Do the Word

Seems like the blog is sponsored by the letter E this week. Lots of Engagement-type items crossing the virtual desk at present.

P/E/O–Participation/Engagement/Ownership is the discipleship backbone of Transformational Giving and thus a regular topic on this blog. (Here’s a blog post on P/E/O containing a chart from Mission Increase Foundation’s Matt Bates that nicely fleshes things out.)

Typically we talk about the P to E move by saying that it’s the shift from Participation in a project to Engagement with a cause, noting that at the Engagement level there is a prominent lifestyle element involved.

I like that distinction, but without a doubt it needs further fleshing out.

That’s why I really like what Mel Lawrenz does with the word Engagement in his book Whole Church: Leading from Fragmentation to Engagement.(There’s a nice PDF of Chapter 1 of Mel’s book on the Wiley website, by the way.)

Mel’s not writing about TG, but what he writes is really causing me to ruminate about Engagement in TG, and I think there’s a lot of carryover.

For example, Mel notes four kinds of engagement:

1. Engaging with God
2. Engaging with God’ s people
3. Engaging with your community
4. Engaging with the world

This is a fascinating list in that one primary application in coaching champions would be helping a champion at the P (Participation) level–someone who’s doing a Signature Participation Project (SPP) with the ministry, for instance–to reflect on the project in each of these four dimensions.

Good news is, this could only happen if the project was synecdochic (that is, if in doing the project the participant could ‘taste’ the fullness of your ministry, with the SPP serving as like the little tasting spoon that they give you at Cold Stone Creamery), so that’s a good way to make sure you’re staying on the synecdochic straight and narrow. If you are, then developing a reflection piece/study guide/devotional that holds up that SPP in light of these four dimensions of Engagement might be a stellar P to E coaching move.

Also, a number of ministries report that they’re struggling as they try to flesh out what it means for a champion to Engage with the cause. I’m not so sure Mel’s list doesn’t give us a nice template for exploring that.

Another aspect of what Mel wrote that excites me: He talks about how these four dimensions of Engagement have a cumulative, exponential effect. Thus, he cautions against creating projects that seal these dimensions into four distinct compartments. He’s writing with specific reference to the church, of course, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how his thoughts might apply to nonprofits as well:

If a church tries to get one hundred more people involved
in small groups each year, that’ s a good thing. But if the energy of small groups is brought into the worship of the church, and global engagement is featured through storytelling in the worship time, and personal devotional life (engagement with God) is directed to community engagement, then the energy of each of these dynamics builds on each other. In other words, the Whole Church that mixes and matches and blends engagement with God, with God’ s people, with the community, and with the world will build a fire that feeds itself. A fire is never sustained when the logs fueling it are spread out and separated from each other. But that is our instinct in church leadership: to put spiritual life into categories and its own special rooms in the church.

The reference to ‘spreading out logs’ and ‘special rooms’ ought to ring bells with reference to the way we separate out volunteering, giving time, and giving stuff into three different functions in the majority of nonprofits. And when we do so, we rarely equip champions to grow from Participation to Engagement.

Thus, Mel’s writing helps me put my finger on one of the key differences between P and E:

When a champion does a P-level project over and over, or participates in the project to a greater and greater degree (like doing 500 shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child instead of 5), it’s rare to see a cumulative or exponential effect resulting across the four dimensions Mel identifies. There’s not much of an increase in maturity, in other words.

Maturity (and the transition from P to E for the champion) results from the champion being able to trace (often with our coaching) the logical or extended impact of involvement of the project in each of the four dimensions Mel charts.

You might be able to engage with God’s people and only grow in the number of shoeboxes you were filling at your church. But it would be hard to engage with God, the community, and the world without brushing up against the Transformational door that leads from Participation to Engagement.

In my efundraising DVD I share the paradoxical principle that the best blog posts you do ought to be on other blogger’s blogs. And in a post I did recently from Korea, I shared the Transformational Giving Insight From The East that you know that you’re in TG territory when it’s impossible to tell who gave and who received.

Kem Meyer’s Virtual Book Tour for her latest work, Less Clutter. Less Noise, is a peerless embodiment of both principles.

Here’s what Kem did:

1. Two weeks ago on her well-read blog she posted an invite for bloggers who had read the book to email her a question about the material in the book.
2. She selected questions from 26 bloggers, each from a local church.
3. She posted the names and blogsites of the bloggers whose sites she’d be stopping by on May 29 to answer the question that blogger had asked.
4. Each blogger selected received a copy of Kem’s book to give away to a reader of their own blog.
5. On May 29 she posted a unique answer to a unique question on each of the 26 blogs, summarizing the questions on her amazon.com blog.

Who was the giver and who was the recipient in this strategy?

Absolutely brilliant.

A shout out this morning to Tom Davis, CEO of Children’s Hope Chest. Tom’s first fiction book, Scared, goes on sale today. Tom’s previous books, Red Letters and Fields of the Fatherless, are both good reads for Transformational Giving practitioners.

Tom’s book coming out reminds me to encourage you to check out Children’s Hope Chest’s 5 for 50 site for a great example of an E (Engagement) level champion development strategy.

5 for 50 nicely lays out five lifestyle dimensions of champion involvement. It also embodies one of the hallmarks of E-level development, namely, that when a champion reaches the Engagement level it is virtually impossible for those around the champion to be unaware of his or her commitment to the cause. That’s certainly operative here.

One suggestion for improvement for this strategy as its laid out on the website:

After laying out the five lifestyle dimensions of involvement requested of the 5 for 50 champion, there is but one link, which leads to the donation page. The (clearly unintended) message that’s potentially conveyed to the champion?

The financial piece is the piece we care about the most.

Tom’s books demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth for Children’s Hope Chest, which is why turning each of the 5 commitments into a drill-down link that offers further information and tools for each undertaking (and dropping out the separate/additional donate link) would more accurately convey the intent of the strategy while moving beyond challenging champions to equipping them via the site.

Regardless, a great Engagement strategy for growing existing champions.

(Side note: I would not recommend 5 for 50 as a Participation strategy for recruiting new champions. It’s not that it wouldn’t work–I’m sure the strategy draws its fair share of new champions–but rather that it’s better suited as a strategy for equipping champions to move from participation to engagement. You’ll note that one of the five commitments–inviting five people to join you on your journey–is a great embodiment of the Transformational Giving principle that new champion recruitment is the responsibility of existing champions, not the organization. And going on a journey with a committed friend is itself a great P-level step for a new champion. Great P-level steps, after all, are short-term, high touch, high yield, understandable with reference only to themselves, and synecdochic.  You can read more about creating effective P-level steps here.)