Do the Word

There’s an intriguing piece in Fast Company on Neal Stephenson’s effort to reinvent the novel as a “social media app”. The best and most detailed description of what Stephenson has in mind is found on the Mongoliad’s Facebook page. Let me quote it at length because it doesn’t make much sense unless you can get the whole idea on the table, er, iPad tablet:

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other authors; we’re also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.

Very shortly, once The Mongoliad has developed some mass and momentum, we will be asking fans to join us in creating the rest of the world and telling new stories in it. That’s where the real experiment part comes in. We are building some pretty cool tech to make that easy and fun, and we hope lots of you will use it.

In short, Stephenson is changing the novel from something written by an author and read by a reader to something over which the author “benevolently presides” and the reader uses as a series of tools to make meaning that fills out and completes the author’s original vision.

Believe it or not, I experienced something very similar to this at, of all places, a nonprofit fundraising banquet I emceed last week.

With This Ring was founded by Ali Eastburn in 2007. She was leading worship at a Christian women’s retreat in Orange County, California. As she looked out at all the wealthy worshipers raising their hands in praise, she had this distinct sense that God was calling her–and maybe them, too–to sell their rings and donate the proceeds to drill clean drinking water wells in Africa.

When she finished her worship set, she excitedly told the women what she was thinking. Their response wasn’t nearly so excited, but, undaunted, Ali sold her own ring and drilled a well anyway.

And so far nearly 300 others have followed her lead and donated rings through With This Ring.

What all of this has to do with The Mongoliad:

After last year’s banquet, Ali spent the night in the Anaheim Marriott (where the banquet had been held) because she was too tired to head home, and they had comped her a room anyway. The hotel clerk, Lindsay, who checked Ali in inquired what all this With This Ring stuff was about…and promptly got wrapped up in the story, too:

Her fiance bought Ali’s original ring, re-set with a cubic zirconium in it, and the two pledged to use their wedding as the means to raise money for an additional drinking water well.

So Lindsay and her husband spoke at the banquet the other night.

I told the banquet attendees that With This Ring was less like a nonprofit than you supported and more like a story you got drawn into. And, as if to underscore that message, Ali surprised everyone by taking a $14,000 Tiffany bracelet donated by a woman named Tracy and loaning it from now until the next With This Ring banquet to one of the banquet attendees.

There was no prior announcement of this to anyone who was coming–just a little note in the evening’s program that said “The Bracelet”. After showing a video of Tracy’s story, Ali noted that rather than selling the bracelet right away, Tracy wanted to “gift” it temporarily to one of the women at the banquet–someone chosen the evening of the banquet by prayerful discernment–who would commit to wearing it every day wherever she went over the course of the next year and sharing the story of the bracelet and of With This Ring.

A woman named Brianna (whom no one knew prior to the moment she was called up on stage) was selected as the recipient. She had just been married five weeks before and said to me, “When you all announced about the bracelet, I knew it wouldn’t be me who got to wear it.”

It was riveting stuff.

There’s a part of my nonprofit psyche (the institutionally oriented part) that was going crazy thinking of every possible thing that could go wrong. Was the bracelet insured? (Yes.) What if the person selected turned down the offer? (Trust the Holy Spirit, Ali said.)  What if she walked out of the banquet and was never heard from again? (Interesting plot twist in the story, I’d say.)

What materialized was something very different.

A bunch of the banquet attendees went up and talked to her afterwards. A bunch more said to me, “When’s the next banquet? I need to be there so I can hear what happens with Brianna.” I would be shocked if less than 50% of the attendees failed to tell their friends the story the next day. (I’m doing so now through this post, for example.)

What happens when a nonprofit moves from being an organization to a narrative? What happens when the executive director moves from being the “leader” to being the “benevolent presider” over co-creation of meaning built around a cause?

We presently lack even the vocabulary to talk about these things in our nonprofit-as-organization world. We do, however, have a pretty good precedent on which we can draw:

The New Testament.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

What is The Great Commission if not the most powerful social media app ever created?

As regular visitors to this blog know, we love Joanne Fritz’s About.com column and we read it assiduously.

We love Joanne’s column even more after her recent post, No Money for Donor Acquisition? Focus on Retention, where she recaps comments from a Fundraising Success Magazine conference keynote by Roger Craver of The Agitator.

There’s TG gold in them thar hills.

Read the whole post, paying special attention to three particular stats/notes that have special relevance to core principles of Transformational Giving:

1. 84% of all donors prefer to be solicited by folks they know.

Humor me by reading that just one more time, please. It does not say, “84% of all donors prefer to be solicited by a smoove operator trained in professional solicitation strategies and techniques.”

It underscores the potency of TG Principle 6: “The champion, not the organization, is called to be the primary means of advancing the cause within the champion’s sphere of influence.”

Not only is that the biblical approach. It turns out it’s also the most effective approach. Go figure.

*

2. 20% of the typical donor database are missionaries who will communicate with others about your cause.

I’ve always said 10% of champions will move to the O (Owner) level. And to think I’ve been understating it all these years.

*

3. “We need to be just as passionate at identifying the missionaries on our lists as they are about promoting our cause. Design a recruiting plan to enlist them in focused efforts, and provide them with the tools to help spread the word and draw more donors from their spheres of influence.”

[Editor’s side note: It’s amazing to me that we Christian nonprofits try to borrow our fundraising terms from secular fundraisiers (e.g., “donor”, “acquisition”, “cultivation”), but secular fundraisers are increasingly borrowing their fundraising terms from general Christian practice (e.g., “missionary”, “evangelist”). We never quite do know how much treasure we have until it ends up in someone else’s treasure chest, do we?]

In any case, Joanne (paraphrasing Roger, I think) makes a great point here. To paraphrase it using language from a previous post, missionaries need to be equipped, not just encouraged, to share the cause. It takes tools, plans, training–the whole works. Precious, precious few nonprofits–Christian or otherwise–make their top development priority the equipping of their missionary champions.

Given the statistics Joanne and Roger have shared here, don’t you think that should change?

Props to Dustin Steeve at Evangelical Outpost for the imbedded TED video clip of Simon Sinek talking about the radical difference between

• marketing based on what and
• marketing based on why.

It’s passing strange  for me to sit still long enough to watch an entire 18-minute video. But this one is worth ceasing all external brain function for and actually paying honest to goodness attention.

Good stuff, this.

In fact, I watched the whole thing a second time in the midst of writing this post. 36 minutes on this video, and it’s still worth it.

Here’s why:

• “Every organization on the planet knows what they do,” contends Sinek.
• Many know how they do it, he continues.
• But almost no organizations know why they do what they do.

Average leaders market from the outside in, notes Sinek. They highlight what they do.

But inspiring leaders market from the inside out. They highlight why they do what they do. As a result, they attract people who believe what they believe.

Sinek delves into anatomy to discuss how the “homo sapien brain”–the neocortex–governs rational thought and language. It is, says Sinek, the what part of the brain.

In contrast, the limbic brains–much deeper and more raw than the neocortex–are responsible for feelings, like trust. Fascinatingly, they have no language. Thus, when we say, “It doesn’t feel right”, we are living out of the limbic, so to speak. We are knowing something that can’t be put into language because the limbic brain has no language.

What’s the payoff here?

In truly transformative marketing, contends Sinek, what you do just serves as proof of what you believe. Marketing, then, is the process of attracting people who believe what you believe.

Sinek’s best observation: Martin Luther King became the leader of the civil rights movement because he gave speeches like the “I have a dream” speech…not the “I have a plan” speech.

There’s an awful lot to like and ponder in Sinek’s presentation, not the least of which is this:

• Measuring impact is all the rage in fundraising and philanthropy. But impact is only just a what.
• What would happen if we nonprofits marketed based not even on whats like impact…but on the basis of whys?
• What if people give not because of what we do…but because of why we do it?

Is the key issue, in other words, that our homeless shelter feeds 3,000 people a week? Or is it that we serve our guests on fine china and linen tablecloths, and our volunteers and guests prepare and eat dinner together…all because we believe that homelessness is ultimately a contagious disease of disconnection, the cure for which is radical reconnection?

When was the last time you did a marketing piece that highlighted not what you did…but why you do it?