Do the Word

As the curtains are about to go up on the first state-side Transformational Giving seminar of the year (today in Seattle, followed in rapid succession by Portland, Phoenix, Colorado Springs, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; register now and you can still beat my flight into town), I figure that a lot of the posts for the month will derive from seminar questions and comments and happenings, so now is a perfect time to sneak a horse of an entirely different color into the TG stable.

When I was in Korea doing the TG seminar last week, I received a question about whether Transformational Giving appied to corporations as well as individuals.

My reply? Absolutely–in almost a straight one-to-one parallel.

Jessica Stannard-Friel, author of the Reimagining CSR blog (and sister of Sean Stannard-Stockton, the author of the Tactical Philanthropy blog to which I owe the awareness of his sister’s great post, offers an example of a corporation mobilizing its unique assets on behalf of a cause.

Writes Stannard-Friel about her previous posts:

I argued that companies should focus their corporate philanthropy programs on contributing resources to which they uniquely have access, resources that they can provide at a cost that is lower than the beneficiary would pay on the open market. As such, I argued that most companies should donate primarily expertise and perhaps products, giving cash only to leverage such donations.

Stannard-Friel then goes on to talk about San Francisco-based pharmaceuticals distributor Mckesson, which departed from its traditional practice of giving money through its corporate foundation to instead provide ‘charitable chronic disease management’:

According to McKesson’s new strategy, while grantmaking will continue to be a component of its philanthropic strategy, the company will also operate its own social engagement programs – something along the lines of the corporate operating foundation Carrie mentioned in her comment. The company will be contributing its expertise in chronic disease management, which I believe will enable it to contribute resources of greater value than the cash it could contribute for the same cost to the company. Currently, the Foundation is investigating the feasibility of a diabetes cell phone project, whereby automated calls are made to diabetes patients, who respond with information about their blood sugar levels; the technology flags patients that require follow-up.

How does this relate to Transformational Giving? It’s all about a company being ‘all in’–contributing not just ‘support dollars’ but its own unique assets toward the furthering of the cause.

Beats asking a corporation to sponsor a banquet table for $350.

In yesterday’s post we talked about the very different definitions of Transformational Giving that abound these days, including Kay Sprinkel Grace’s definition of Transformational Giving as consisting of gifts that are jumbo-size in relation to an organization’s overall budget or in relation to the cause which the gift is intended to impact.

So which gifts are lagging in the present recession?

The, um, ones that Sprinkel Grace refers to as transformational.

According to a Christianity Today post last week, their January 2009 survey of Christian donors discovered that 44% of givers expected to donate the same amount in 2009 as they did in 2008, and 34% felt they were likely to give more than last year.

So what accounts for the belt-tightening many ministries are undergoing at the moment?

The drop in million dollar-plus donations, down 33% in the last six months of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007.

Conversely, the ‘other’ kind of Transformational Giving–the kind in which it is first and foremost the giver that is transformed (as per our definition of TG in this neck of the woods)–continues to be delightfully recession-proof.

John W. Kennedy’s well-written article recounts the story of Carolyn Cooper, who continues to sponsor three girls in the Dominican Republic through Compassion International despite having been laid off from her job at AT&T. Ms. Cooper puts the sponsorship payment ahead of all of her other expenses, including her mortgage, somehow making it work despite receiving only $350 a month in unemployment benefits.

The only clunker that Kennedy drops in the article is to conclude that givers like Cooper continue their giving due to the ‘family-like link’ they have to the charity to which they are giving. It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to contend that a more plausible explanation for Cooper’s giving is not her family-like relationship to Compassion but rather her sense that the sponsorship of the girls is her ministry, not simply Compassion’s. Compassion is the stage, in other words, but she is the performer.

Cooper explains her own actions this way: ‘When I look at those pictures, I remember that I don’t need a bigger car. I don’t need a flat-screen TV. I do need to keep other children from dying of starvation.’

That’s not loyalty to an organization. That’s loyalty to God’s calling to Carolyn as a Christian.

And that’s truly Transformational Giving.

Multiple people use the term Transformational Giving to describe their systems or strategies of fundraising. Humorously, they use the term in diametrically opposite ways. I’m not sure whether to fight for the term or to rest content with Shakespeare that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.

In the online version of Contributions magazine, Kay Sprinkel Grace reels off a list of gifts–$150 mil to Stanford U, $12 mil to College of the Ozarks, $5 mil to the George Washington School of Medicine–before concluding:

These gifts – some huge, others modest only by comparison – have a common tie: their impact. Because of their size, relative to the overall budget of the organization or the project, they are transformational.

Transformational gifts may be categorized as “big” or “major” gifts, but what distinguishes them is their unique capacity to alter the programs, perception, and future of an organization. More than gifts, they are true investments in the future of an organization and of the community.

This phenomenon – the product of a robust economy and a heightened understanding by donors of the importance of philanthropy in building communities and institutions – is one of the most important milestones in the entire history of philanthropic growth in this country.

Well, so much for that whole robust economy thing there…

What seems to make a transformational gift transformational for Sprinkel Grace is that it is disproportionately huge in relation to the organization through which it is given, as well as disproprortionately large in relation to the size of the opportunity or problem it is tackling.

While Kay goes on to talk about how the givers of these gifts want very much to be involved in the organizations through which they make them, it’s absolutely fascinating to me that what she never makes explicit is that a gift can be (and, in our definition of TG, is most properly understood to be) transformationally given when it is disproportionally impactful on the giver.

When the widow gives her two bits to the Temple treasury, Jesus does not pronounce her gift transformational because of its impact on either the Temple budget nor the impressive slate of activities the Temple was undoubtedly undertaking. He pronounces it transformational because the gift for all intents and purposes wiped her out.

So I for one will continue to plug away for a standard definition of Transformational Giving that is measured first and foremost in relation to the giver (hence why we don’t call it Transformational Receiving or Transformational Spending Of Donation Dollars).

To that end, I resurrect this gorgeous quote by Dr. Lenore Ealy, Project Director of the Philanthropic Enterprise, from a 2004 blog post (eons ago in Internet years) on Gift Hub:

The measure of a gift is the transformation of the giver as well as of the recipient and society. The transformation may be spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, or political. The crust of self-interest breaks open like a cocoon, and, having once been a caterpiller crawling on the earth, out flies an entirely new, far lighter, creature of the air.