Do the Word

Do you remember the research last year that concluded that giving money to charity made people happier?

Katya Andresen points us to a Drake Bennett post that updates that research, and the additional information he provides nuances that earlier conclusion quite a bit.

Turns out that it’s not giving money to charity that makes people happier but rather giving money to other people (so-called “pro-social spending”), which may include charitable giving:

First, they surveyed 632 Americans on their general happiness, along with what they spent their money on, and found that higher “prosocial spending” – gifts for others and donations to charity – was indeed correlated with higher self-reported happiness. They followed this up with a more detailed look at 16 workers before and after they received a profit-sharing bonus from their company. They found that the only factor that reliably predicted which workers would be happy six to eight weeks after the bonus was their prosocial spending – the more money people spent on charity and gifts for others, the happier they were.

Surprisingly, no research has apparently yet been done that differentiates whether the types of gifts we give to charity make us more or less happy.

In other words, if I donate $10 because a charity sends me address labels in the mail, does that yield the same level of happiness as if I give $10 to a family from my church who is struggling?

Take it a step further and ask:

If I give $2 million to build a building for a homeless shelter (who then, perhaps coincidentally, engraves my name on it), will that yield the same amount of happiness as if I designate that that same $2 million be spent on discipling and rehabilitating the homeless people who are normally helped inside of the shelter’s existing building–people whom I then meet because along with donating the $2 million I also decide to volunteer to mentor homeless people in the shelter’s rehabilitation program?

Sum it up and ask:

Is all charitable happiness created equally?

Drake’s post offers some tantalizing clues that certain types of giving might be more happiness-inducing than other types:

Another theme that has emerged in similar research is that money spent on experiences – vacations or theater tickets or meals out – makes you happier than money spent on material goods. Leaf Van Boven, an associate psychology professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Gilovich, chair of the psychology department at Cornell University, have run surveys asking people about past purchases and how happy they made them.

“We generally found very consistent evidence that experiences made people happier than material possessions they had invested in,” says Van Boven.

Why? For one thing, Van Boven and Gilovich argue, experiences are inherently more social – when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it’s usually with other people, and we’re liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn’t participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don’t usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor’s newer, nicer car, but we don’t like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.

And while we quickly grow accustomed to a new suit or a bigger house, no matter how much we originally loved it, experiences instead tend to get burnished in our memory – a year after a vacation, we look back not on the stress of dealing with lost luggage or the fights over which way the hotel was, but the beauty of the scenery or the exotic flavors of the food.

Another theme that has emerged in similar research is that money spent on experiences – vacations or theater tickets or meals out – makes you happier than money spent on material goods. Leaf Van Boven, an associate psychology professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Gilovich, chair of the psychology department at Cornell University, have run surveys asking people about past purchases and how happy they made them.

“We generally found very consistent evidence that experiences made people happier than material possessions they had invested in,” says Van Boven.

Why? For one thing, Van Boven and Gilovich argue, experiences are inherently more social – when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it’s usually with other people, and we’re liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn’t participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don’t usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor’s newer, nicer car, but we don’t like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.

And while we quickly grow accustomed to a new suit or a bigger house, no matter how much we originally loved it, experiences instead tend to get burnished in our memory – a year after a vacation, we look back not on the stress of dealing with lost luggage or the fights over which way the hotel was, but the beauty of the scenery or the exotic flavors of the food.

If this so-called “conceptual consumption” brings more happiness than, say, buying a big-screen TV, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that charitable giving that draws us deeply into the cause, into relationship with others who are passionate about the cause, into personal interaction with those impacted by the cause, would make us happier than checkbook philanthropy with associated naming opportunities?

If buying a building is less satisfying than hiking through Mayan ruins, then why would giving money so that a charity can build a building be more satisfying than traveling with that charity to impact the cause firsthand?

This is not to rag on capital campaign gifts by any means…though it is meant to rag on capital campaign gifts that do not bubble over out of deep personal experience with the cause for which the building is being built. Never, in other words, ask a donor to give money to fund a building that they will never volunteer inside of.

One suspects the happiness researches may not have had a lot of Transformational Giving experiences, as their charitable imagination appears somewhat limited:

One intriguing possibility is that workplaces could change to encourage more prosocial spending in their workers. Dunn and Norton have argued, for example, that companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.

Now let me ask you honestly:

Would your happiness really improve that much if the owner of your business said, “Here’s $50 of my money. You get to choose where I donate it”?

What about a matching gift program, where the owner of your business matches non-church gifts you make to charity, up to a certain amount? (That’s what Mission Increase Foundation does for its employees.)

Further, what about a matching time program where the owner of your business gives you a certain amount of time off from work to match volunteer time you’re giving on your own?

Most transformationally of all, what about a matching time and money program where the owner of the business does both?

If it makes for happier (and thus more productive and longer-tenured) employees, why not?

All of these ideas hinge, of course, on the premise that not all charitable giving is created equal when it comes to improving your happiness. That, it seems to me, is the next frontier of happy-giving research.

Until that’s done, enjoy this short story from a dear sister of ours that verifies what the happiness researchers will undoubtedly one day prove: Gifts where our hands come attached to the check make us happiest of all.

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.