Do the Word

It’s half time at the Lapsed Champion Bowl!

Today marks the middle of this week’s posts on the subject, so before you run out to use the restroom and grab a bowl of Tostitos (be careful on the order there) and do other half time-esque activities, let’s review the highlights from the first half:

• We discovered that many individuals who are categorized as ‘lapsed’ really aren’t lapsed at all. They’re participants. Participants participate in projects. They might even participate repeatedly, or annually (like a rescue mission donor giving money to provide meals for the homeless every Thanksgiving). As such, they may look quite ‘active’.
• As the apostle John reminds us, however, activity is not the criterion by which we measure whether a champion is ‘of us’. Knowledge of the truth is. We’re not talking here about knowing in the informational sense, but in the King James way of knowing one’s wife that always made us giggle in Sunday school. In Transformational Giving we call this Engagement. Engagement means ‘knowing’ the cause the way Adam ‘knew’ Eve.
• As such, when a ministry defines and declares who’s lapsed on the basis of the lack of recency of individual giving (saying, for example, that all individuals are lapsed who have given two or more gifts in their giving lifetime but none in the last two years), it’s missing the boat. Activity isn’t the issue. And ministries aren’t the arbiters of what counts as lapsed. Engagement with the cause is the issue, and what counts as lapsed is determined by Scripture.
• Even using this language stands to land us quite far downstream from where we want to be biblically if we’re not careful. Jesus doesn’t talk in terms of sheep who wander. He talks in terms of shepherds who lose. So we need something more than a lapsed champion strategy. We need an organizational accountability strategy, in which we repent of and seek to recover the champions whom we have permitted to lapse (or, if you prefer, the sheep we have permitted to wander) on our watch.

So heading into the second half of play (the two posts remaining this week), what should we be looking for?

• A two-sided lapsed recovery strategy, one that addresses not only sheep who wander but also shepherds who lose. We should expect to see the appearance of TG Principle 5, which talks about the relationship between organization and champion being a peer-level mutual accountability relationship. There’s no way this game can be won unless each side recognizes and recovers its authority and responsibility.
• That kind of talk brings the champion map to mind–the P/E/O plan created by the champion and the organization to chart a trajectory for champion growth in the image of Christ in relation to the cause.
• I’d also look for TG 5 to be used to talk about how Scripture needs to be the basis of determining what counts as lapsed, not the need of the organization nor the desire of the champion. That’s likely to involve talk of intensive Scripture study, prayer, and fasting.
• It’s also appearing likely that more is at issue here than a person’s giving. Don’t be surprised if in the second half we see the appearance of the idea that a person could be happily giving regularly and yet still count as lapsed. You could almost see that coming in the first half with the idea in yesterday’s post that an organization could well be humming along and in fact itself be lapsed.
• We’ve seen since the opening kickoff this week that Participation has been sidelined from the lapsed discussion. Engagement clearly is going to be the focus of the second half offense. If the opposite of lapsed isn’t active, you have to think it’s Engaged.
• The whole idea that Engagement is tied to knowledge sets us up well for a revelation that a champion can’t lapse without first ‘knowing’ the cause. That’s definitely going to mean changing the way we deal with all champions, not just the lapsed ones. Likely we’ll see that the best lapsed champion strategy…is an effective P/E/O (Participation/Engagement/Ownership) strategy that plants the seed of ‘knowing’ the cause in every project from P through O. In other words, the key to not losing sheep is clearly connected to keeping them focused on the cause, not just bombarding them with a monthly barrage of heart-tugging appeals.

The fascinating thing to note as we close this halftime show is that we know something new has to be introduced in the TG offense in the second half. Even when you consider the champion maps and a well-formed P/E/O strategy, it’s not enough to keep shepherds from losing and sheep from wandering. We’re clearly looking at a major new piece being added to the TG playbook right here.

The teams are headed back on to the field now, sheep on the left and shepherds on the right. Things are shaping up for a powerful finish to this one.

Whoa Nelly! Call the family and gather ’round the blog for the second half of the Lapsed Champion Bowl!

Role reversal.

That’s the phrase that keeps coming to mind for me as I reflect on the vastly different way that Transformational Giving views and treats the subject of champions lapsing, as compared to how traditional/transactional development deals with ‘lapsed donors’.

As we talked about in yesterday’s post (and when you review it, make sure to check out the comment posted by Mission Increase Foundation Expansion Officer Tracy Nordyke), John’s words about those who were not ‘of us’ and Jesus’ words about shepherds reverse the roles normally played in the lapsed drama by organization and champion.

In traditional/transactional lapsed donor strategy:

• the organization determines what constitutes a lapsed donor. Typically they determine that a donor is ‘lapsed’ when the donor, after having in the past given X gifts in Y period of time, has now ceased altogether from giving over Z period of time.
• the donor is responsible for the lapse due to their inaction. In fact, if their unresponsive behavior keeps up, we usually term them ‘inactive’.

Notice how these two key points are inverted in Transformational Giving:

• In 1 John 2:20, notice what John says is the opposite of not being ‘of us’. It’s not ‘staying with us’. It’s knowing the truth. In other words, activity isn’t the measurement; knowledge is. And knowledge here, of course, means something entirely different than amassing information. It might better be translated by a word far more familiar to us in Transformational Giving, namely: Engagement. More on this as the week unfolds. The key to note for today is that the standard of lapsing is not  set by the organization. It’s set in relation to the truth (to which, I would add, both the organization and the champion are subject. This raises the fascinating spectre of lapsed organizations, which, provocatively,  John raises in Revelation 2:3-5 with regard to the Church at Ephesus.)
• As we noted yesterday, Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Suppose a sheep wanders.’ He says, ‘Suppose a shepherd loses a sheep.’ So the subject and verb here are switched. The emphasis is flipped 180 degrees. The focus is not ‘donor lapsed’. It’s ‘shepherd lost’.

So let’s take stock of where we are as of Day 2 of our lapsed champion odyssey:

• In TG, organizations don’t define what counts as lapsed. Scripture does.
• According to Scripture, organizations can lapse just the same as champions can, even when they are by all appearances quite active.
• The shepherd, not the sheep, has an accountability role not comprehended in traditional/transactional development.

Having fun yet? More tomorrow.

Traditional/transactional fundraising usually defines lapsed donors as those who gave a certain number of gifts over a certain period of time before failing to give for a subsequent period of time.

If that’s a lapsed donor, then the opposite is pretty obvious: a donor who continues to give a certain number of gifts in a certain period of time.

In this way of thinking, the opposite of a lapsed donor is an active one.

Sounds sensible. But is it?

You know me well enough to know that the reason I ask the question is because I intend to turn the traditional/transactional answer on its ear. What may surprise you is that it’s going to take this whole week to do it.

Fortunately, the fact that a multiple-day answer is required doesn’t mean that we have to slog through four days of arcane nonsense before we get to something meaningful. Instead, if I do my job right, we’ll be having major a-has every day this week. The length of the answer is due, in other words, not to the complexity of the question but rather to the degree that it is so close to the heart of God.

To understand this, we have to turn immediately to scripture, where two verses in particular serve as the biblical ‘bookends’ when we talk about lapsed champions.

In 1 John 2:19, John writes, ‘They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had really belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.’

In Luke 15:4, Jesus says, ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?’

These two verses bookend a very different shelf on which the question of lapsed champions sits.

On the one side, John’s statement helps make clear something that is obscured in most discussions about lapsed champions, namely:

Most individuals labeled as lapsed champions (or donors) by an organization really shouldn’t be classified as lapsed at all.

 For John, and by extension in Transformational Giving, we recognize an entire category of people who were never ‘of’ us, though for a while they were ‘with’ us.

In TG, we call these people Participants.

They may do projects with us. They may give through our organization. They may even be around  for some period of time.

What they don’t do, however, is engage with the cause through us.

As a result, we don’t use the term ‘lapsed’ to describe them. Participants, in other words, don’t lapse by definition. They participate for a time (sometimes even a long time) and either become engaged with the cause, or they just stop participating.

Turn now to the other bookend.

Notice Jesus’ language. It doesn’t speak of a sheep lapsing or wandering.

It speaks of a shepherd losing a sheep. 

As such, TG turns the question of lapsing on its head. Rather than seeing it as a characteristic of the sheep, it sees it as part of the responsibility of the shepherd.

It’s a great fundamental observation:

Sheep wander. Shepherds bring them back.

So when we talk about lapsed champions in TG, we’re talking about you bringing back those who were of you and who have now wandered, as champions are prone to do.

Since this is a very different way of thinking about the question, it stands to reason that we’re going to have a very different way of going about the process–a way so different, in fact, that the opposite of a lapsed donor will quickly be seen to be something more than simply active.

More in tomorrow’s post.