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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Alternatives to Shane Claiborne’s Holiday Mischief, Part I: Why Holiday Mischief is not P/E/O

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Our Monday post on Why Shane Claiborne’s Idea of Being “Long Gone” is the Wrong Kind of Holiday Mischief prompted an astute and well-reasoned question from Shannon Pekary at Palo Alton’s Ravenswood Youth Athletic Center, who wrote:

I am confused by your response. It seems to me that Shane’s answer very much falls in line with PEO model that MIF teaches of a P response. As MIF points out often, it is very difficult to take someone who has no connection to a ministry and overnight turn them into someone who is engaged in their cause. Shane’s response accomplishes a number of things: 1) Puts a suburbanite in an inner-city community “carroling” of all things. Many people are terrified of coming to the inner-city, and just this one step can be a transformation. 2) Creates an initial connection, people get to see the people they are giving to, 3) Solve an actual real need, and do it in secret, as Jesus commands.

Perhaps the Simple Way would then follow up with the givers to see what the experience was like, and see if they would like more opportunities to have a more permanent connection with someone in the community.

So, how would you do it differently, taking into account that you are dealing with deep divisions between these two worlds, including fear, race, economics and distance?

Good thoughts all the way around, Shannon. Recall from Shane’s post his paragraph summarizing the result of his group’s holiday mischief:

Last year our little mischief-makers gave away over $10,000 to families around the city. And the cool thing is the families do not even know who they are. They don’t even know the name of the congregation and may never see them again … all they are left with is a little reminder that they are loved.

This is a classic transactional approach:

  • The purported “haves” would like to help the designated “have-nots”;
  • The transaction occurs (in this case, the covert transfer of funds via caroling and Christmas cookies);
  • Stereotypes are reinforced (those with money are the “haves” and thus the givers; those in need of money are the “have nots” and thus the recipients);
  • The parties each receive what they were seeking (the “haves” are excited to have “made a real difference,” and the “have nots” receive funds);
  • They can then part and not need to see each other further–well, until the need arises again for each (the “haves” feeling the need to make a difference, and the “have nots” needing more funds).

There are a number of ways to describe the mutual damage caused by such an approach. In the P/E/O language of Transformational Giving, the best way to describe it is that a Participation project that is not intentionally structured from the outset to lead to Engagement will often lead to contented immaturity.

Is it possible for someone to go from P to E as the result of participating in drive-by-caroling-and-dollar-delivery?

Absolutely.

How frequently does it happen?

A lot less than we wish it would.

In fact, such situations (P events that aren’t part of an intentional overall P/E/O strategy woven from whole cloth) almost invariably lead to transaction rather than transformation, as the purported giver experiences a tremendous sense of contentment rather than the clear and present and specific challenge of continuing on to Engagement.

Every fiber of our being wants to believe that Participation that is powerful and real and deep will quite naturally lead to Engagement, but, surprisingly, it frequently does not. Champions get easily stuck at P. They love it there. We take them on a mission trip overseas thinking, “Once they get to the field, the things they see will change their lives forever! They will become knowledgeable, passionate, unrelenting advocates for the cause!”

But without intentionally thinking through and structuring and telegraphing the intended P to E invitation to the champion ahead of time, what often happens is a “Been there/done that/got the t-shirt” experience: The donor spends a few thousand dollars and a few weeks of vacation and thinks, “I have done my part. On to the next radical challenge!”

So the limitation to Shane’s mischief-making is exactly that: it’s mischief making. It carries the scent of the radical but ultimately allows both fighters to retreat to their own corners after the bout of holiday largesse. The path to Engagement is not embedded in the Participation event–that is, Participants can feel quite content (even smug) in Participation (even repeatedly) without ever encountering The Real. Neither party is formally and consciously challenged by the Participation event to move to Engagement, where the cause becomes a part of their everyday life…

…unless…

…such opportunities are built into the P/E/O process as formally and explicitly as the Participation step, which is not the case here. This is drive-by charity, reinforcing stereotypes, creating good memories for everyone (via a transaction that makes good value for all), and leaving the other anonymously distant enough that we need not be troubled by the vagaries of real relationship. Notice that Shane doesn’t describe the result of the event in terms of new relationships forged and stereotypes upended; instead, he describes it in terms of anonymity and distance safely maintained.

Check out these three past posts for more details on the dangers of Participation events that are not built with the focused purpose of guiding champions from P to E:

But what about Shannon’s final question: What could we do differently? In Transformational Giving, any solution would have to be designed with the following parameters in mind:

  • Both parties would give and receive in ways that upend stereoypes of who “has” and who “has not” (think here of Jesus saying to the rich young ruler in Mark 10:21, “One thing you lack“);
  • The gifts would be the start of relationship–token and pledge that no good thing would be withheld from the recipient in the future;
  • The event would be embedded within a larger, intentional, defined framework designed to consciously invite all parties to grow to full maturity in Christ, with the P to E move clearly demarcated and offered.

With these thoughts in mind, what alternatives to Shane’s holiday mischief would you propose? Please hit up with your ideas in the comments section, and I’ll add my own in the next post.

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