Do the Word

Great post by Nathaniel Wittemore at Social Entrepreneurship on the story of ZURB, a San Francisco design house whose corporate philanthropy takes the form of an annual “coffee fueled marketing marathon” in which they do an entire pro bono marketing strategy for a nonprofit they select…all in 24 hours.

The way it works is that each year, the ZURBwired program selects one mission to accomplish for a nonprofit. It can be a new website, publicity for a new fundraising campaign or something else entirely. For 24 caffeine-fueled hours, ZURB, the nonprofit and participating partners rethink the project from the ground up. At the end of it, the nonprofit participant is left with both valuable outputs, as well as a new approach to the design process they can employ every day.

It’s the last part of the last sentence that makes the process so powerful.

Described in P/E/O lingo, the 24 hour marketing marathon is a Participation-level activity: short-term, high-touch, high-yield, and understandable without external reference.

But notice that one of ZURB’s goals is to train the lucky nonprofit intensively in a design process that the nonprofit can use with other projects in the future. This is an attempt to coach the nonprofit to E so that their view of design and project management is ZURBified, as it were. In other words, the one day marathon project is designed so that it breaks out into the ordinary ongoing life of the nonprofit organization.

But there’s a hint of O in here on ZURB’s part, too:

ZURB’s work isn’t meant to be a closed process, in which it’s only the nonprofit in question that benefits. Instead, they put everything online for all to see. For the ZURB team, this is a chance to introduce groups to a process of design as much as it is about applying that process in one specific instance.

Take a look at the process here. Really instructive.

What may be most interesting of all is that ZURB is coaching the nonprofit rather than the other way around.

What would happen if a nonprofit took it upon itself to coach a design house in its own area to undertake such an approach. Like, say, for instance, you?

Thanks to Joanne Fritz for the link to the story of the Salwen family, authors of the new book, The Power of Half, in which they chronicle their Transformational Giving style journey of selling their home, giving half of the proceeds to the poor, and–well, they didn’t quite complete the biblical trifecta, but life is a long time.

If you haven’t yet heard the story, you’ll want to at least read the article if not the book. For purposes of this blog, what I want to do is to parse that story for you into P, E, and O elements, since their story illustrates the progression so well.

The P stage (short-term, high-touch, high-yield, understandable with reference to itself, containing a foretaste of the whole enchilada):

Still, Kevin [the father] believes that generosity is not all nurture. A person’s nature plays into their willingness to give, and his daughter Hannah has that giving nature. Her nature kicked into high gear when they were stopped at a red light three years ago with a Mercedes on one side and a homeless man on the other. Hannah remarked that if the person didn’t own the expensive Mercedes, the homeless man could have a meal. That led to her fervent request that her family do more to help others.

So they sold their home, bought one for half the cost, and embarked on a year-long family study of where and how to give away half of the proceeds from the sale. They ultimately chose to give through The Hunger Project to aid Ghana. And they went to Ghana to see it all through.

(This is a good time to note that the aforementioned all falls within the P category. People sometimes mistakenly think of P, E, and O differing by degree of commitment, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most people stay at the P level in their giving. Some become super highly committed Ps, staying red hot and rollin’ all throughout their life for the projects they care about. What makes a person a P is simply that their relationship to the cause is mediated by a formal, structured project–in this case, even a radical project like selling your home and giving away half the proceeds.)

Our best estimate so far at Muppet Labs is that 70% of champions stay at the P stage. 30%, however, transition on to E, which is exactly what the Salwens did:

What the Salwens did is impressive; however, what has happened to them as a family is equally as impressive. Their project transformed the family in what Kevin says is “a magical way.” Without intending to, the family “traded stuff for a deeper level of connectedness, and trust, and togetherness.” What would seem like a difficult step to most people, downsizing from a luxurious home and giving away $800,000, is “just certainly an amazingly easy deal” when you realize what the family gained.

The move from P to E happens when the cause breaks through the project and into the person’s everyday life. It’s not necessarily that they stop doing the project but rather that their relationship to the cause extends beyond it. In this case, the process of selling the home, researching charities, giving the money away, and visiting Ghana transformed the Salwens. Giving broke out of its structured project bounds and remade the very relationships between family members. To wit:

Kevin believes that the process of digging into each of their deeper values as they went though the process of choosing where to invest the money opened lines of communication among the family that had never been there before. The teens saw their parents as more than just parents, and Kevin and Joan saw their children for who they really were at their core.

Of those who move on to Engagement, around 10% progress to the O stage. At O, the individual recognizes that it is their responsibility–not a nonprofit’s or a supposed expert’s–to spread the cause within their sphere of influence, recruiting those they know to P-level participation. Here’s what that looks like in the case of the Salwens:

The family realized that there was a book to be written about the transformative effect of their project. The Power of Half was written by Kevin and Hannah to “help inspire other people to just take a good look at their lives and recognize what they have more than enough of” so that they can get out in the world to help others and themselves the way the Salwen family did.

They don’t believe others need to sell their house. They want others to look at what is possible for them. “The book,” Kevin says, “provides a roadmap for how people can make that decision of what they have more than enough of” and figure out what their half is. They can get together with their family or their community and decide how they can be out there “doing a little bit of good in the world.”

And that’s what it looks like to go from P to E to O. Perfect. Enjoy the book.

Here’s a quote from Paul Thompson of Twin Falls, Idaho, one of the 10 missionaries that are now back from Haiti after being imprisoned on charges related to trafficking Haitian children:

We’re four guys — well, we’re a group of 10 people — that are convinced that it’s better to get up off the couch and go and help people than just sit on a couch and do nothing.

As a guy who doesn’t like couch duty myself, I fully understand the sentiment–and yet as a trainer of nonprofits, I’d want to commend Option C to all of us in the future.

• If Option A is sitting on a couch and doing nothing, and
• Option B is getting up off the couch and going and helping people in a way that lands you and your posse in the slammer, then
• Option C is recognizing that it is incumbent upon us to deny ourselves the couch in the first place and instead devote our time to being coached and trained in growing to the fullness of Christ in all of the areas in which He calls us to serve…before disaster hits.

Many volunteer champions have served–and continue to serve–knowledgeably and with distinction in Haiti.

I have my ministry with you today because of the efforts of one of them.

Pastor Bill Rogers, who has gone on to be with the Lord, loved Haiti so much that he would always cry–always–when he talked about it. He took work teams and mission teams there every year. He spread the word about Haiti and the need for our love and care there to anyone who would listen. He raised funds and sent them on for projects he could not complete himself.

This was all in the 1980s, when Bill was serving as pastor of Mt. Olive United Methodist Church, where I arrived as a pukey-faced fall-down-in-the-mud Gentile who didn’t know nothin’ from nothin’ about the Christian faith. I met Bill because Tim Rush, the newsman with whom I was working at the time on WBAT Radio, where I was doing the morning show while going to college, asked me to go to church with him. I did.

I met Bill there, and Bill was the first Christian worker who ever coached and mentored me. He taught me how to get up off the couch and serve the Lord. Because of Bill, I became a pastor with a passion for teaching other Christians to get up off the couch and serve the Lord in ways that pair zeal with knowledge.

That passion remains vigorous to that day.

If Bill were alive to have heard about the missionaries from Haiti noted above, I believe he would have simply said, “Oh my.” And that would have been enough, since anyone who knew Bill knew what that meant.

So as I reflect on Paul Thompson’s words, above, what I am ultimately left praying for is that God might raise up among all of us a new generation of Bill Rogerses who call people to rise up off the couch to be coached and trained to serve on the front lines of ministry year after year after year, knowledgeably and with distinction.

Just like Bill.