What Non-Profit Leaders Owe Their Donors-As-Followers

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Pastor Foley
  1. Mutual accountability.
  2. A relationship centered on transforming the donor-as-follower in relation to the cause.

That’s my short answer to the question posed in the title of this post. Those are the two things that non-profit leaders owe their donors-as-followers. (Oh–if you haven’t yet read the previous post, Nonprofits Have Followers, Not Donors, please do so. It’ll help you make a lot more sense out of this current post.)

Liberty University’s Dr. Michael R. Mitchell fills out this thought in his must-read for nonprofit execs and fundraisers (please don’t waste your time reading fundraising books, for heaven’s sakes), Leading, Teaching, and Making Disciples:

Followership is more than a position of submission. It is a commitment to change, a willingness to be transformed into the image, style, and behavior of the leader. Following may simply indicate trailing behind another or even adhering to the directions of someone who can point the way to a desired location. Followership, on the other hand, implies a condition of relationship and accountability. The invitation of Jesus to follow him offered a transformation of life and lifestyle that involved more than just shadowing him from town to town and miracle-to-miracle, observing and not participating. Many people followed him, but only a few chose to accept his invitation to followership and discipleship.

“Observing and not participating”–doesn’t that describe the donor file of most nonprofits? (Heck, it describes the constituency of most churches!) We act as if we’re in this state of affairs because observing and not participating is the donor’s preference.

Two comments here:

  1. Have we modeled any other viable path of possibility for the donor? I mean, more than pray ‘n’ give ‘n’ sign up for the newsletter? When donors ask, “What can I do?“, do we have a robust answer that represents the heart of our ministry? Or is it an ill-defined side unmarked rabbit trail for the bold?
  2. What does it say about us as leaders that we are willing to accept observing and not participating as a legitimate means of involvement in the cause? Jesus “began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1), not “do and advertise”, “do and promote”, or “do and solicit”.

The moment we accept the appellation, “leader”, we owe more to our followers–yes, followers, because that’s what leaders have, even when they prefer not to recognize that ethical responsibility–than solicitation, receipting, and reporting.

We owe them mutual accountability and a platform for transformation that we staff at the heart of our ministry.

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Nonprofits Have Followers, Not Donors

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Like it or not, our nonprofit organizations have followers, not donors. “Donors” is just the label we put on them so that we can skirt the responsibility for their growth that is ethically entailed by our drawing them into involvement through our organizations.

“Follower” is usually a word assiduously avoided in church and nonprofit circles. It sounds so cult-y. We want people following Jesus, not us, right?

And yet we don’t hesitate to appropriate for ourselves the term “Leader”. We study leadership. Read books on leadership. Aim to be great leaders.

But if we are leaders, what are we, um, leading?

We are inclined to say that we are leading organizations (oh! or better yet–we are leading movements). And this is a very telling statement because as Liberty University’s Dr. Michael R. Mitchell points out in his brilliant book, Leading, Teaching, and Making Disciples:

It appears that even though preachers, teachers, and leaders all share the same conviction that effective communication demands both a sender and a receiver, in practice they pay little attention to the receiver (p. 4).

Having donors instead of followers, in other words, makes it possible for us to talk and think primarily (if not only) about ourselves and our organizations and our needs with very little attention being paid to how any of it is affecting those whose involvement in the cause is being shaped by our leadership.

As Mitchell notes, there is just not a lot of literature about the follower qua follower:

Douglas K. Smith includes a chapter on “The Following Part of Leading” in The Future Leader (Hesselbein, Goldsmith, and Beckhard, 1996), but his interest in following is as a means to ensure results, such as producing performance for the organization, rather than changing the life of the follower.

We don’t want to take responsibility for how our efforts are changing the life of the follower. We don’t even want to think about it. So we call them donors and think about them only in terms of how they produce performance for the organization.

Not only does this result in diminished organizational performance, but it’s a pretty shoddy way to treat the people who love our cause the most, if you think about it.

In our next post, I want to give you another dose of Dr. Mitchell and draw out what it would mean for us to take seriously our responsibility to our donors-as-followers.

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How Isaiah 1:17 gets Manhandled by the Professionalization of Christianity

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Pastor Foley

What’s on my mind more and more these days is how the professionalization of Christianity–that is, our propensity to believe that we are doing what God requires when we provide financial support to paid professionals to undertake the acts commended to us in Scripture–robs us of the Christian character and growth God intends for us.

As usual, my friend, DocRocket‘s Robert Hayes, puts it far more aptly in far shorter space, noting last week on my Facebook page:

Trying to re-envision Isaiah 1:17 as professional helpers would see it. “Delegate the appropriate professionals to learn how to do right and seek justice. Create legal defense funds for the oppressed. Hire a PR firm to advance the cause of the fatherless, and make sure there’s a support check for every widow.”

Doesn’t really resonate like the original.

It is not enough that we give to professionals so that justice may be done. If we ourselves don’t become more just in the process of giving, then it is unjust for the professional to be willing to receive what we are offering.

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