Do the Word

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.

That’s the compelling conclusion of  University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, as reported in Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times Op-Ed column, Would You Let This Girl Drown? (Thanks to Generous Mind Jon Hirst for the tip.)

Kristof favorably reviews Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, a book I panned in a previous post and with which I still disagree. Nevertheless, Kristoff serves up a point with which I agree emphatically: When nonprofits seek to overwhelm people with shocking statistics related to their cause, the only result is that people become overwhelmed.

There’s growing evidence that jumping up and down about millions of lives at stake can even be counterproductive. A number of studies have found that we are much more willing to donate to one needy person than to several. In one experiment, researchers solicited donations for a $300,000 fund that in one version would save the life of one child, and in another the lives of eight children. People contributed more when the fund would save only one life.

Kristof notes rather resignedly that this is largely a function of our rationality impeding our empathy:

Perhaps this is because, as some research suggests, people give in large part to feel good inside. That works best when you write a check and the problem is solved. If instead you’re reminded of larger problems that you can never solve, the feel-good rewards diminish. For example, in one study, people donate generously to Rokia, a 7-year-old malnourished African girl. But when Rokia’s plight was explained as part of a larger context of hunger in Africa, people were much less willing to help.

Excellent point, though this is the very nut that the Participation/Engagement/Ownership process is intended to cut, and cut gradually. In other words, at the participation stage the champion’s interest is in Rokia, not world hunger. It is through helping Rokia that the champion comes to understand both the larger context of hunger in Africa and the biblical imperative to get personally engaged in that larger context.

Kristof also suggests a change in focus, from whipping out the death stats to assuring the champion that by participating and engaging with the cause they are joining a growing movement of champions:

In the case of fighting poverty, there are billions of other bystanders to erode a personal sense of responsibility. Moreover, humanitarian appeals emphasize the scale of the challenges — 25,000 children will die today! — in ways that are as likely to numb us as to galvanize us.

I also wonder if our unremitting focus on suffering and unmet needs stirs up a cloud of negative feelings that incline people to avert their eyes and hurry by. Maybe we should emphasize the many humanitarian successes, such as the falling child mortality rates since 1990 — which mean that 400 children’s lives are saved every hour, around the clock.

It’s a point Peter Block makes in his masterful Community: The Structure of Belonging:  individuals are slow to get involved even with a cause they believe in until they can see others getting involved in the way that they themselves are being asked to get involved.

That’s one of the reasons why Transformational Giving (TG) Principle #7 says:

The relationship between champion and champion is as important as the relationship between champion and organization.