Do the Word

We began this week with a disconcerting fundraising analogy from Fund Raising Success magazine.

I never imagined we’d find an even worse analogy to top that by week’s end, but in fact we have one!

Our pal Joe Milligan at the Springs Rescue Mission received the following astonishing fundraising advice by email from a Christian college fundraiser (truly, we Christians corner the market on un-Christian ways of thinking about fundraising) the same day he attended the Transformational Giving seminar in Colorado Springs:

LIONS, MICE & ANTELOPE

A lion can actually capture, kill and eat a field mouse.

However, it turns out that the energy to do that is greater than the caloric content of the mouse. So, if a lion spent his whole day hunting and eating field mice… it would slowly starve itself to death!

A lion cannot live on mice. Lions need antelope. Antelope are big. While they take more speed and strength to capture and kill, once killed, they provide a huge feast for a lion and its pride.

A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope.

The difference between mice and antelope is really, really important relative to Major Gifts!

If you’re spending all of your time and energy going after ‘field mice’… your short-term rewards are a feeling of activity and maybe even accomplishment. However, in the long run, you’re going to die.

Do you spend your day chasing mice or hunting antelope???

So here we have the following transactional fundraising analogy:

Fundraiser:Lion::Donor:Mouse (or Antelope, if it’s a high net worth donor you’re disemboweling)

Um… Have you ever seen video of a lion chasing, snaring, and then gorging itself on an antelope, flinging its prey’s limbs in all directions as blood flows like Hawaiian Fruit Punch?

And we wonder why people get a leeeeeeetle nervous around fundraisers.

(Alternative comment from MIF’s Tracy Nordyke: ‘Did you notice that in the analogy both the mouse and the antelope end up dead?’)

In honor of the completion of this month’s day-long seminars on Transformational Giving in Korea and across the western US, I offer the following lion/antelope video clip as a prophetic vision of a future in which fundraiser/predators are in for a BIG surprise from their TG counterparts…

…and where antelopes and mice triumph in the end!

Take 2 minutes to click this link and read Peter Deitz’ transcript of his Australian conference presentation on what he calls action-oriented short term web volunteer opportunities. (AOSTWVOs?)

Catchy title there. I wish we would have thought of it instead of our much clunkier moniker, ‘Signature Participation Projects’, or SPPs.

(You can read more about SPPs on this post.)

Peter’s article is much catchier than his name for these kind of opportunities. In fact, his focus is on (what we would call) SPP’s  that can be done in 20 minutes or less.

These are all secular examples, of course, but quite instructive and eminently applicable.

The most intriguing one to me is an outfit called The Extraordinaries, a downloadable app for your cell phone that enables you to volunteer 20 minutes rather than whiling away the time playing Tetris. Peter leaves the link to the Extraordinaries out of his presentaton, but I’ve tracked it down and have it for you here, to save you another minute or two.

As Christians, should we be striving for SPPs that take 20 minutes or less?

By my read, most of the SPPs Jesus did (for Jesus, his SPPs were his miracles, always intended to move the participant to kingdom engagement) would have easily fit within that time limit.

My favorite 5 minute Christian SPP?

World Gospel Mission’s 30-day Concert of Prayer, in which readers of WGM’s magazine, The Call, gather groups of friends to call in on a toll-free number for a daily 5-minute prayer call each day for 30 days, with the prayer led by a missionary in each of WGM’s 30 fields and potential fields. The COP runs from mid-September through mid-October, so you can subscribe for free to The Call now and get in on the action come this fall.

As we ready for our San Francisco Transformational Giving seminar today, our thanks go out to SFO’s Giving and Training Officer Tracy Tucker for tipping us off to a new study on giving circles that casts a whole new flashing blue light on Transformational Giving principle #7 (click here for the whole TG Ten list). Principle #7 reads:

The relationship between champion and champion is as important as the relationship between champion and organization.

And the giving circle study (from such development luminaries as the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and The University of Nebraska at Omaha) concludes:

1. Giving circles influence members to give more.
2. Giving circles influence members to give more strategically.
3. Giving circles members give to a wide array of organizations.
4. Giving circle members are highly engaged in the community.
5. Giving circles increase members’ knowledge about philanthropy, nonprofits, and the community.
6. Giving circles have a mixed influence on members’ attitudes about philanthropy, nonprofit and government roles, and political/social abilities and values.

In other words, want your champions to give more? Then spare the address labels and the heart tugs, pick up your coach’s whistle, and pull them together to get to know each other and help them learn how together they can mutually have a far more pronounced impact on the cause.