Do the Word

How would our approach to our donors change if we thought of them as fellow students of the cause rather than as supporters of our organization?

“Well, what if they grew in the cause but didn’t give to our organization?”

My question in reply: Is it really possible for them to genuinely grow in the cause without growing in their giving?

Change your identity. Stop being the recipient of your donors’ gifts and start being the vehicle for your donors’ maturing and comprehensive activity in relation to the cause.

To that end, rebuild your newsletter around your donors’ ability to answer the following five questions after reading each issue. These come from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed, a great site on learning and instruction that doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with donor development only because, regretfully, we persist in thinking of donors as supporters and not students of the cause.

• Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
• Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
• Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
• Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
• Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)

If we think that donors can answer these questions well and passionately without giving, we understand neither donors nor causes at all.

Sadly, that very well may be the case.

Instead of just buying your gelato from the ice cream shop, why not help them make it by supplying organic fruit from your own garden?

That’s the premise of New Zealand’s Giapo Gelato, whose new “Giapo Certified Organic” line is crowdsourced from its customers. From Springwise:

Located in Auckland, Giapo Gelato serves up an all-natural line of healthful gelato and sorbets, with inventive flavours including Spirulina, Feijoa and Chili Chocolate. Earlier this week, it kicked off its new crowdsourcing effort to incorporate organic fruits supplied by the crowds. To be eligible for consideration, consumers must guarantee that no herbicides or pesticides have been used within the growing area of their fruit; samples will be randomly tested to ensure compliance. The price of the fruit supplied will then be calculated in current market prices, and Giapo will give suppliers free Giapo Gelato in return.

Springwise goes on to note that trading extra produce for gelato is an exchange that many gardeners will likely be willing to make. But I think there’s more here than free ice cream. If I’m supplying the fruit for an ice cream store, am I likely to mention that to my friends? Invite them down to the store to taste it? Explain how I got involved and challenge them to do the same?

Yes on all three counts.

And this is the “secret sauce” that has powered Habitat For Humanity for years.

It would be infinitely less enticing to say to people, “The poor in our community need homes. Our organization can build them for a good price. Please make the most generous donation you can today.”

Instead, Habitat sticks a hammer in your chest and says, “The poor in our community need homes.” And we reply by saying, “But I don’t know how to build a home?” And they reply by saying, “We’ll show you how, and we’ll do it with you.”

As we noted in a previous post, volunteers donate 50% more than non-volunteers. What that tells us is that when we crowdsource more than money from our donors, we end up crowdsourcing more money from our donors as well.

This is the most basic lesson of fundraising in modern times and yet perhaps the most resisted. We nonprofit leaders protest that it’s more efficient if donors give us money–rather than their labor or their creativity or their word of mouth–so we can use the money to fund our labor, our creativity, and our advertising that is the cost of not equipping and relying completely our donors to share the cause in their sphere of influence.

What can you crowdsource from your donors other than their money?

Yes, it will require you to fundamentally rework your “supply chain”, your way of approaching the cause, your identity as an organization, and your management structure.

But lest you protest that your cause doesn’t lend itself to this, note that it’s the causes we never dreamed could be crowdsourced–from building homes to microlending in the developing world to large-scale adoption of children–are now the hottest and fastest growing causes.

What cause will be crowdsourced next? I hope the answer is:

Yours.

AA gets a great send-up in a Wired Magazine piece by Brendan Koerner. It’s a lengthy piece but well worth the read for many reasons, not the least of which is Koerner’s discussion of something that still puzzles scientists about AA–and something, I would add, that nonprofit executive directors would do well to heed:

To begin with, there is evidence that a big part of AA’s effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps. It may derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group. Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups, rather than treat them individually. The first to note this phenomenon was Joseph Pratt, a Boston physician who started organizing weekly meetings of tubercular patients in 1905. These groups were intended to teach members better health habits, but Pratt quickly realized they were also effective at lifting emotional spirits, by giving patients the chance to share their tales of hardship. (“In a common disease, they have a bond,” he would later observe.) More than 70 years later, after a review of nearly 200 articles on group therapy, a pair of Stanford University researchers pinpointed why the approach works so well: “Members find the group to be a compelling emotional experience; they develop close bonds with the other members and are deeply influenced by their acceptance and feedback.”

Note especially that last line as you ask yourself:

• Are you drawing your donors together into groups?
• If so, are those groups focused on giving donors the opportunity to articulate their experience…or to admire and appreciate your experience?

We regularly take groups from around the world to South Korea to participate with North Korean defectors in the projects they’re undertaking in an effort to transform their homeland. They stay in the homes of North Korean defectors in order to hear their stories and live a little of their life. They launch Gospel flyers via giant hot air type balloons into North Korea. They teach in our Underground University that equips NKs to serve the underground NK church in South Korea, China, North Korea, and around the world.

And some of the most intense time these visitors have is in their discussion time with each other between each of the activities.

Earlier this week I got an email from one of our past guests–one who had experienced real trauma on the trip as he was overwhelmed with the reality of NK defector life, so much so that he had dropped out of participating with our organization altogether. He noted offhandedly that he and his wife had just returned from a vacation with another of the families he had met on the trip two years ago.

He then asked me for an update on the situation in NK so that he could post it on his blog and mobilize his network to get involved.

Writes Koerner:

Addiction-medicine specialists often raise the concern that AA meetings aren’t led by professionals. But there is evidence that this may actually help foster a sense of intimacy between members, since the fundamental AA relationship is between fellow alcoholics rather than between alcoholics and the therapist. These close social bonds allow members to slowly learn how to connect to others without the lubricating effects of alcohol. In a study published last year in Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, Tonigan found that “participation in AA is associated with an increased sense of security, comfort, and mutuality in close relationships.”

Makes me wonder whether the most effective reaction strategy for lapsed donors may be a camping trip with a current donor rather than a letter that says, “We haven’t heard from you in a while, and we’re concerned…”