Do the Word

Just went through the rabbit hole (courtesy of a tip from Katya Andresen’s blog) to see what P/E/O looks and sounds like in a radically secularized context.

Story Innovation Labs is offering a free downloadable e-book entitled Storylistening through Social Media.

See if any of this sounds familiar:

THE CROWD THAT LISTENS—politely, patiently, credulously—HAS DISPERSED FOREVER.

Talking to just anybody isn’t what marketing is about anymore.

Brands need to know the influences of their audiences and the relevance of what others are publishing/saying about them.

ARE YOU STILL IN THE BUSINESS OF DETAINING THE UNINTERESTED? Why?

What if you could NURTURE A COMMUNITY around what you do, instead?

Engagement can be beneficial. Wise conversation curation can transform an ebbing sea of increasingly inattentive “consumers” into a thriving, engaged, interacting “community.”

…and lays out strategies for dealing with each group and equipping individuals to grow from one group into another.

It’s definitely not P/E/O (unlike A/F/F/F/F, P, E, and O are different in kind, not degree, plus the A/F/F/F/F architecture is decidedly focused on connecting customers with the organization, whereas P/E/O connects the champion to the cause, with the organization as the stage/platform), but it’s certainly interesting enough to make the e-book worth downloading and scanning through. (The foe/fiend conversion material certainly has resonance in TG, not to mention the New Testament.)

I have to admit to having mixed feelings any time I see analogs of P/E/O pop up in secular marketing. On the one hand, there’s a degree of vindication in being able to say to ministries, “Look, even secular nonprofits and forprofits are turning away from the strategies we Christian organizations are clinging to dogmatically!”

On the other hand, there’s always a sadness in seeing secular nonprofits and forprofits coarsely approximate what only we can fully embody, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit and the plan and purposes of God.

True confessions time:

When I wrote the cookie book with Amy Karjala and Rebekah Farquhar, we decided to build the story around a small, local youth ministry because I felt that local ministries would have a much harder time thinking up Participation/Engagement/Ownership opportunities to utilize in coaching their champions in contrast to international ministries!

Having co-founded an international ministry with my wife, and having spent no small portion of my development consulting hours collaborating with international ministries, it had become second-nature for me to think of international ministries as having a distinct P/E/O advantage, since international ministries have a far more exotic palette with which to paint.

Now, however, one of the most popular questions I receive by email or when I teach comes from individuals working an international ministries, who say to me, “I see how P/E/O can work for a local ministry, but our champions are spread all over the country, and our work is on the other side of the world. I don’t see how P/E/O can work for us.”

I think I should have written the kimchi book instead of the cookie book!

In any case, if you’re looking for a real-life example of how a small international organization creates long-distance involvement opportunities for its champions, check out the website of charity:water.

They’re a secular organization, but most everything they do would port over with little difficulty to a Christian ministry.

I’m not wild about the “a-thon” approach that crops up here and there on the site (“From birthday parties to school-wide events, jog-a-thons to getting the Dean of Students to shave his head, throwing an event or party can be one of the best ways to help raise awareness and funds in your school community”), but the cause-oriented downloadable PDF for students to use in their schools is a nice touch. So are the banners and the Twitter backgrounds which champions can use in their own sphere of influence (instead of your organization setting up its own Twitter account and trying to build a sphere of Twitterfluence).

By far my favorite elements of the site are the stories from the field (written, note, not by staff members but by owners of the cause) and the Google Earth images. Google Earth is a fascinating tool for international ministries to prayerfully contemplate incoporating into their champion development efforts.

Finally, there’s a great statement of the cause–and it’s pure cause. It’s not organizational needs. It’s not “our vision”. It’s a statement that can be understood completely with reference to itself…rather than with reference to the organization in question. Christian ministries would do well to emulate the form, especially since more than a few ministries I run across have an exceedingly difficult time distinguishing the cause from their organization. (I just read a piece from a ministry, in fact, that defined the cause as supporting their organization!)

Finally, be sure to check out charity:water’s events page, which is a veritable catalog of ways owner-level champions can recruit new participants to a cause. Exceedingly well done…and engaging from any distance.

The Big Idea in the free Marketing Your Ministry workshops and labs we’re teaching this month and next is this:

The work of recruiting new champions for your cause does not belong to you. It belongs to your champions. Your job is to comprehensively equip your champions in relation to the cause so that they become living brochures for the cause (not for your organization) in your sphere of influence. (Your organization makes a great stage but a terrible actor.)

If that approach sounds familiar, I hope it’s because it’s nothing other than an effort to take 2 Timothy 2:2 and Ephesians 4:11-13 seriously.

It may, however, sound familiar because more and more secular nonprofits are beating us to our own punch, applying things that we Christians have known for years but have been afraid to apply in a development context because we were too busy clinging tenaciously to the very tactics that secular nonprofits have been busily abandoning because they don’t work anymore.

In the spirit of making us jealous unto good works, then, I share with you this post from Beth’s Blog in which she perfectly describes from a secular standpoint what we in Transformational Giving call “marketing as an O to P move”–in other words, a champion owning the cause in their sphere of influence to such a degree that they recruit new participants to the cause.

Beth calls this being an “imbedded free agent fundraiser”!

It’s a fabulous article. Read it not only to see a real-life example of a “living brochure”–an O-level champion recruiting new P’s for the cause of helping children in Cambodia–but also to soak in Beth’s tips about how nonprofits can support the “imbedded free agent fundraisers” in their own network.