Do the Word

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.

Measurement sounds like an inherently complicated subject, but it’s not. Most of the time we can learn an immense amount about a situation without even looking at specific measurements. All we need to look at is what’s being measured.

Take traditional transactional fundraising. (Please.)

In traditional transactional fundraising (ttf), what do we measure?

• Gross income raised
• Net income raised
• Cost of fundraising
• Recency of gift
• Frequency of giving
• Size of gift
• Wealth information related to the donor or prospect.

Sum it up and say that what we measure in ttf are quantifications of the relationship between the donor and our organization.

When we report back to donors (and foundations and our board), and when we evaluate our organization internally, what we typically report on are measurements between our organization and the cause our organization is seeking to impact.

So there are umpteen measurements between the individual and our organization, and between our organization and the cause.

But are there any measurements between the individual and the cause in ttf?

In a word? No.

Why?

Because ttf does not believe it is the individual’s job to impact the cause. That’s the organization’s job. The individual’s job is to determine which organization to give money to in order to impact the cause, and to give as much as possible as frequently as possible.

Similarly, ttf does not measure the relationship between the individual and his or her church. Why would we? After all, that’s the donor’s business, right?

According to Barna Group research, church members are shifting their giving away from churches and to nonprofits at an astonishing rate. Three years ago the average Christian was giving 84 cents of every donation dollar to the church. Today, that’s plummeted to 76 cents of every donation dollar, and the trend is accelerating.

The fact that we don’t measure how an individual’s giving to our nonprofit affects his or her giving to church is a sign that our attitude toward the Barna statistic is, ‘It’s not my problem. Tough luck, church. It’s a charity-eat-charity world out there. You better suck it up and figure out how to compete better. Eat my complimentary address labels.’

Another thing ttf doesn’t measure is the relationship between the individual and his or her sphere of influence in relation to spreading the cause.

Grassfire.org was one of the first organizations to build its development philosophy around what founder Steve Elliot called ‘The Grassfire Effect‘–the idea that individuals could be something more than the source of ‘endless referrals’ for an organization; instead, they were the most effective means by which a cause can spread in their sphere of influence.

The fact that ttf doesn’t measure the degree to which an individual’s sphere of influence is saturated with the cause indicates that nonprofits don’t believe individuals are the main means by which the cause spreads. Nonprofits believe nonprofits are the primary spreaders of the cause.

Finally, ttf doesn’t measure the individual giver in relation to himself or herself. Is the gift a healthy step for this individual’s giving portfolio? What does it represent about his or her giving overall–not just as a percentage but as a step of maturity in understanding what the Bible calls him or her to do? Does it reflect maturation in relation to the cause?

The fact that ttf doesn’t measure these things indicates that, in the end, it’s not really the relation between the individual and the organization that is being measured. It’s the amount of money that’s transacted (or in the case of prospects, the amount of money that potentially may be transacted) that’s key.

And that, dear reader, is pretty sad.

And beyond sad, it’s likely not even ’cause smart’ in the long run. It may perhaps be smart in relation to institutional survival, though even that’s debatable. But do we really want to say that Kingdom causes are best impacted by Christian nonprofits funded by reverse consumers known as ‘donors’ who are cultivated the same way for-profit marketers cultivate people to buy a certain brand of dishwashing detergent?

Or would we rather gamble that Kingdom causes are works prepared from before the foundation of the world by God for His people to walk in on the way to full maturity in Christ, assisted by leaders whom God sends for exactly that purpose, all to reveal the glory of His Son (cf. Ephesians 2:10 and Ephesians 4:12)?

Sounds like something well worth measuring.