Most Nonprofits Have Too Many Donors, Most Churches Have Too Many Members

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Great post last week on Harvard Business Review from Hanna Halaburda entitled Fewer Customers, but the Right Ones. Halaburda pans dating site eharmony.com‘s latest promotion–a ten day free trial:

To successfully match people who are looking for a long-term relationship, eHarmony needs not just a lot of people in their database, it also needs people who are ready for a long-term relationship. This seems self-evident, but cluttering up the site with those looking for something else will increase the noise-to-signal ration and make matching harder. In its everyday business, eHarmony does an excellent job by discouraging potential customers who may not be so serious about dating. They ask potential members to complete a very long questionnaire of more than 250 questions. And if the answers suggest that you are not serious enough, they reject you. eHarmony also charges more than Match.com — up to a 25 percent premium. As a result, only people who really care about establishing a long-term relationship will end up at the site.

Observation: Most nonprofits and churches have a noise-to-signal ratio which is off the charts. They are based on B-I-S (butts-in-seats) business models. Such models require that the nonprofit or church bring in the largest possible number of potentially interested individuals, in the hope that:

  1. The nonprofit or church can convert marginally interested individuals into passionately interested ones.
  2. Given the sheer volume gathered, there’s bound to be a pony in there somewhere.

The challenge to the first idea is that nonprofits and churches are rarely able to effect this conversion to maturity. They find that they must continue to “cultivate” (yucky word) donors/churchgoers by feeding them a steady diet of the same things that brought them in the door in the first place.

Consider the rescue mission who “acquires” donors by inviting them to donate money to cover Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless. They ultimately find that it’s next to impossible to get those new “supporters” to understand that meals are not the solution to homelessness but that the mission’s long-term structured rehabilitation program is. So the mission ends up having to ask for money for meals month after month, amping up the urgency and the desperation with each passing appeal, and using whatever money is raised for meals to cover the long-term structured rehabilitation program that is really the heart of their model.

Same with the church who tries to recruit attendees through events that have nothing to do with the Gospel. I’m just finishing Todd Hunter’s Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others, and it’s a solid and interesting read. A few of the examples Todd provides do leave me scratching my head, however, like the story of the woman who gathered a group of women together in an effort to share the love of Christ with young moms by providing free swimming lessons:

We all thought the swim lessons were a huge success, even though there was no one [who] was converted and only one lasting friendship was formed. We’ve been taught that our role is to develop authentic friendships, to serve others in these simple ways and to pray for them. We can be at peace in this. Jesus wants people to follow him more than we want them to, and he will do the heavy work with them.

There’s bound to be a pony in there somewhere.

And that’s exactly what ends up happening: Nonprofits and churches, unable to “cultivate” donors/churchgoers to greater maturity and involvement in the cause, end up employing various methods to sift through the accumulation in order to find the pony. For the nonprofit, the pony is the rich, active donor. For the church, the pony is the one who can somehow take everything the church offers and manage to knit it into a personal program of growing to greater maturity and involvement.

What nonprofits and churches fail to account for, however, is that this strategy creates what Halaburda calls high “negative externality”–or, more simply put, turn-offs for those who are truly committed:

If the value you’re offering your customers rests on exclusive membership of similarly minded relationship seekers, what happens if you make it easy for others to get in for a while? You might get a lot of people who don’t care that much about a serious relationship, or who are looking for a different product, like a quick adventure. When such people roam around your site, they create a “negative externality” for your core members, who may discover that it’s more difficult to find a long-term relationship — the very service they had paid a premium to get. In a nutshell, when you lower the barriers to entry, you threaten your core value proposition to your most valuable customers.

This is why nonprofits sigh and say, “Right–that’s why what I need is just a few wealthy donors…”

But there’s an alternative. Halaburda’s article includes a link to a free downladable PDF that details a business model that is based on recruiting a smaller number of more committed individuals in the first place. In the nonprofit world, the equivalent would be donor acquisition programs that look and act more like part-time internships enabling individuals to grow to comprehensive maturity in the cause.

For the church, it looks an awful lot like Luke 9:23.

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Secular Marketers are Coveting the Church Format You Hate So Much

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I think you know I enjoy reading Dan Pallotta‘s columns in the Harvard Business Review, though he and I could hardly approach the topic of fundraising from more different backgrounds and orientations and in an effort to achieve more diametrically opposite ends. But the guy is smart, funny, and interesting, which is more than one can say about most fundraising writing on the Internet, even, oddly, the stuff I tend to agree with.

Anyway, Pallotta engaged in a rare moment of church envy the other day in his column (typically he is, um, not praiseworthy of Christians or Christian morality or much of anything Christian for that matter) that made me want to switch my membership to whatever church he went to when he wrote the following:

Religious services are a form of marketing. What else would you call being held captive to a rehearsed one-hour message repeated once a week, every week, week after week after week? It’s a particularly productive form of marketing — rich, experiential, and communal. It’s much more powerful than a website banner ad that your retina can filter out before reaching your brain, or a TV commercial you can make disappear with TIVO. You have to sit there and listen. The message is simple: Be charitable, both to your religious institution and to humanity in general. And it works.

I’ve taught and trained hundreds of churches, and I can count on one hand the ones that week in and week out share the simple message, “Be charitable”. Even the ones that share that simple message rarely do so in a way that is “rich, experiential, and communal.”

I wish sincerely that churches were indeed far more guilty of what Pallotta accuses us of and envies so greatly. We ought to be. He’s exactly right: What an opportunity we’re missing! Instead of using each week to share the simple call to generosity, we’re scared even to talk about it. We hope people catch it from the ventilation system, to be sure, but to our shame we are hardly making rich, experiential, communal appeals for charity every week.

In the end, my question remains the same as always, namely:

If the Church’s opportunities to build generosity are so coveted by secular marketers, why are we the ones consistently trying to imitate them?

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How to Build Generosity: Don’t Teach People How to Give More. Instead, Teach Them How to Love More, and the Giving Will Follow

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I wrote earlier this week about how much I liked David Brooks’ review of David Platt’s book, Radical, which I am anticipating I will also like very much.

And since I am having a like-fest this week, let me note how much I liked Jan Edmiston’s review of Platt’s book on A Church for Starving Artists, a blog I like a lot in general. In particular, I liked Jan’s honesty as she commented on Platt’s call for Christians to live on $50,000 a year and give away the rest:

I speak for myself here: When friends live in palatial homes with perfect yards and they seem to go to Europe a lot, I find myself jealous and competitive. And the simple truth is that our family cannot afford to live on $75,000 a year much less $50,000. We have multiple kids in college and a mortgage (small house but expensive market.) One of my proudest achievements is that we paid for braces for 3 kids: $18,000 with dental insurance.

This is not to say we could cut back on some things. But honestly, I don’t want to. There, I said it. My Starbucks treats are like little vacations on long working days (and most of them are paid for by generous parishioners who share gift cards.) My car was bought used – but it has a moonroof which frankly adds joy to my life. We have a dog that needs food and vet appointments, but she has made life a little sweeter for all of us.

How do we discern what is excess and what is not?

My own reply is that the question represents the entirely understandable but yet wrong end of the proverbial stick with regard to giving. I mentioned to you that I’ve been writing the chapter on Ransoming the Captive for my upcoming book, so the material for that is fresh in my spell checker. I quoted from it briefly last week, but let me share a bit more as my own reflection in response to Jan’s question. It’s written specifically in relation to ransoming captives, but you’ll no doubt catch the general point:

If Christ sets one free, it is tempting to think that such freedom ought to free one from work that is personally all-consuming, like the work of ransoming the captive. The Trinitarians and the Mercedarians give up a third of their resources in its pursuit. Schindler forks over every last pfennig. Early Christians offer their own lives as ransom. Is it not ransom enough for one to subsidize someone else’s gas and holiday wrapping paper expenses? Why can others not find freedom in Jesus from that?

Such a perspective perfectly misses the point of ransoming the captive, however. As [Carolyn] Osiek deduces in her own study,

“The exhortation to redeem captives is deeply rooted in the biblical message of human liberation and habitually linked with other preaching and work for relief of the needy.”

Habitually linked—both words are crucial, even in relation to Jesus himself. Jesus does not die for strangers—nor does he even die for sinners or for his enemies. That those he dies for are all these things—sinners estranged from God who are thus his enemies—is absolutely true. But who Jesus dies for is his beloved humanity, who have tragically become his sinfully estranged enemies.

And in this is a world of difference. It is the habit of [God] to love human beings with a comprehensive attitude and pattern of direct contact, warm relationship, and unfailing and unwarranted beneficence. Ransoming them is simply the costly consequence of that love. Since the dawn of the race he has done good to them, fed them, shared his bread with them, opened his home to them, visited and remembered them, and healed and comforted them. Having done all these things for each human being, would he not also give himself to ransom them from the very thing that separates them from him?

In the same way, for those ransomed by the blood that courses with his love—for those who have mirrored the fullness of his philanthropy to the world, doing good, sharing their bread, opening their homes, visiting and remembering, healing and comforting, proclaiming the gospel, forgiving and reconciling, and making disciples, what could account for them withholding their own lives from those to whom they have thus given? It is their reasonable and joyful worship of [God].

One may subsidize gas for a stranger, but only the habit of love finely trained through mirroring Christ’s Works of Mercy to the world will prompt one to lay down one’s life. And it will indeed prompt one to do exactly that. One will always do so for a much beloved one. The Works of Mercy train one to love as God loves, with a love of God and neighbor maturing to the full stature of Christ. One will love first those who are of the household of God, and next those in the world, as Paul notes in Galatians 6 and as Jews and Christians from the earliest days on through Maximilian Kolbe in our own era demonstrate.

Even in the world outside of God, if one’s one family member were kidnapped, there would be no question about sacrificing everything to meet demands for ransom; it is the stuff of television. So when Peregrinus Proteus is imprisoned, Christians come from other cities as far away as Asia bringing food, raising money, spending the night with him, bribing guards, helping him, defending him, strengthening him, lavishing their all on him because this is what they always do, because

44ball that believed were together, and had all things common;

45And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

46And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,

47Praising God, and having favour with all the people. (Acts 2:44b-47, KJV)

This is what Christ does for them and pours into them to pour out to each other. And it is what Maximilian Kolbe pours out on a stranger because he sees Christ in him. It is a customary and not an odd thing to ransom a captive who is one’s own blood. The miracle is not in the act of ransoming a loved one but rather in coming to love the one who is not one’s own blood in the first place. This is the gift one receives through the habitual practice of the Works of Mercy.

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