Do the Word

As if to underscore yesterday’s post on orienting concerns–those ‘worries’ that we bring to every question of theology and fundraising–there was a really clear illustration of the orienting concern of traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf) in the great post yesterday on Beth’s Blog related to measuring the fundraising impact of social media like Facebook.

TTF fundraisers twist in the wind when it comes to figuring out Facebook and Twitter and other social media because even telemarketing and door-to-door fruitcake sales are often still more potent income generators for nonprofits than Facebook. And this is a problem for ttf’ers, since as Betsy Harman is quoted as saying in the piece:

It’s still all about building relationships, telling your story, and taking potential donors through the process of cultivation, stewardship and solicitation.

There’s the orienting concern of ttf–organizational finances–rearing its head again: Everything is measured against its potential to generate income for the organization.

The challenge is, nowhere more than with social media does such a goal drive ttf adherents to drown in sorrowful and desperate tweets. Social media is tenacious and consistent in its resistance to this kind of income calculus. Yet ttf fundraisers can’t ignore that ‘everyone is doing it’–getting involved with social media, that is.

Social media simply resists to the core of its being you and I ‘taking potential donors’ (yikes! What a phrase) through ‘the process of cultivation, stewardship, and solicitation’.

Hard to ‘take’ anyone anywhere on Facebook or other social media. It’s a media that relies on giving something–in the case of our work, giving mentoring, counsel, networking, and interesting opportunities to connect with others to do with others what they can’t do on your own. Giving without thought of return because it’s in service of the cause.

TTF fundraisers totally understand the concept that social media requires a gift mindset. They just for the life of themselves can’t figure out what to do with it.

From Beth’s Blog yesterday:

The other thing to remember is that a lot of social media culture is built on the ‘gift economy:’ the notion that it’s a good idea to do things that are just good ideas. There’s no expected return when you do someone a favor, or when you take time to share research for free. You realize that it’s making the whole environment richer with your unique participation — you don’t expect anything else from it.

The problem for ttf devotees is that at some point they have to make things shift from the organization making a gift with no expectation in return, to the other person making a gift back to them. One always runs the risk of smacking of insincerity when you expect nothing on the way to expecting everything.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, in other words, are virtually impermeable to the orienting concern of nonprofit financial health. People on Facebook, in other words, could care less about the financial health of our nonprofit.

On the other hand, TG’s orienting concern–Is the champion/partner being shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ in relation to the cause?–is tailor-made for social media. Social media opens up opportunities to coach champions that are unlike any opportunities we’ve ever had before.

And we can port all of our TG agenda onto social media without Facebook friends feeling like we’ve baited and switched them. We can (and should) even talk openly about how to give to advance the cause, because our orienting concern is helping the champion comprehensively impact the cause, not the financial health of our nonprofit. People will actually appreciate it when we can coach them in how to use all of their personal and corporate assets to impact the cause.

At the end of the day, social media measurement is one more demonstration of the potency of TG when compared to ttf. TTF is left to hem and haw about how social media builds ‘social capital, goodwill, and influence‘…but it can’t figure out how to put that in the ttf fuel tank that only runs on dollars.

TG, on the other hand, is completely comfortable in the social media environment, since it’s designed to allow us to give all the things we are called to give: coaching, accountability, and opportunity.

Now having exposed the lack of clothesiness of the ttf emperor in relation to measurement, we turn next week to what the Bible has to say about measurement (an astonishing amount, actually) in order to ask:

According to scripture, what does God want us to measure anyway?

That’s the question that needs to drive TG measurement–and the answers turn out to be things that, while nothing short of spiritually revolutionary for us as Christian nonprofits, are remarkably do-able from a practical standpoint.

One of the appeals of traditional/transaction fundraising (ttf) is that it’s so easy to measure. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby! You know if your ttf efforts are succeeding or failing by looking at your gross and net incomes and your cost of fundraising. Simple.

On the other hand, Transformational Giving (TG) appears to require more complex, softer measurements. After all, in TG we’re concerned about more than giving. In our P/E/O charts (which in and of themselves are a measurement), we’re seeking to measure each dimension of growth required for a person to grow from being what I call a pukey face fall down in the mud gentile that doesn’t know nothin’ from nothin’ in relation to the cause…to a disciple comprehensively shaped in the image of Christ in that dimension of Christian service.

That sounds like TG might need a few more measurement gauges than ttf.

Or does it?

Let me unleash a little Randy Maddox on you, from his amazing tome, Responsible Grace. The air will get a little thick in here for a second, but crack a window and resist the urge to skip ahead:

I have come to believe…that what gives consistency (if there is any) to particular theological traditions within a religion are not unchanging doctrinal summaries, or a theoretical Idea from which all truth is deduced or given order in a System; it is instead a basic orienting perspective or principle that guides their various particular theological activities….

I want to make clear that it is not simply one theological concept or metaphor among others. It is a perspective within which one construes (or a ‘worry’ which one brings to) all of the various types of theological concepts….

Its role is not to be the foundation from which doctrines spring or the pattern into which they must fit, but the abiding interest which influences the selection, interpretation, relative emphasis, and interweaving of theological affirmations and practices.

Sum it up and say:

As we contended in our TG seminar (click here to download a complimentary PDF of the seminar workbook), ttf and TG are both, at root, theological systems. And theological systems are built around a basic organizing principle or ‘orienting concern’. Given our focus this week, you might say that the orienting concern is the fundamental measurement employed in the system.

For ttf, the orienting concern is the financial health of the nonprofit. As you’ll see in the seminar workbook notes, there’s a biblical term for that:

Idolatry.

Let me state it flat out:

Making decisions about how to relate to people/donors/champions based around an orienting concern of the financial health of a nonprofit is idolatrous.

Let’s return to something to which we alluded earlier this week.

There are three entities involved in development:

1. The champion or partner
2. The nonprofit
3. The cause

What ttf does is to split these up into two distinct and independent sets of measurements:

1. Champion/partner-nonprofit income measurements
2. Nonprofit-cause impact measurements

This is why ttf so frequently leads the nonprofits that practice it away from their cause:

Because the income and impact measurements are two separate sets of measurements.

Raising money is one thing, impacting the cause is another. It’s why the so-called ‘program’ folks at nonprofits look down their noses at the ‘fundraisers’.

In TG, it turns out that the orienting concern–the measurement–is simpler, not more complex. There’s only one measurement, not two disconnected sets of measurements. The measurement is this:

• Is the champion/partner being shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ in relation to the cause?

The orienting concern that underlies the measurement is this:

• The champion/partner is called to walk in works prepared by God for the sake of being shaped in the image of Christ, to the glory of God.

Because that is our orienting concern, every other measurement becomes subsidiary.

(Yes, even income measurements. With this orienting concern we can distinguish between ‘good income’ and ‘bad income’ for an organization based on whether that income is the product of growth in the cause–fruit produced from the giver being shaped in the image of Christ–or not.)

With these principles in mind, tomorrow we can lay out a truly TG system of measurement–transparent, collaborative, and built around God’s fundamental orienting concern…which is most assuredly not a nonprofit’s balance sheet.

Right smack in the middle of our week on measurement comes a post from The Agitator (commenting on a post from DM News)…

…on measurement.

You’d almost think we planned it.

Both articles posit three groups of donors/consumers [Editor’s note: the fact that donors and consumers are interchangeable–does this trouble you at all?]:

1. Those whose lifetime donation/purchase total is the highest among your constituents.
2. Those whose “share of wallet” (percentage of money spent/donated to you of all they spend/donate in your category) is the highest among your constituents.
3. Those whose referral rate (the number of folks in their sphere of influence that they tell about you) is the highest among your constituents.

Both articles ask the same question in an effort to provoke: If you could figure out which of your constituents fell in each of these categories (which you can’t, because you’re only tracking transactional data), which category of donor-sumers would you invest in the most?

To me, such a question is not provocative but roundly disappointing.

I recommend two genuinely provocative questions instead:

1. Why would you build a fundraising program where you were investing in people based on your calculations of their ‘investment value’ rather than building a development program where you were investing in people based on their demonstrated willingness to be mentored by you comprehensively in relation to the cause?
2. What if the reason we kept measurements on individuals wasn’t so we could determine their ‘value’ but rather to share those measurements with them for their benefit–to help them see things about their growth in the cause and impact on the cause which would help them grow to greater fullness in Christ?

What we’re building up to this week is the concept of ‘shared measurements’: measurements done collaboratively with our champions, according to their eager and explicit consent, for their sake (i.e., to enable them to grow in the cause).

Before we move on to what shape that might take in TG, I can’t help myself but to ask:

Don’t you marvel at the opportunity churches miss to do exactly this when they send their giving summary updates listing your donations for the quarter/year?

These church giving statements–they’re like the register tape in a grocery store, with a thankful/hopeful/concerned/call-the-office-if-you-see-an-error-here letter from the pastor or finance chair thrown in for good measure.

GIFT *** DATE *** WHAT YOU PLEDGED *** WHAT YOU GAVE ***

I just got my ‘statement’ last week. (On the same day, I got my ‘statement’ from the water company, too.) What the church measures–is it for tax purposes? Church budget purposes? For the purpose of coaching their champions into the fullness of Christ?

Check your statement and let me know what you think.