Do the Word

Great post today from Jeanine Skowronski at Yahoo Finance about the Global Rich List, a website that seeks to enable you to determine exactly where your income ranks you compared to every other person on the planet.

For example, if you make $52,000 a year (the median American household income for 2009), you are the 58,252,719 richest person in the world (or in the top 0.97 percentile of all moneymakers).

You can even get a widget from the site that lets you share your exact ranking with others through your Facebook page or personal website.

Far from being an effort to enable you to boast in your riches, however, the site purports to show just how much you can do with your comparatively vast wealth:

The site uses your wealth ranking to invite you to share your wealth with others. It told me, for example, I could buy 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras for just $8 (as opposed to 12 organic oranges for the same price) or a $30 first aid kit for a village in Haiti (instead of an ER DVD box set). However silly these suggestions may be (who spends $30 to watch ER?), charitable giving is clearly the point.

The site is fascinating and fun–after all, who can resist taking fifteen seconds in order to determine where they rank compared not only to the Joneses but to every Jones worldwide?

According to the site, Poke “wanted to do something which would help people understand, in real terms, where they stand globally. They want us to realize that, in fact, most of us who are able to view this web page are in the privileged minority.”

The assumption, however, that once we realize how privileged we are, we will become more generous in sharing with others runs counter to two stark realities:

1. Giving is learned, not latent. It is not a lack of information that makes us less generous, nor the presence of information that makes us more so–nor even the presence of compelling opportunities for giving. (Aha–we pause at that last thought! We fundraiser types are conditioned to believe that compelling opportunities are the necessary and sufficient condition for giving among those with the capacity to do so. So, um, how’s that working for you?)
2. The more we have, the less we give. The most generous people in the United States are those who make well below the median American household income. In fact, the more we make above that amount, the less we give away as a percentage of our income.

So what are you doing today to help your champions learn giving? Are you doing anything more than presenting compelling opportunities for giving? What one thing can you do today to coach your champions to grow in their generosity?

In a post last week on D. Michael Henderson and What Mormons Can Teach Us About Major Donor Development, I made a not so subtle recommendation that you buy everything the man ever wrote.

I received a gratifying number of emails from people who ordered Henderson’s Ladder of Faithfulness, from which I quoted in the piece.

Good step.

But it’s not everything the man ever wrote.

So in an effort to coax you into the rest of his catalog, let me quote from Making Disciples One Conversation at a Time on the subject of the kinds of conversations we should be having with our champions as we coach them to full maturity in Christ in our shared cause through the vehicle of a mutual accountability relationship.

First of all, note the centrality of such conversations to your overall effort–and why you can’t expect success if you skimp on them!

Ministry always entails relationships, and relationships require communication. So the way to improve your ministry is to improve your conversations.

Second, recognize that such conversations are something entirely different than friendly chats, nor do they arise spontaneously out of same:

The reason we engage in redemptive discussions with our friends is that both of us are committed to following Jesus. We want to be like Him and to do His will and work. Every time you meet with your friends, you need to keep that objective in mind. All parties to the conversation must agree that this is where the conversation is headed.

In fact, seeking to be spontaneous in such a conversation–because you feel awkward about walking a champion through a P/E/O chart, for example, and prefer to “shoot from the hip”–actually works against you:

Regarding the subject of conversations, in one of my classes a student objected to what he considered regimentation of discussions. ‘I just like to be free to talk about whatever comes up,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to be bound by rules. I want to say whatever comes to my mind,’ to which I answered, ‘It’s not all about you.’ Lots of people want to talk, and they do. They drone on and on about whatever strikes their fancy. But self-centered conversations don’t accomplish much. If we want to serve God first, others second, and ourselves last, we need to shape the direction of our discourse.

Coaching conversations follow a delightfully predictable and manageable four-step process:

Here are four elements that every effective conversation should contain:

1. A clear goal
2. Shared information that relates to that goal
3. Strengthening of the relationship
4. Agreement on the next steps toward the goal.

Next, don’t use the coaching call just to “give an update on the ministry” and “let you know how to pray”. Use the call to ask productive questions:

Productive conversations start and end with productive questions. The first words of a verbal encounter set the stage for the rest of the interaction. ‘John, I’m glad we have this time to talk. I know you’re serious about following Jesus, and I know your time is valuable. Let’s make the most of it. What is the most important issue we can discuss today?’ Or you might ask, ‘What’s on the growing edge of your relationship with Christ?’ or ‘Is there a particular decision you need to make or an issue you need to clarify?’ You should also ask, ‘Is there something you sense I should be tackling?’ That insures that the conversation will be mutually beneficial—a discussion between fellow strugglers

Finally, remember that the coaching call itself is just part of a wider process:

The most effective conversations share information before, during, and after the conversation itself. The people who make the most difference in other people’s lives are constantly sending each other supplementary material: books, articles, quotations, personal notes, tapes, or reports. People who are good at this follow up their discussion with a note that reaffirms their discussion, perhaps with an enclosure—an article, a photo, or a news clipping. And, just as often, they send some information prior to actually meeting: ‘John, you mentioned your interest in serving the poor in our own community. Here’s an article on “Neighborhood Networks” that might give you some ideas. We can discuss it when we meet on Tuesday’.

What a fantastic book. Order yourself a copy today, and, while you’re waiting for it to arrive, pick up the phone and call a champion today to put into use what you already learned, above.

There is very little that is heroic about fundraising. And that’s sad, because there should be.

And by heroic, I don’t mean:

• Commendable, touching, or really cool;
• Successful (i.e., raised a lot of money);
• Heart-wrenching (i.e., generates an emotional response).

I mean:

• Heart pounding;
• Changes the very identity of the giver;
• The stuff of legend;

Dan Pallotta, whose Harvard Business Review stuff is always a good read, blogged about that this week in a piece entitled, When Your Goal Is The Impossible:

For two years before I saw the film [Alive, the story of plane crash survivors hiking out of the Andes], I’d had this idea for a 600-mile bicycle ride to raise money for AIDS but was too intimidated to do anything about it. Walking out of the theater, some voice that didn’t seem entirely mine said, “That’s it, we’re going to build the AIDS Ride.” And the next day my staff and I began trying to figure out how to get 500 people to bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It seemed impossible at the time. It hadn’t been done before. But a little over a year later, 478 heroic people of all shapes and sizes, most of whom hadn’t been on a bike in years, finished the 600-mile journey, netting a million dollars for AIDS.

As we rode into West Hollywood together, I couldn’t stop crying.

I would cry at dozens of these kinds of closing ceremonies over the years as tens of thousands of average people completed long journeys after raising large sums of money for urgent causes — both things they never thought they could accomplish when they started.

Why in fundraising do we say that an activity is successful if it raises money and is generally ethical? Isn’t that an exceedingly low standard? Why can’t we say that an activity raising money is a necessary but insufficient condition of calling it a success?

Then we would be doing more than fundraising. We would be doing, you know, development.

As I think back over my development career so far, I find that the most successful campaigns I have been involved in so far have done more than transfer money into a nonprofit’s bank account.

They ennobled people. For a brief moment, people truly became heroes.

They didn’t just get called heroes. And it wasn’t because we stroked them and said, “You are really a hero!”

I mean:

People became heroes.

• If you can describe your fundraising activities and only get choked up by the brochure or PowerPoint and the “take” for the night, not the heroics of those in the moments in the middle…
• If your fundraising doesn’t make your donors better, more capable people…
• If people who participate in your fundraising activities don’t reminisce about them and tell other people about them and describe them as life-changing moments…

…then it’s no wonder that you don’t like the job of fundraising, that you see it as a necessary evil–a vile means to a noble end–rather than a mutual adventure of discovery with your weird and very cool donor friends.