Do the Word

I had a great time with the gang in attendance at the transformational Giving seminar in Washington Wednesday. Always I alternate back and forth between believing we present too much in a single seminar and wishing that the whole thing were actually four days long with time for breakout sessions, Q & A, and labs where we could coach ministries on how to develop maps with champions (the area I sense is alawys the greatest challenge for ministries and the area where they’are most tempted to cut corners because it’s the most different from traditional fundraising.)

The piece that was the most fun to share today came when we were taking about developing a Signature Participation Project, or SPP.

As we’ve talked about previously in this blog, a Signature Participation Project is a short-term, high-touch, high-yield project that is understandable without reference to the ministry itself but which draws the participant into wanting to grow deeper into the cause, ideally to engagement through the ministry.

All good SPP’s are synecdochic–that is, by participating inthe project, an individual gets to ‘taste’ something of the ministry’s cause as a whole. The root word is synecdoche, which means using the part of something to refer to the whole (like ‘all hands on deck’) or the whole of something to refer to a part (like ‘I got stopped by the police’, by which I don’t mean that 357 Colorado State Troopers pulled me over but rather that a single police officer tagged me for going 105).

(OK. Not really. I think that was one of the Baldwin brothers. But you get the point.)

It’s often a tough concept to grasp, but it’s extremely important. It’s part of why we recommend to ministries not to do golf scrambles or auctions or jog-a-thons: they’re not synecdochic. When you participate in a golf scramble, nothing about golfing gives you a taste of the cause as a whole. Even giving away a brochure about your organization at the golf scramble, or having your Executive Director give a speech at the golf scramble, or having one of your clients give a testimony at the golf scramble, doesn’t make the experience synecdochic (unless, perhaps, you run a golf ministry).

You can imagine that the concept, which is challenging to explain in English, is even harder to explain through a translator in Korea. That’s why I was so delighted to receive one of the best explanations I’ve ever received of the concept from a Korean attendee at the seminar.

The quintessential Korean food, much maligned by Westerners, is kimchi–typically pickled cabbage with red pepper paste, though there are hundreds of varieties.

Koreans have a practice where, upon entering a restaurant, they sample the kimchi, which is always served first as part of the array of side dishes that precede the main course in a Korean meal. If the kimchi is good, then it is a certainty that the main course will be good. But if the kimchi is bad, the meal is guaranteed to be worse.

A ministry’s SPP is like kimchi. If a champion samples it and it’s delicious, the champion should then know that the main course of engagement with the cause through the ministry will be even more satisfying.

If your kimchi tastes like every other restaurants’ kimchi, why eat there?

Likewise, some ministries make the mistake of creating SPPs that are not only understandable without deeper reference to the cause but are completely satisfying without deeper reference to the cause.

Big mistake.

That’s like making kimchi the main course. And, as much as I like kimchi, I would never eat it as the heart of any meal.

Child sponsorship organizations struggle with this (folks liking child sponsorship so much that they never move on to deeper engagement with the cause.) Operation Christmas Child’s shoebox project has to address this. Rescue missions doing big Thanksgiving dinners hit this full on. Rather than whet people’s appetites for deeper engagement, they sate those appetites–and champions remain at a much lower level of maturity than God intends.

So as you prepare your SPP, keep kimchi in mind. It makes a great side dish–and your overall cooking will be judged by it–but it makes a pretty miserable main course.

Thanks for a great day, Seattle.

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.