in Piscataway. Students gathered to learn about the movement and hear from students who have already made pledges.

The featured speaker was Peter Singer, the controversial Princeton University bioethics professor known for his polarizing views on animal rights, human disabilities and euthanasia. Singer has written philosophical essays that argue it is morally indefensible for people to live in luxury while others starve.

Um… Aren’t those supposed to be our lines?

Sadly, we are too busy working to reassure ourselves that the best way to make sure we’re saved by grace is to be stingy and feel joyfully righteous about it. (“See? I’m not under the law! I’m under grace!  That must explain this nice watch I own.”)

Worth checking out the Giving What We Can giving pledge, which reveals how, astonishingly, one can tithe without getting one’s theological knickers in a knot over it all:

The Pledge to Give

I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to fight poverty in developing countries. I make this pledge freely, openly, and without regret.

There’s something about that last sentence that sounds like one of our lines, too…

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Marking Donor and Member Development Through Ritual

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Nice piece by the folks at Hanopolis on the recent coming-of-age ceremony of a group of Korean students as they finished their college exams. Has me thinking about what occasions we mark–and don’t mark–for our donors and church members as they grow to fullness in the cause.

High school seniors who took their college exams in November in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, participated in a ceremony marking their transition from childhood to adulthood, Dec. 7, Tuesday.

Participants in the so-called “Coming-of-age Ceremony” included both male and female students who put on traditional clothes intended for “grown men”, strictly speaking.

In a world with fewer ceremonies marking life’s transitions, the event was arranged with the help of a Confucian school in order for teens to experience traditional culture as well as help them in the next phase of their lives.

While ceremonies are often seen as pointless and empty, acts pregnant with symbolism and metaphor have important psychological impact on participants.

What “acts pregnant with symbolism and metaphor” do we undertake with our donors?

Gayle Gifford and Jonathan Howard at Cause and Effect have written one of the few posts on this subject of donor rituals:

“On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.”

All Girl Scouts events, with donors or volunteers, include a flag ceremony with a reciting of the Girl Scout Promise. Through this simple ritual, donors internalize Girl Scouts’ values and symbolically re-affirm their support for the history and tradition of this 90 year-old organization.

The Jewish Foundation of Manitoba set out to create a meaning experience for donors when it created its Endowment Book of Life. Donors create a written story of their lives which they sign at a special Signing Ceremony in front of family, friends and peers.

Their story is then displayed at the Foundation through an interactive, web-based kiosk and the stories are also posted on the organization’s website. Signers receive a commemorative gift of their story mounted on specially-designed plaque.

Since 1998, the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba has averaged 56 new signers a year and generated $2 million in received gifts with legacy commitments from 255 more (as of 2004).

Sadly, however, the only donor development milestones that are marked in most organizations are donations, which are marked through receipts and thank you calls, and annual years of volunteering, marked through appreciation banquets. These are generally not bad things, but they hardly exhaust the possibilities.

Peter Bregman just did a thoughtful post in HBR on The Value of Ritual in Your Workday. He notes that the first step in marking development milestones is really just paying attention to the development that is happening around you.

Rituals are about paying attention. They’re about stopping for a moment and noticing what you’re about to do, what you’ve just done, or both. They’re about making the most of a particular moment. And that’s something we could use a lot more of in the business world.

True, that.

But what is it that we notice when it comes to donors and members?

Typically only the actions of direct and immediate benefit to our organization. As a result, our donor and member development programs bear more resemblance to operant conditioning schemes than efforts to help people grow in the cause. That is, we pay attention to whatever leads to greater and more frequent giving.

But donor and member development rituals should be something more and other than self-serving moments. At its heart, Transformational Giving (TG) is about recognizing and ritualizing moments of growth for donors and members. What is recognized and ritualized in TG is any step intentionally undertaken by the donor or member on the path to full maturity in the cause.

Are you paying attention to those? Do you have the kind of relationship with your donors or members that you would know when such steps happen? Would they even think to share those with your organization?

As Bregman notes, the first step in that process is to commit to a mindfulness to pay attention to the donor’s/member’s relationship to the cause, not just your organization’s needs.

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