Do the Word

Heartening predictions for Transformational Giving devotees in fundraising guru Mal Warwick’s May 2009 newsletter:

• Large charities clinging to enormous donorfiles will lose ground to those that emphasize donor quality over quantity.
• Major donor or foundation consortia will flourish, issuing Requests for Proposal (RFPs) to nonprofits and businesses alike to tackle specific problems.
• Small donors will flock to mutual-fund-like investment vehicles, by-passing individual nonprofits to address broader issues.

This is more than a ‘donor-centric’ future, by the way–much more than just a call to treat donors well. The tables are turning: champions are more and more comfortable acting to impact causes independent of nonprofits, and they’re increasingly beset not by compassion fatigue but by institutional fatigue–that is, they’re tired of nonprofits instisting that the road to impacting the cause goes through them.

Increasingly, a nonprofit earns its status as a respected expert and coach one champion at a time. It’s a great day that we need not fear: after all, it’s how Jesus worked, and it’s the environment in which Paul ministered. The only thing we need to toss off are the secular fundraising weights that beset us.

Teach a champion today how to better impact the cause they love–therein lies your path to success in development.

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.