The Best Gift Your Nonprofit Can Give the World: A Viable Plan to Go Out of Business

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times op-ed piece entitled Adults Only, Please contains a powerful thought-starter for nonprofit organizations:

Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, likes to talk about two kinds of values: “situational values” and “sustainable values.” Leaders, companies or individuals guided by situational values do whatever the situation will allow, no matter the wider interests of their communities. A banker who writes a mortgage for someone he knows can’t make the payments over time is acting on situational values, saying: “I’ll be gone when the bill comes due.”

People inspired by sustainable values act just the opposite, saying: “I will never be gone. I will always be here. Therefore, I must behave in ways that sustain — my employees, my customers, my suppliers, my environment, my country and my future generations.”

For nonprofits, cleaving to sustainable values means focusing on the cause rather than the organization that promotes it. Paradoxically, nonprofits embrace sustainable values by creating a viable plan to go out of business.

I wrote about this last year in a post entitled Wanted: Extinction, Not Attention that highlighted the work of Willie Cheng, author of Doing Good Well: What Does (and Does Not) Make Sense in the Nonprofit World. In Cheng’s words,

Individual charities are set up to solve specific societal issues, and hence should be working themselves out of a job by finding the solutions.

Translated into Seidman’s values language, a nonprofit with laserlike focus on finding solutions to the specific societal issue it was created to address will display sustainable values as it works itself out of existence.

Witness sustainable values in action in the decision of the Children’s Aid Society to close one of its schools, in Greenwich Village, New York. Why?

Because their sustainable values caused them to recognize that they had accomplished their work in that area.

From the Nonprofit Quarterly:

The school operates as part of the Phillip Coltoff Center, which according to the New York Times, opened 119 years ago “when the Village was populated by legions of poor children.” Times have changed, and the Children’s Aid Society feels the school’s 1,000 young children – plus older students who take part in extra-curricular programs—come from families who can afford to send them elsewhere, even at a higher cost. “We can’t really justify,” said Richard R. Buery Jr., president and chief executive of the Children’s Aid Society, “the big disconnect between having so many resources focused on serving a population—while clearly a population that needs and deserves the service – that simply has access to more resources and opportunity than a place in the South Bronx, who are in our mission to serve.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that the Children’s Aid Society has closed operations, declaring its work done in a particular community. The Times cites two other schools shut down in past years. “We support communities’ being strong, and then when they’re strong you want to focus on ones that are not,” Buery added.

If Children’s Aid Society was focused on situational values, they would have focused on institutional health and parental demand and continued to operate the school. But by focusing on the sustainable value of cause, they recognized it was time to declare victory and move on.

The Whole Life Offering Ten (from my new book due out in February) puts it this way:

Nonprofits and parachurch ministries are church renewal movements, called to equip the church comprehensively in a particular work of mercy so that work may once again be normative for Christians.

Same is true for secular nonprofits: they are societal renewal movements. Either they solve the problem they were created to address, or they make attending to the problem the normative behavior of ordinary folks rather than the professionalized province of a specialized nonprofit.

As I noted in another post from last year, Nonprofit as Church Renewal Movement, such a focus–on the sustainable value of cause rather than the situational value of nonprofit survival, would give us an entirely different set of success measures:

  • Getting big wouldn’t be viewed inherently as a good thing or even as a goal; in  fact, we’d view it with a certain amount of suspicion. After all,
  • The real metric of success would be the degree to which the Christian nonprofit successfully re-embedded care of the particular cause back into the church.
  • We’d definitely be measuring not only ROI but RII, and
  • We’d know exactly when to go out of business, namely, when the church gets back in business and on firm footing in relation to the biblical cause God has given us to harangue the church about.
  • Could that be what God has in mind when He calls us to found a nonprofit?

So this year as you contemplate what to give your donors for Christmas and year end, eschew the calendars, key chains, and staff photos and send them your viable plan to achieve your purpose and go out of business.

It’ll set you up for a much better year-end or new year ask, by the way.

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Most Lapsed and Inactive Donors and Members Don’t Wander out the Back Door; They Wander Back Out the Front Door

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Bob Allen’s Why Do People Leave Churches? post on the Associated Baptist Press blog (thanks to Call & Response for the tip) is as applicable to secular charities as it is churches and religious nonprofits, as it deals with the ubiquitously toothache-y subject of lapsed and inactive constituents.

From Allen’s article:

“Churches have gone to great extreme effort to get people in the front door of the church,” Brad Waggoner of LifeWay Christian Resources said in a 2006 podcast. “There’s been some success numerically in that strategy, but very few people are talking about the back door of the church. That is: ‘Where do the people go that slip out of the life of the church?’

“The back door is just as important as the front door in determining the health of a local church.”

Allen quotes church consultant George Bullard, who contends that four things are necessary in the first year of a new attendee’s experience in order to minimize the likelihood of lapsing: Push guests toward regular attendance; make sure they develop deep friendships within the congregation; get them in a small group; and find a volunteer opportunity where they can plug in.

Not a bad idea in the bunch. And yet…

Conspicuously absent from our discussions (both Christian and secular) of lapsed and inactive donors and members is the reality that most “lost sheep” don’t wander out the back door.

They wander back out the front door. The door they came in.

That is, donors and members “lapse” because they weren’t intending to be donors or members in the first place.

In the case of a nonprofit, for example, a “prospect” receives a direct mail acquisition package. She has no intention of being “acquired” into the nonprofit’s donor file. She was making a single gift, not an ongoing commitment. Only the nonprofit sees the person as a lapsed donor. The person sees herself as someone who did a nice thing and who keeps getting harassed by the charity for more money.

Same with the person who wanders in the door of a church at Christmas because they want to see face melting lasers and indoor snow while eating Christmas treats. They don’t think of their departure in terms of a lack of deep congregational friendships, small group participation, or volunteer opportunities. They just came to see the face melting lasers, man.

Regrettably, minimizing lapsing is usually construed as an assimilation/cultivation task, yet it should primarily be viewed as a recruitment task. That is, if our recruitment efforts align with our assimilation/cultivation efforts, our lapsed/inactive rates will plummet as a matter of course.

Translation: Time to stop building our donor files with wine tastings and auctions and our churches with face melting lasers. Time to start recruiting champions into causes.

Lest we fear that actually asking people to understand and do difficult things might tank our recruitment efforts, check out Katya Andresen’s post entitled Do People Give More If It’s Painful? (Short answer: Yes.)

Tripp York, author of The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom, reminds us that the use of face melting lasers to recruit new converts is a relatively recent development; in the early church, people actually joined the church knowing that it would likely lead to their death:

To become a Christian under the Roman Empire, at least in the first three hundred years of Christianity, entailed possible loss of goods, exile, and very often death. Christianity, therefore, was not entered into lightly. To become a Christian meant that one had to prepare for the possibility of a premature death.

Jesus’ own lapse prevention strategy went like this:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’” (Luke 14:28-30)

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Alternatives to Shane Claiborne’s Holiday Mischief, Part II: Moving from Mischief to Maturity

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Pastor Foley

We’ve been thinking together this past week about Shane Claiborne’s holiday mischief, talking about where it falls short from the standpoint of Transformational Giving (TG), and what a TG-based alternative might look like.

Shannon Pekary at Palo Alton’s Ravenswood Youth Athletic Center asked me what I myself would propose. Here’s my reply:

Shannon, what I would propose is a progressive dinner that I would call Gifts of the Magi.

Participants would be drawn equally from the suburbs or the charity’s champion base (often the same thing, quite unfortunately–this needs to be remedied as well) and the inner-city neighborhood or population on which the charity is focused. Figure a group of five to ten from each area would be about the right number to undertake the project initially, and the project could be scalable in groups of five or ten.

Prior to the encounter between groups, the charity would gather each group separately (in person would be great, or electronically would work, though less well) in order to engage in a discussion of questions developed beforehand, things like:

  • What do you think the greatest need is for the people in the neighborhood you’ll be visiting?
  • What do you think they will identify as their greatest need?
  • What do you think their children struggle with?
  • What do you think they do for fun?
  • What do you think they like to eat?
  • What do you think their hopes are for 2011?
  • What do you think is the other group’s least accurate stereotype about you?
  • and so on.

A list of twenty questions like this would be about the right number. Note that BOTH groups are answering these questions about each other. The answers should be written down and, ideally, recorded on video.

The charity would then give two people in each group $100 in order to prepare one course of a progressive dinner (appetizer-appetizer-main course-main course-dessert), with the charity itself preparing the fifth course. The other group members would be divided up to help shop, prepare, serve, and clean up.

The progressive dinner would then be plotted for geographic convenience, proceeding from house to house.

In each house the “course” would begin with a reading from the Christmas story in the Bible, along with a brief devotional reflection that highlights God’s grace to each of us evident through the story, as well as reflections on the interactions between the very different and disparate groups in the story.

Next, at each location the charity would facilitate interaction between groups by working through the questions each group previously answered, starting from the easiest ones and working to the hard ones, with the hardest ones saved for the last stop (more on that in a minute). Ideally this would be done in a fun and non-threatening format that does not embarrass or confront anyone–an actual Christmas party approach. The groups would also of course enjoy each other’s hospitality in the form of eating the food prepared in each home.

At the last stop, the charity’s office, the participants would talk through the last and hardest questions–the ones like, “What stereotype do you think the other group has about your group that is the least accurate?” The charity would also explain its mission, as well as the next phase of the event. Here’s the next phase:

Each group member would draw the name of a person from the other group. During the course of the next year, they would give and receive three gifts to and from the person whose name they drew:

  1. A gift of time (i.e., volunteering to help the other person meet a need they identify)
  2. A material gift (i.e., giving an item of value that they already own to the other in order to bring joy or meet a need)
  3. A financial gift (i.e., giving an amount that represents real sacrifice to the giver in order to help meet a need identified by the recipient)

The partners would then be given time at this final stop of the progressive dinner to talk about their needs and wants, exchange contact information, and plan when to get together next.

During the course of the year as the partners exchanged gifts, they would be required to share with the charity what happened. A representative sampling of these initial and subsequent encounters would be videotaped, with reflective interviews done afterward. A video on the year’s project would be developed and distributed publicly by the charity prior to recruitment for the next year’s (expanded) event.

I recommend this alternative approach, Shannon, because:

  • It helps each group see itself as capable of giving and receiving from the other
  • It consciously and purposefully upends stereotypes
  • It has the potential to build meaningful ongoing relationships
  • It is a Participation event with the invitation to Engagement built in through the multiple planned encounters
  • It produces a visual record that can be used to coach and challenge future champions from BOTH groups
  • It involves the charity in the role of convener and facilitator, not subject
  • Real, thoughtful, progressively wiser help is provided to all participants

That’s more than mischief. It’s a pathway to maturity.

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