Do the Word

Reading Angela Eikenberry’s absolutely fantastic Giving Circles: Philanthropy, Voluntary Association, and Democracy.

There’s a great deal to share in coming days about Giving Circles, but I wanted to first take notice of a thought that she shares that has prime relevance to Transformational Giving.

Writes Eikenberry:

Giving and volunteering are often viewed as individualistic, heroic efforts, based on individual choice; there is typically little incentive or even ability for individuals to look at more comprehensive efforts for fundamental, long-term change.

In TG terms, we’d say (as we contended last week) that most giving and volunteering is P-level, that is, based on Participation in projects (and supporting an institution can actually count as a project, by the way).

Why?

Because absent coaching champions to grow in maturity in Christ in relation to the cause, projects are about all we can interest people in.

Continues Eikenberry:

Poppendeick suggests the general popularity of giving and volunteering can perhaps best be explained by their function as a moral safety valve to relieve the discomfort people feel when they are confronted with privation and suffering amid general comfort and abundance…. Poppendeick believes emergency food programs serve as an illusion of effective community action, lulling the public into complacency: canned food drives give people a warm, fuzzy feeling but do not cause them to think about why people continue to be in need.

One of the characteristics of a good Signature Participation Project (SPP) is synecdoche. That is, by participating in the project, a champion gets a taste of the cause as a whole.

In Eikenberry’s writing we see the impossible-to-overstate importance of synecdoche well-done:

• If your SPP gives people a warm, fuzzy feeling but does not cause them to think about and begin to be drawn into the deeper cause;
• If it serves as a moral safety valve to relieve discomfort related to the cause;
• If it creates the illusion of effective action but does not fundamentally impact the cause;

…then we’re pulling a Matthew 23:15b and could be causing our cause to recede further in the distance than when we’ve first begun.

Strangely enough, there are few things more dangerous to a ministry than self-replicating Participants.

Reading Matt Bates’ brilliant post yesterday on how to PEOize short-term missions was doubly fascinating for me since I was actually leading a short-term missions team in Korea (focused on NK defectors) when I read the post.

A PEO opportunity to add to the ones Matt mentioned relative to short-term missions is one in which short-term mission trippers regularly engage with very little prompting, namely, blogging while on the mission trip.

It is of course possible for you to have mission trippers blog on your organizational website, but it is far better for trippers to blog on their own existing sites, since the goal of Transformational Giving is to coach a champion on how to spread the cause in his or her sphere of influence.

The other alternative is for trippers to blog on single purpose blogs created specifically for the sake of keeping the trippers’ champions up to date on what’s happening on the trip.

In the case of this trip to Seoul, there were two blogs maintained by trip participants, and both were quite well written. Seoul USA board chairman Stephen Garner wrote this blog, and participants from Southwest Hills Baptist Church in Beaverton, Oregon wrote this one.

As we debriefed the trip last night prior to our departure today, one of the things I realized was how, even though these two blogs are really well done, we missed the opportunity to use them to maximum PEO coaching value.

In retrospect, there’s a number of things I would have done differently related to these blogs that I plan to do differently next time:

1. Prior to the trip, I would have talked to the team about the ministry of blogging and how it could and should be a crucial part of what they do while on the trip, given that that’s the time that folks are actually reading these blogs. I would have given them a crash course in how to use the blog to spread the cause in their sphere of influence during their time on the field.
2. I would have literally blocked out a half hour time block each day for people to update their blog daily, and I would have better facilitated their computer connections. The obvious next step once you’ve enabled someone to see the ministry coaching value of blogging during the trip…is giving them the time to carry out that ministry. I realize as I read the blog posts from the Seoul USA mission trippers that they had to try to squeeze in time to blog late at night and early in the morning, and sometimes even that wasn’t possible.
3. I would have given them suggested themes or topics on which to blog. Mission trippers don’t naturally gravitate towards the kind of writing themes that coach the champions in their sphere of influence. Instead, they understandably gravitate toward the ‘Here’s what I did today’ style of blogging, which, while generally enjoyable and appreciated by families back home, misses a tremendous PEO opportunity.
4. I would have provided the team with several Flip videocameras to enable them to take video during the idea and upload it to their blog. Flip videocameras are ridiculously cheap these days, and the power of same-day video can’t be overstated.
5. I would have provided links to the mission trippers’ blogs from the Seoul USA blog and corporate websites, and I would have invited the trippers to provide links to the Seoul USA sites.
6. I would also equip the trippers to seed into their during-trip blog posts the recruitment call Matt Bates discusses in his post from yesterday. What better time to recruit than from the field?

Certainly not all trips admit of blogging in the ways I’ve suggested above, but more do than don’t. I’m kicking myself for thinking of all this now that the trip is over but reminding myself that TG is typically only learned in hindsight.

The Mission Increase Foundation Giving and Training Officers will be firing up a new daily blog beginning July 13–my birthday. A second TG blog–that’s a great birthday gift!

Each GTO will write a post a week. To give you a little idea what you’ll be seeing on that new blog (I’ll get you the address as soon as I get it), here’s a piece from LAX Regional GTO Matt Bates on applying Transformational Giving to short-term missions teams. Absolutely brilliant piece!

Had a site visit with a missions agency today and brainstormed a fundraising idea that could potentially double as a P to E step.

Like many missions agencies, this one sends short-term teams from the states to sites in the field where they have an ongoing presence with local Christians.

My idea is to reframe the commitment of the short-term missionaries from the very start to include the time required for the usual training, preparation and going, plus (at minimum) an additional year after the team returns from the field.

In this post year, the team would pray/recruit/write/give within their sphere of influence for the cause of world missions as it relates to the particular site where they themselves went. 

The missions organization in turn would commit to discipling the short-termers in the post year, leveraging all they know and understand about how the short-term trip is not an end, but an important step in the journey to full maturity in the cause.  The missions agency would be attempting to move the team from a collection of Ps to a collection of Es.

The giving component in the post year would include a monthly pledge from each member of the short-term team, plus a commitment to get five-ten others in each member’s sphere (starting with the folks who sponsored their own short-term mission) to match their gift.  For example, if a team member committed to giving $50 a month, and got 5 others to give $50 a month, that’s $300 a month or $3,600 in a year.  10% of whatever the team raises could be set aside for scholarship funds to send the next team to the same site, and 15% could go to the missions agency for overhead.  75% would go directly to the site they worked at to continue and advance the ministry on the ground there.

This is a much different conceptual fundraising and ministry model than most missions agencies currently employ.  What they typically try to do is get all the names of the short-term missionaries (‘alumni’) and their supporters, then get all of them to give to the missions agency once the short-term trip is over.  The trouble is that the aunt who supported her nephew to go to Moldova doesn’t care anything about the missions agency—she cares about her nephew—so she is annoyed that the missions agency is contacting her with solicitations.  In the model I propose, the nephew challenges the aunt to match his own giving in the post year, and the missions agency challenges the nephew to teach his aunt to care about Moldova.

The missions agency would also develop the praying/recruiting/writing/relating components with goals and objectives for each area. 

It’s also important that in the post year, the missions agency keeps the people in the teams that went to the field, establishes team goals, and tracks performances of team vs. team. 

Can’t wait for this second daily blog on Transformational Giving beginning next week. I’ll keep you posted!