Do the Word

Tom at The Agitator lends space to Lisa Sargent who highlights what she describes as “a trailblazing multilevel donor loyalty program used by M. D. Anderson, a Texas cancer center that has seen direct mail revenues increase five hundred percent since it started the program.”

The trailblazing element?

The program is open to donors who don’t give a lot, so long as they give for five years or more:

‘The Partner’s Circle sprang from the observation that people who gave a little bit of money continuously throughout their lifetime often ended up bequeathing the institution significant donations from their estates,’ says Cindy Lappetito, vice president and general manager at loyalty-marketing company Epsilon, which created M.D. Anderson’s direct marketing campaign and donor loyalty programs.

Effective? Yes. Transformational? Er, not so much. The impetus to include low dollar givers seems to arise more from shrewd traditional transactional marketing than from a James 2:1-7ish egalitarianism.

For sheer transformative value, consider the disloyalty card being distributed by World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies at East London coffee shop Prufrock. To get a free coffee at Davies’ Prufrock shop you have to go grab a cuppa at eight other East London coffee shops.

Comments James Hoffman via his coffee blog:

There is no catch, it isn’t some cunning ruse to sell more coffee.  It might work if one roaster supplied all the places on the card – but there is a complete mix from Burgil to Union, from Square Mile to Nude’s in house espresso.  Gwilym just wants people to go and try coffee in different places.

This man is a great ambassador for coffee.

“A great ambassador for coffee”–not a bad reputation. And if such be true for coffee, then how much moreso for us in the realm of world-shaking causes? Are we known as “great ambassadors for the cause”–or as effective fundraisers (or not) for our organizations?

What might a donor disloyalty program look like?

How about a monthly giving program where once a quarter the gifts accrue to your organization…and each of the other months the gifts accrue to a different nonprofit you highlight that is having a powerful impact on your cause that is different than your own?

The message?

We want to be great ambassadors for coffee.

Or, more precisely, we care about the cause, not just our organization, and we value a wide variety of approaches that we think you should know about–and invest in–too.

The SPP, or Signature Participation Project, is a key element of the Transformational Giving process of coaching champions.

If you’re new to the blog or would like a refresher on what an SPP is and what good and bad examples look like, click here and head down the rabbit hole of links in this first post. They’ll take you back through most if not all of the previous posts on this subject.

That most recent post on SPPs was about my vote for the worst SPP of 2010, Movember’s moustache growing campaign.

The campaign’s main flaw?

The, um, tenuous connection between a man’s prostate and his moustache.

That being duly and as tactfully noted as possible, let’s turn to one of my favorite SPPs for 2010, The Uniform Project.

Emma Carew just did a nice Chronicle of Philanthropy piece on the Project (I encourage you to click through so that you can see the video that follows that article):

Inspired by the school uniform she wore as a child in India, the New Yorker Sheena Matheiken has been wearing the same dress for 273 days in an attempt to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation, an Indian charty that supports children who would otherwise be unable to attend school.

She and her designer friend, Eliza Starbuck, made seven identical black dresses, and Ms. Matheiken has been wearing one every day with the addition of different accessories, with the goal of doing so for one full year. The Uniform Project, as they’ve dubbed it, has raised more than $53,000, or enough to keep 147 students in school, according to a widget on their Web site.

Ms. Matheiken calls the project “fashion philanthropy” on her Twitter page, and updates the project’s blog daily with a snapshot of her daily outfit, dressed up with accessories that have been designed or donated by others, or items she has purchased on e-Bay and Etsy. Each day readers rate the outfits, using labels such as “batty” and “brave” or adding their own.

Here’s what I like about this SPP:

1. It’s synecdochic in a deeply personal way. Ms. Matheiken was raised in India, where school uniforms were mandatory. By wearing a “uniform” for an entire year as an adult, she herself is experiencing a taste of school life once again, in solidarity with those whom through her own actions she hopes to keep in school.
2. It’s participatory. Champions can contribute to her outfit every day, and they can comment on her outfits on the blog. Through the outfits she selects, she is able not only to have fun but to illustrate certain aspects of the cause she is championing.
3. It’s high touch. I mean, let’s be respectful to Ms. Matheiken and ask permission first, but essentially you can touch and see and even send in accessory pieces for the dress she wears. This enables people to become progressively more involved. Donate a bow one day, a buck the next.
4. It’s understandable with reference to itself. That is, I don’t have to know anything about the Akanksha Foundation to understand what Ms. Matheiken is doing. I can see her in her uniform and understand that, just as when she was a child, there are children in India who need an education, to whom I can make a donation.
5. Because the dress and blog are such personal media, they can be vehicles for Ms. Matheiken to draw those she meets deeper into the cause, rather than just soliciting a transaction.

One major potential drawback: this appears to be a self-contained SPP which does not have the goal of drawing people deeper into the cause. But the concept is so delightful and so potentially able to be a means of drawing people deeper into a cause that anyone whose nonprofit primarily does work overseas ought to be able to draw upon this SPP for inspiration.

JoNel Aleccia, health writer at msnbc.com, pens a piece cataloging the well-intentioned but foolish efforts of those who would seek to do anything other than send a check to a reputable international NGO in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

It’s a recurring theme in many posts these days–the idea that writing a check to a highly-rated international disaster relief agency is the only logical course of the hour, and to try to attempt anything else could actually be harmful.

A different but equally pressing problem is the flood of ill-advised donations that aid agencies already are facing, organizers said. A handful of “Help Haiti” food and clothing drives across the country are inspiring cringes among some workers, said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a coalition of agencies….

“I guarantee you someone is going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes,” Brooks said.

Let me grant willingly and without hesitation the following points:

1. Disasters like this one bring scammers out of the woodwork; giving to telemarketers raising money for charities you’ve never heard of is obviously not the best way to help those in Haiti.
2. Collecting supplies to send to Haiti makes no sense if no one in Haiti has requested your supplies.
3. Someone is probably going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes.

Still, I categorically and emphatically resist two of the implied premises of the article, namely:

1. The idea that highly-rated disaster relief charities constitute an unmitigated good who know what they’re doing because, after all, they’re highly-rated disaster relief charities.
2. The idea that any kind of donor involvement outside of a cash donation to a highly-rated disaster relief charity constitutes an inferior form of help.

As to the first point, Tracy Kidder notes:

In the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve.

The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from corruption, doesn’t hold — all the more reason, indeed, to work with the government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise.

Hearkening back to the lessons we could have and should have learned from the tsunami (but didn’t), David Frum adds:

Initially, aid organizations had to base their relief distributions on informed guesses — overwhelmed by logistics, they lacked the time to undertake detailed assessments or consultations with affected people. The situation on the hardest-hit west coast [of the Indonesian island of Aceh] remained the big unknown. ‘We were taking steps in the dark,’ said one aid worker.

Although international agencies were right in guessing that water, food and shelter would be survivors’ initial needs, they were wrong to assume these needs would not be covered, at least partially, by Indonesians themselves. Agencies did little to suppress the myth of disaster victims dependent on external aid to survive. …

As dramatic stories of suffering hit the headlines, more agencies poured in, expecting the worst. But aid workers arriving at Meulaboh, dubbed ‘ground zero’ of the western coast, on 4 January were surprised to find survivors being well cared for by the Indonesian army and authorities. A scramble for beneficiaries began. Some agencies jealously guarded their information to ensure their ‘niche.’ Within weeks, the ‘humanitarian space’ had become too small for all these actors.

Coordination became difficult. Out of 200 agencies present in late January, only 46 submitted reports to U.N. coordinators. Joint needs assessments were rare. Language proved problematic, with U.N. meetings held in English and government meetings in Indonesian. Without knowing who was doing what and where, some communities were overwhelmed with aid while others were neglected.

At the root of coordination problems was one key factor: too much money. Nearly everyone could hire a helicopter or boat, make their own needs assessments and distributions, and ‘fly the flag’…

Frum contends that “[d]isaster relief is first and foremost a military relief operation. No one else has the reach and the lift”:

In the first half week after the quake, the U.S. military distributed 600,000 packaged meals and installed water purification systems that can pump 100,000 liters per day. Army helicopters deliver food inland, bypassing the miserable Haitian roads; the Navy has already converted the little port of Cap Haitien to receive modern containers.

The notion of NGOs as disaster relief experts beyond reproach dies hard. But what dies even harder is the idea that a donor can be anything but a dunderhead when he or she gives something other than cash to a highly-rated disaster relief NGO.

I’d love to do a list of reputable charities who are receiving non-cash relief supplies for distribution to Haiti, and/or who have opportunities for concerned individuals to volunteer in meaningful capacities. This is not to disparage the giving of cash but rather to recognize that being shaped in the image of Christ sometimes means responding to disasters by doing more than writing a check.

My own list would start with UMCOR, which not only has a long history of respectful partnership with Haitian churches and agencies but which also lost its Executive Director Samuel Dixon in the quake. Note that Dixon was there during the earthquake, which says something about UMCOR’s ongoing commitment to Haiti that goes beyond simply responding to a disaster.

UMCOR (which, incidentally, is acknowledged as a four-star charity by Charity Navigator) has robust programs for Haiti relief supply donation and volunteering.

Why does UMCOR do this? Do they not know that it is far more efficient for people to write checks so highly-rated disaster relief agencies can buy wholesale instead of donors wastefully dropping by the grocery store on the way to work and paying retail for relief supplies?

• Just perhaps UMCOR is training its champions how to respond to disasters wherever and whenever they occur, whether in Haiti, halfway around the world, or in a house down the block.
• Perhaps they want to help their champions understand why winter coats and high-heeled shoes aren’t helpful so that the next time a disaster happens, those champions will know how to respond more thoughtfully.
• Perhaps becoming personally involved–by, say, dropping by the grocery store to pay retail–changes the kind of people we are, makes us spend more than five minutes thinking about the situation and the people who are impacted, helps us to involve our children in such a way that the generation that follows us will not only be more compassionate than we are but more able to respond personally and knowledgeably in the face of disaster.

Rest in peace, Samuel Dixon. Thank you for believing that Christians could–and should–always be more than human ATM machines, and that aid that connects our hand, heart, and head has an impact not only on the immediate disaster at hand but upon the way we think about and pray about and respond to all of the disasters that follow.