Do the Word

I’m in Denver for the quarterly meeting of the board of Dare2Share Ministries, on which I serve.

One board member raised the question, How can we get Greg Stier, Dare2Share’s Founder and President, in front of more people as a speaker?

Greg is truly one of the most gifted speakers I’ve had the privilege of hearing, and good things happen when Greg’s in front of a crowd. His thinking on youth discipling other youth to share their faith deserves as wide a hearing as possible. How to make that happen?

As the board discussed the question, something interesting began to emerge:

We recognized that spreading a message as widely as possible isn’t synonymous with speaking to more and more people. In fact, we realized, speaking to more and more people often means spreading a message less effectively than sharing that message in great depth with a few passionate apprentices.

Let’s engage in some napkin-based math here:

Greg may speak to 50,000 youth and youth leaders a year. Think of the effort it would take–in organization, administration, time, and money–to double that figure. And what would be the impact of reaching 100,000 youth and youth leaders? Would it be twice as much? Three times as much? Half again as much?

Now head completely in the opposite direction:

What if, instead of attempting to speak to another 50,000 youth and youth leaders each year, Greg identified from the 50,000 to whom he already speaks the most promising twelve among that 50,000? What if instead of adding dozens of new speaking events onto his calendar he poured all that time into intensively training those twelve apprentices who are spilling over with passion and potential?

If all of this sounds a little familiar, it’s likely because the strategy is so familiar from the scriptures. Jesus himself spoke to large crowds but emptied himself into the twelve apostles. Acts 19 reveals Paul doing the very same thing in founding the school of Tyrannus. So successful was this method of pouring intensively into a very few students that after only two years,

all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.

2 Timothy 2:2 commends the same exponential progression from a small number of dedicated apprentices to a large and powerful impact:

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.

If  Timothy’s students take the same approach, and Timothy’s students’ students do likewise, the number of people who have heard the message from a qualified teacher reaches staggering proportions in short order.

Sum it up and say:

• Worldly thinking encourages us to seek out more and more speaking venues with greater and greater number of hearers;
• Biblical thinking encourages us to seek out a small number of reliable apprentices from however many we teach in front of, and to invest in them heavily, teaching them each to seek out a small number of reliable apprentices as well, and so on.

A handful of reliable apprentices trained by Jesus reached the world in surprisingly short order. How different would the world be today if the early Christians took the approach we take when seeking to recruit people to our cause? “I need more churches to speak in!” is our constant refrain. Our impatience causes us to “miss the math” of small numbers and to despise the day of small beginnings.

The Daily Tell shares a report about two new sites for which financial giving is a P- (Participation-) level activity: SeeYourImpact.org and Jolkona.org.

Both sites operate according to the same principle: Encourage donors to give by providing a plethora of project options across a range of causes through which a visible, reportable impact can be made on a single person for a relatively small gift. After giving, the donor receives a report within a few days detailing how their gift helped that single person, and they are encouraged to share that report with their friends.

The sites are clean and easy to navigate through and understand. Sanitary even.

The projects are short-term, high-impact, and understandable without external reference to a nonprofit organization.

The low-dollar price of entry for giving is designed to appeal to younger donors with limited funding resources. Trevor Neilson, President of Global Philanthropy Group sees this “democratization of philanthropy” as quite the trend:

“Just a few years ago philanthropy was really seen as something that rich people do for poor people,” he told the news provider. “The trend we’re seeing now is that everyone can be philanthropic, and can organize themselves around issues they care about.”

I find myself wanting to like the sites and yet, in the end, unable to do so.

There are all kinds of good things I could say about them, since they embody several of the principles of Transformational Giving. Each project presented is a pretty fair example of a Signature Participation Project. Granted, throwing hundreds of them at a potential donor at any one time calls to mind the fundamental marketing dictum that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 0, which is to say that choice paralyzes and the authors of these sites might be better off picking one really strong Signature Participation Project and building a single site around that, such as nothingbutnets.org. I even like the fact that these sites view Participation as having a strong financial component, an approach that many ministries think is implausible.

But I think what leaves me so nonplussed by both of these sites is that, in the end, I think they are answering a question that I’m not sure anyone is really asking.

Both sites are predicated on the belief that what causes people not to give is that:

1. They’re not sure that their small amount of money can make a difference.
2. They want to see timely visual proof of the one person their gift is helping, and this is not provided by most charities.

Certainly neither of these points is unimportant; people obviously want to know that they can send a small amount of money and have it make a visible difference.

But are those really the two barriers that prevent most people from giving?

Peter Singer might say yes, and the Nikolas Kristof Op-Ed might tend in that direction.

But I myself would ultimately say no–that overcoming  these two barriers is necessary but not sufficient.

The barrier that must be overcome in order to grow people in relation to the causes we love is internal, not external.

Every day provides every person on earth with the opportunity to make a significant difference in the life of someone else. It can be done for very little money–most often with no money at all. And the results don’t even need to take days to show up via email–instead, they are immediately apparent on the face of the person we help.

Why don’t we take advantage of such opportunities? Because they are not attractively packaged for us and sanitized for our protection?

Perhaps.

But John suggests something else:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Detach giving from a rich knowledge of Christ’s love for us, says John, and we will miss the opportunity to give no matter how attractive and clever the form.

Are the giving opportunities you offer to champions aligned to an awareness of Christ’s love for them…or the timely and well-packaged needs of others?

Both have existed since the dawn of time, and yet only one has yielded true transformation in the area of generosity.

Not too long ago I dumped on Donor Power Blog and actually de-listed them from the recommended blog list on my site. They’re still de-listed (too traditional/transactional in my view), but as I noted in my post I still read DPB daily and always enjoy Jeff’s style of writing even though I typically differ from his perspective.

Jeff had a nice post today referencing an Improbable Research piece that I definitely encourage you to check out.

In the piece, IR mails a wide variety of items–a rose, a football, tennis shoes, a $20 bill–and evaluates whether they were delivered, how long they took, and in what condition they arrived.

Neither Jeff nor IR had a particular application step in mind for all of this, but I do:

Before you sit down to write your next direct mail letter:

• Read the Improbable Research Postal Experiments article
• Ask yourself, “What could I mail to my champions other than a letter that would enhance their ability to impact the cause?”
• Then ask yourself, “What could I mail to my champions and encourage them to mail to people in their sphere of influence that would encourage my champion’s champions to impact the cause?”
• Check out the 2008 Echo Award winners and note how all of these highly successful packages involve sending something other than a letter–something far more unusual (and, as the results from each package suggest, far more successful)
• Check out this passage from Daniel 5 and reflect on this truth: How God sends a message is as important as the message He sends.
• Now write your letter

I’ll be expecting my deer tibia in the mail from you nine days from now.