Do the Word

I’ve been reading Tim Muldoon’s book on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Some great insights therein that have real bearing on the Participation/Engagement/Ownership process which is at the heart of the Transformational Giving (TG) model.

Consider Ignatius on the impact that imitation can make in coaching or champions.

Originally quite the war hero and not quite that much of a Christian, Ignatius (or Inigo, as Muldoon refers to him below) suffered a devastating leg injury that required re-breaking and extensive recuperation in order to heal correctly. Bored from sitting around month after month, Inigo eventually turned to reading the biographies of great Christians.

Writes Muldoon:

Inigo confronted his spiritual pain and realized that it was pointing him toward a real life change. By the end of his recovery period, he was thinking about how he could take his energy, which had previously been about glorifying himself, and use it to glorify God. He writes about his desire to do stupendous acts for God, like a kind of spiritual hero. If he read of a certain saint’s strict spiritual practices, Inigo thought about how he could go one step further.

We’ll talk more in our next post about how Inigo moved beyond the spiritual superhero stage, but today what’s worth noting is this:

We nonprofits fail to recognize that the greatest spur to growth of a champion in a particular cause is seeing, hearing, and experiencing the growth of another champion in relation to that cause.

TG Principle Number 7 says, “The relationship between champion and champion is as important as the relationship between champion and organization.”

Sadly, in most nonprofits there is no relationship between champion and champion for all intents and purposes. And yet history and modern psychology amply testify that if we want to coach a person toward growth in a particular cause, the best way to do so is to show them that growth in a person to whom they can relate.

Randy Maddox notes that John Wesley saw this approach as core to his method of making disciples:

[R]ecognizing the role of “life-narratives” in forming and expressing one’s worldview, he particularly exhorted his Methodists to live in the story of Christ, and the stories of exemplary Christians (a rich set of which he provided for their reading), so that their orienting narrative might be reshaped in keeping with the pattern of Christ.

What’s more, a recent study by the Association for Psychological Science indicates that “witnessing uplifting behavior may spur good deeds“:

In an experiment, researchers recruited volunteers who watched a “neutral” video clip of scenes from a nature documentary or a clip from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in which musicians thanked their mentors. The participants then wrote essays about what they watched, were paid for their time and asked to indicate whether they’d want to take part in another study.

Those who saw the Oprah Winfrey clip were more likely to volunteer to take part in another study.

The positive, uplifting emotion that makes people feel good and may inspire them to help others is known as “elevation,” the researchers explained in a news release about the experiment from the Association for Psychological Science.

In another experiment, participants watched one of the previous two clips or a third clip from a British comedy. Afterwards, a research assistant said she was having trouble opening a computer file connected to the study, and told the volunteers that they were free to leave, but as they exited she asked the participants if they would be willing to fill out a boring questionnaire for another study.

Volunteers who watched the Oprah Winfrey clip spent almost twice as long helping the assistant as those who watched the other clips, the researchers noted.

The study authors concluded that “by eliciting elevation, even brief exposure to other individuals’ prosocial behavior motivates altruism, thus potentially providing an avenue for increasing the general level of prosociality in society.”

So explain to me again why it is that when it comes to the champions of our own causes, we nonprofits “divide and conquer” them, relying upon our own (limited) relationship with them and our own ability to tug on their heartstrings with urgent appeals and stories of individuals needing help in order to prompt them to respond…instead of exposing them to other champions whose lives embody the very change we are seeking to coach them to make?

Gospel For Asia has done some great Transformational Giving work when it comes to development. Giving away their signature book is a great participation project. Their free MP3 and e-book downloads are equally cool.

Their Cost-Free Giving page, however, is not:

You can help Gospel for Asia share Jesus with those who have never heard His name, and it won’t cost you a thing!

Here are three reasons to steer away from cost-free appeals to your champions as you practice Transformational Giving:

1. It’s problematic theologically.
   2 Samuel 24:24 is David’s reply to Araunah’s offer of cost-free giving. Says David, “I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” Sacrifice is one of the core characteristics of biblical offering. An offering that costs you nothing is not an offering. It’s a vapid sort of transaction in which you give up something that is of little value to you because it is of more value to someone else. That registers about a 0.000001 on the Transformation-o-meter.
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2. It’s problematic practically.
   It may sound paradoxical, but as Kristin Ivie notes, “Research on what motivates people to give shows that people are more likely to give when there is a difficult event or action required along with the donation.” Click here for my earlier post on the subject, entitled, “Want to Increase Donations? Demand Difficult Deeds”.

   As I noted there, if you are presenting in a church and people ask, “How can we help?” and you say, “The most important thing I need is your prayers,” statistically you have less likelihood of garnering their ongoing, meaningful commitment than if you say, “The most important thing I need is for you to fly to Africa with me for a special Christmas outreach I’m planning there next month. We’ll be gone two weeks, and you’ll need to raise $1,000 towards the project above and beyond your airfare.” Even if they say no, you’ll be further ahead in coaching them to understand that the cause is real, serious…and costly.

   Moral of the story? Meaningful commitment breeds meaningful commitment. Meaningless commitment breeds meaningless commitment.
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3. It denigrates non-financial forms of giving.
   The ironic thing about the GFA “Cost Free Giving” page is that each of the ideas that are listed there do have a cost. It’s just not a financial one. Using GoodSearch instead of Google means giving up some of the things I’ve come to expect in a search engine.  (No sleight to GoodSearch intended, but there’s a reason we talk about ‘googling’ a phrase rather than ‘goodsearching’ it, and it’s not simply a matter of Google’s superior marketing.)

   Likewise, GFA’s request that I change my shopping habits and give up my airline miles does translate into a sacrifice for me. And this is a good thing! Now we’re talking about the prospect of me offering to God through GFA something that is meaningful to me. That’s the stuff transformation is made of. So describe it that way! Help me see that I can–and should–be advancing the cause that GFA and I share with more than just my wallet. Put me on the horns of a dilemma: Should I use my frequent flier miles to upgrade to business class on my next international flight…or should I offer the miles to God through GFA so that the Gospel may travel yet further?

When non-financial gifts are treated this way, as sacrifices that move me towards holy living in relation to the cause GFA and I share rather than as “cost free giving”, you are helping me as a champion to be “all in”–committed in every dimension of my life–and thus far more likely to also consider a financial gift than when you try to appeal to me with words like “easy” and “no out-of-pocket expense”.

The dust has settled at The Agitator after Roger and Tom’s epic series on The Donor Pyramid Lie. Still, Joanne Fritz hit up with two epic posts of her own (here and here) this past week that have me thinking that one of the most important elements of the donor pyramid epitaph–and one of the key elements of new vision that we all ought to have going forward–still needs to be written.

In the Agitator series, Tom lists a series of seven fundamentals which he contends remain valid with regard to the donor pyramid. Click here to see the whole list; for our purposes the first two items on that list are the most germane, below:

1. Donors who initially make small gifts can indeed be cultivated — dare I say it?! — up the ladder to make bigger gifts … and even bequests. Even HUGE gifts and bequests.

2. Database marketing approaches that utilize personal giving history, donor-expressed preferences, etc. can contribute mightily to moving donors up that ladder.

I do not take issue with the veracity of what Tom notes. But looking toward the future of fundraising, I do want to ask about the desirability and suitability of these fundamentals.

In Joanne’s post, Largest Philanthropists Gave Less, Follow Their Own Drummer in 2009, the title alone astutely underlines two trends that ought to lead us to ask whether a fundraising approach built around migrating donors up a pyramid is either a desirable or suitable master strategy. As Joanne notes, giving from the top philanthropists plummeted 75% from 2008 to 2009. And lest that seems like purely a function of economic distress, Joanne adds:

Rather than write checks to their favorite causes, many large donors are setting up their own foundations dedicated to solving some big global problems. Wealthy donors increasingly want to see concrete, measurable results from their giving. They also want to create large scale change, rather than a piecemeal solutions.

Don’t miss the last sentence: “piecemeal solutions” can easily mean gifts to fund programs operated by your and other nonprofit organizations. After all, if a mega-donor is after large-scale change, this is something altogether different than supporting multiple discrete programs in multiple discrete organizations with multiple generous donations.  Your donor cultivation pyramid may be reduced to a launching ramp as major donors tire of  seeing their resources–financial, intellectual, and relational–trapped in multiple silos (i.e., nonprofits that don’t communicate or work together to effect large-scale change) and decide to design, build, and fund programmatic efforts of their own–even after the economy rebounds.

So is there really any alternative to a pyramid that exhibits the fundamentals Tom notes in his Agitator post?

Joanne’s post, Is Micro-Giving the New Layaway?, offers some tantalizing clues in this regard.

Joanne notes that even in the grip of recession, Americans gave more to Haiti disaster relief than they previously had to tsunami relief in 2004, with one noteworthy difference: the average Haiti gift was $109, as compared to $208 for the Asian tsunamis. Sums Joanne, “We are also giving to charity in more ways”–e.g., online giving, mobile giving–“but in smaller amounts.”

Online giving (with its social network widgets and badges) and mobile giving (powered by the ubiquitous text message) are notoriously social undertakings. That is, I am increasingly likely to hear about a cause (or at least to be motivated to act on what I’ve already heard) through key friends and influencers rather than traditional nonprofit-driven marketing channels.

As such, a “donor pyramid”–in which my growth in the cause is related to “cultivation” by the nonprofit and is measured by increasing gift size–is poorly suited to the reality of a world where my giving is motivated and shaped by friends and influential non-institutional voices not only initially but over time. In other words, it’s not as if I’m recruited to a cause by friends but then the nonprofit through which I gave assumes greater influence over me and my giving decisions than they do.

In a world of micro-giving, a new kind of “pyramidal” measure is needed–one where nonprofits not only recognize but affirm that I am (and always will be) a far greater influencer in my sphere of influence than they are. The job of the nonprofit? To equip me to recruit those I know to participation in the cause, and to assist me in coaching them into engagement and ownership of the cause in their own sphere of influence. (For quick definitions of Participation, Engagement, and Ownership, check out this previous post.)

That recruitment process means that it is I, not the nonprofit, that has the most potent pyramid–a group of my friends and acquaintances who are at various stages of involvement in the cause we and the nonprofit love and share. What role does the wise nonprofit of the future have in that pyramid?

It serves as the base. The convening mechanism. The platform. The stage on which the action–performed by the champions, equipped by the nonprofit–plays out.

Interestingly, put Joanne’s two posts together and you come to an interesting conclusion: It’s not only the rich who are wanting to break out of non-profit pyramid silos erected by organizations. It’s the micro-givers, too. So not only does our understanding of the giving pyramid need to change; our understanding of our own organization needs to change as well, from fund-seeking doer to funding-platform equipper.

Last word to Joanne, who says it better than I have here:

I like the idea of framing micro-giving within the context of broad social change. We’ve already talked a great deal about micro-giving as the democratization of philanthropy where anyone can participate, no matter what their means. Now the picture widens and we can see that micro-giving may be intertwined with new economic realities and cultural shifts.