Do the Word

Prior to becoming President of the Los Angeles Mission a job transition or two ago, I was serving as Vice President at the Russ Reid Company, overseeing the agency’s work with rescue missons, including the Los Angeles Mission.

At that time, the mission was going through a “If one direct mail appeal letter a month is good, two appeal letters a month can only be better” phase.

No exaggeration. And most months there was also a newsletter thrown in for good measure.

And the weird thing was, it was working–at least according to all of the metrics that are typically employed to measure fundraising. The mission was generating not only more gross income, but more net income, and its overall cost of fundraising was remaining well within the bounds of acceptability.

I wanted to protest that donor fatigue would derail the mission’s approach sooner or later, but the mission’s lapsed and inactive donor reactivation program steadily, predictably, and efficiently gathered the donors up who fell out of the clown car and stuffed them back in again, all while the car veered wildly down the Hollywood Freeway.

It was amazing. Disgusting, alarming, and yucky. But amazing. It was one of the few times in history that a direct mail agency was alarmed that its client was mailing too much.

Even back in those pre-Transformational Giving days, there were some mission fundraising folks (including Seattle Union Gospel Mission’s Jenny Printz and Los Angeles Mission’s Matt Bates, now not coincidentally both Regional Giving and Training Officers with Mission Increase Foundation) who knew that there must be more to fundraising measurement than gross income, net income, net yield per donor, and cost of fundraising. Out of that vague sense of discontent, we each began on our own to try some different things that would eventually crystallize into the movement known as Transformational Giving (TG).

Transformational Giving has become quite the detailed system of development in the last ten years. In one area, however, Transformational Giving remains quite undefined:

Measurement.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there is any dearth of proof or statistical evidence that Transformational Giving ‘works’, or that it works ‘better’ than traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf). Mission Increase Foundation maintains one heckuva impressive statistical database that tracks just that. And there are no shortage of organizations successfully exemplifying TG principles; we regularly chronicle ’em in these pages here.

When I say that measurement is the great undefined frontier for Transformational Giving, what I mean is that Transformational Giving is different from traditional/transactional fundraising not just in degree, but in kind. As a result, it ought to be doing more than just showing it can hold its own in measurements like income growth and cost of fundraising.

It needs to determine what from a TG standpoint is worth measuring in the first place.

Principle 8 of the Transformational Giving Ten says, ‘Giving is not the process but rather one vital result of the process of a champion being comprehensively coached to share the cause effectively within his or her sphere of influence’. That certainly suggests, and rightly so, that the results of TG are seen first and always most prominently in the champion himself or herself, and secondarily in the bank account of the nonprofit. If so, TG ought to be determining, promoting, and popularizing measurements that relate to that.

It ought to be doing that. But so far it’s not.

Sadly, I suspect that’s because we TG folks are too busy trying to sell TG to nonprofits and missionaries who were raised on traditional/transactional fundraising. Proving that TG beats ttf  requires that we use ttf’s metrics: income and cost of fundraising. That’s not all bad, but, on the other hand, it’s not all good. For example, if a ministry can generate more income at a better cost of fundraising through traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf), should they simply continue to do so? If not, why not?

I think there are plenty of reasons why not, and they’re not simply abstract theological reasons (though the abstract theological reasons in and of themselves ought to be enough to keep any self-respecting Christian up at least half the night). But until we development TG measurements and subject ttf to them, we’ll simply be accused of being idealistic and not understanding that ‘my organization is going down the drain, and we need MONEY! Please tell me how the LA Mission managed to make so much money doing two appeal letters and a newsletter every month. We definitely need to do that. And please give us a grant while we’re waiting.’

So this week we turn our attention to questions of measurement and Transformational Giving. Our goal: the development of metrics that reveal TG’s true potency, especially when compared to traditional/transactional fundraising. Some will say it’s not the sexiest topic we’ve ever covered, yet I’m not so sure it’s not quite literally the most important. The future of TG likely depends on our being able to make a case to nonprofit executive A or missionary B that they should care about anything other than gross income, net income, and cost of fundraising.

Our text for the week will be Douglas W. Hubbard’s How To Measure Anything: Finding The Value Of Intangibles In Business. Not a light tome by any measure, but it’s the good pleasure of this blog to make it interesting and applicable to you.

So grab your champions and a ruler and get set for this week’s Adventures In Measurement!

Thanks to Joanne Fritz for highlighting the Chronicle of Philanthropy article announcing the end of ‘The Golden Age of Philanthropy’ in the United States.

The closing credits for the Golden Age rolled at last week’s annual Council for Advancement and Support of Education conference. Blame it all on living on the recessionary downside of home prices and stock market valuations, say conference speakers.

Fortunately, fundraising gurus were quick with advice:

Move one level down the giving pyramid and start cultivating relationships with middle donors.

Sure, it’ll take more resources to raise fewer gifts, and sure, development offices already have fewer development officers due to economic cutbacks (even attendance at the conference was down 15% from last year), but conference attendees were urged to take consolation in the remarks of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who exhorted participants:

I cannot imagine a more difficult but more important job right now [than fundraising for colleges]. Your mission is more important than ever.

Go team?

I could not agree more that the ‘golden age’ of traditional/transactional giving (ttf) is over. What stuns me is that the prescription from ttf’s best thinkers is: gather more workers and keep pounding away at that pyramid, friends!

That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: ‘You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota.’ (Ex. 5:6-8)

TG, anyone?

In yesterday’s post, we went old school with praise for Jane Addams and Hull House as a branch of the TG family tree. The core idea we were lauding was Addams’ focus on identification, immersion, and partnership, not pity, as a transformational driver.

Today we go new school with a ten-pack of Partnership-Beats-Pity resources: a reading list for development professionals interested in coaching champions to bear burdens with, not for, the subjects of our causes, helping impact the things that they care about that arise from the heart of God.

1. Opening Doors: Pathways to Diverse Donors, by Diana S. Newman. Check out this post from last week for my lavish praise of this 2002 work. I love it so much I can almost even forgive Newman for using the d-word in the title.
2. If Jesus Were Mayor, by Bob Moffitt. We’ve talked about this marvelous tome in past posts (namely here and here), but never in light of Moffitt’s brilliant discussion of ways to give and get involved with churches overseas that lead to partnership rather than dependence.
3. A Model For Making Disciples, by D. Michael Henderson. We’ve swooned over this title in past posts here and here, but, again, never in light of Henderson’s pointing out how John Wesley’s Class Meeting discipleship model arose to meet a fundraising need, and how that need was met in a way that put rich and poor contributors on equal footing and even gave the poorest of the poor the opportunity to lead the richest of the rich.
4. When Charity Destroys Dignity, by Glenn J. Schwartz. The book’s subtitle is ‘Overcoming Unhealthy Dependency in the Christian Movement’. Some of the chapter titles are ‘What Should Wealthy Churches do with their Money?’, ‘Historical Development of the Syndrome of Dependency’, and ‘What can Missionaries do to Avoid or Break the Dependency Syndrome?’ Weird capitalization, sure. But a rich, rich work.
5. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, and Ruthven. Read this book and your pity for the poor will be overcome by admiration and astonishment. The book doesn’t address the topic, but I’ve always felt that matching gifts–where the poor provide  financial gifts of proportional sacrifice for joint projects with affluent Western champions–is TG of the highest order. (Note that I said ‘of proportional financial sacrifice’. There’s amazement aplenty waiting to happen when champions see what kind of a ‘proportional gift’ they would need to make to match a 15 cent gift from someone from half the nations on the globe.)
6. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, by Dambisa Moyo. As we were saying in yesterday’s post, when our mindset is ‘help the less fortunate’, it is truly jaw-droppingly astonishing how badly that kind of help can backfire.
7. Missions and Money, by Jonathan J. Bonk. The subtitle, Affluence as a Missionary Problem, is sheer genius. Most missionaries are convinced that Low Support Account Balances are the primary Missionary Problem. The best sections of the book are the ones labeled ‘Old Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Reassuring’, ‘New Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Reassuring’, ‘Old Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Troubling’, and ‘New Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Troubling’. Why isn’t this written down anywhere else?
8. The Ethics of Giving and Receiving: Am I My Foolish Brother’s Keeper?, edited by May and Soens. Lots of great essays in this book. Make sure especially to check out Roy Menninger’s ‘Observations on the Psychology of Giving and Receiving Money’. (That’s a great question for champions to ask, by the way: What are the possible responses that can be made to this donation by the end recipient, not the charity?)
9. www.vulnerablemission.com. This is the web home of the The Alliance For Vulnerable Mission, dedicated to the premise ‘That there should be some missionaries from the West whose ministries are conducted in the language of the people being reached, without use of outside financial subsidy.’
10. Why am I concerned about dependency, a blog post by my dear bro and kindred spirit Glenn Penner, CEO of VOM/Canada. Glenn makes a fascinating connection between persecution and dependency and then notes how it’s the latter, not the former, that really gives him the willies.

The Bible itself sure belongs on the top of this list. Make sure to keep a weather eye out for the partnership-beats-pity theme therein–and hit the comments section at the bottom of this page to let me know what you find.