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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Ten Questions to Ask at Your Christmas Event

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Last week we took up the challenge of creating an alternative to Shane Claiborne’s holiday mischief. The goal was to develop an event that could bring genuine growth and the beginning of ongoing relationship to individuals from disparate groups (e.g., rich and poor, suburbanite and city dweller, homeless and homeful).

I offered a project idea I called Gifts of the Magi, about which you can read more here. (Make sure to check out the Comments section of the post, where Shane responds to my proposal.)

One of the aspects of my proposal involved engaging the two disparate groups in discussion questions. I offered a list of possible questions as part of that post.

Over the weekend, howevever, courtesy of Justin Taylor’s fine blog, I came across a vastly superior list of questions to my own. Not only do I think this new list of questions is the better list to use in conjunction with the Gifts of the Magi project, I believe you and I should use this list at our own Christmas gatherings this week.

The list–entitled Ten Questions to ask at a Christmas Gathering, comes from Donald S. Whitney. The list appears to have disappeared from his own site, so until it reappears, let me list the questions here (and do make sure to click through to Don’s site and check out the rest of the great content that’s still there):

  • What’s the best thing that’s happened to you since last Christmas?
  • What was your best Christmas ever? Why?
  • What’s the most meaningful Christmas gift you’ve ever received?
  • What was the most appreciated Christmas gift you’ve ever given?
  • What was your favorite Christmas tradition as a child?
  • What is your favorite Christmas tradition now?
  • What do you do to try to keep Christ in Christmas?
  • Why do you think people started celebrating the birth of Jesus?
  • Do you think the birth of Jesus deserves such a nearly worldwide celebration?
  • Why do you think Jesus came to earth?

Great discussion questions to ask two disparate groups of people your ministry will bring together.

Great discussion questions to ask the guests at your own personal Christmas parties.

Great questions to stop and ask yourself right now.

*                                       *                                   *                               *

And now, a Merry Christmas wish to the hopefully very nice attorneys in Donald Whitney’s ministry:

Copyright Disclaimer: All the information contained on the Center for Biblical Spirituality website is copyrighted by Donald S. Whitney. Permission granted to copy this material in its complete text only for not-for-profit use (sharing with a friend, church, school, Bible study, etc.) and including all copyright information. No portion of this website may be sold, distributed, published, edited, altered, changed, broadcast, or commercially exploited without the prior written permission from Donald S. Whitney.

For more short, reproducible pieces like this, see www.BiblicalSpirituality.

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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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