Do the Word

I remember driving to the Bay Area to meet with a rescue mission director there one recession ago. It was right in the months after the Internet bubble popped, and suddenly their fund raising program popped as well.

In the phone call in which he had invited me up, the director had said to me, ‘Our budget is going way down. Nobody’s giving money away these days. We’ve got to figure something out—some way to weather the storm until the economy improves and people start to give again.’

(If you find yourself thinking this way, you need to get in on next month’s Radical Fundraising In Radical Times seminar, in which we talk about how the current recession is changing donors permanently. Time to get ready for the New Normal. But I digress.)

On the drive up from LA, I just happened to be listening to KGO Radio from San Francisco. The newscaster read a story about a kid who, tragically, had been mauled by a dog who someone had left off a leash.

What was so amazing about what happened was that as the afternoon went on, the newscaster noted that people had been calling the radio station—unsolicited—asking where they could send money to help the child’s family with medical bills. The station worked with the family to hastily set up a bank account and an address and, during the few hours of my drive up the 101 to the mission, without a single ask, over $15,000 had been raised.

Too bad no one was giving money away those days.

While this kind of spontaneous vision sometimes happens by chance, your role as a fund raising professional is to help it happen on purpose. Fund raising is not about raising support for ourselves and for our organizations. It’s about recognizing that fundraising is about helping others make meaning.

You don’t have to wait for a dog to bite or a fire to burn or a hurricane to strike. Those things cause people to adopt a spiritual vision spontaneously, which is a wonderful gift. But the world is filled by people yearning to hold a spiritual vision in their heart, if only someone they trust will share one with them. As we talked about in the previous post, Peacemaker Ministries’ donor/champions had all previously thought to themselves, ‘Why is Christmas so hard and un-peaceful so much of the time? Seems like there must be something we could do…’ 60,000 calendars later, they had done something – and the PM vision was imprinted on their hearts for life.

By inspiring champions with your ministry vision, you can use the raw power of your champions and your network to self-organize—to create a network that pulls itself together spontaneously and in stunning ways to save children and fill sandbags and send teddy bears to 9/11 orphans – to do the good that your ministry started out to do, before it got caught up in an endless race to extend the donor file.

In the next post we’ll talk more about the power of Transformational Giving, and will look at the wisdom of Christ in seeing that what we lack is often more important than what we have.

When you are promoting a project or asking for support for a particular effort, it’s very common to send out a letter from the director (marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL – URGENT, of course) directly appealing for funds. Another approach is to have a celebrity or testimonial endorsement that says ‘This ministry is so wonderful, won’t you help them?’ And these are time-tested ways of getting a modest return from donors. But they don’t transfer ownership of the ministry vision to donors – instead, they keep that vision right in the ministry headquarters where it’s safe from ever transforming a donor’s calling.

Instead of a personal and confidential director’s letter or a celebrity or testimonial letter, you can transform donors into champions: by igniting in them the vision God has given to you both, and by acting as the stage or convening mechanism through which donor/champions give their time, energy and treasure to spread the vision to others and complete the work of the vision you both share.

Five years ago, Peacemaker Ministries (a ministry that does Christian mediation and arbitration, teaching biblical principles of peacemaking all over the world) decided to make this kind of change in its fund raising strategy. Instead of sending donors a letter reporting on the success of recent mediations or the urgency of receiving funds for upcoming teaching events, PM created a vehicle for transformational giving: a holiday peacemaking calendar.

Here’s how it worked:

In a mailing right before Thanksgiving, PM sent a letter to donors that noted the common experience everyone has that time of year; namely, that the period from Thanksgiving through Christmas is a surprisingly un-peaceful time for people, and that the principles of peacemaking writ small could bring focus to these days and turn them into the spirit-filled season of joy they ought to be. The mailing included a ‘holiday peacemaking calendar’, in which each day commended a simple peacemaking activity that a donor could do on their own, with a spouse, with their family, or with their co-workers.

PM distributed the calendars to the donor/champions – 1400 of them – and invited them to pass them along, and to send in requests for as many calendars as they could personally give away.

Those donor/champions ultimately requested another 60,000 copies.

Take the PM example to heart. If you want to raise more money, don’t build more two-way communication loops (e.g., fund raising letters or phone calls). Instead, build more n-way donor communications webs—preferably ones where you’re not even around when your cause is being talked about.

That kind of thinking is so foreign to us fund raisers that we don’t even have much of a vocabulary to talk about it yet. Some of the vocabulary we have is counterproductive, in fact. I’m not talking about ‘friend raising’ or relationship building! Implement a ‘friend raising’ program and guess what: you’ll end up with a bunch of friends. This may not be a total loss, however, since you can circulate your resume to all of your new friends after you get fired for failing to raise any money!

What I’m talking about is not a change in degree in fund raising. It’s not about doing more of something, or doing something more systematically. It’s about a change in kind. It’s a bold leap that’s awaiting anyone who’s awakening to the value of seeing fund raising as a powerful communal experience–an example of which we’ll share in our next post.

If you are like most every other ministry or charity in the world, you spend a good chunk of your time developing a donor network. Your ‘network’, though, isn’t really a network. Instead, it’s a list of 1:1 relationships. You send out a request letter, and the donors read it (or not) and maybe they send a check (or not). Your donors aren’t inspired to become filled with the spirit of your ministry and to go and do likewise. Instead, they’re encouraged to admire how effective YOU are in doing the work, and to financially support YOUR wonderful efforts!

If your website—or TV station or 800 number or whatever—is built this way, so that it only broadcasts (in other words, the communication is one way and one focus: From you, out, about you, out), in order to make any money you’re going to have to have a really large audience.

The larger the audience, the more the money. The smaller the audience, well, you know.

But…

If your website or TV station or 800 number is built so that it facilitates genuine two-way conversation, it takes a much smaller network of people to generate a serious impact. Some ministries are beginning to realize this, and are developing these kind of networks, where there is genuine communication from the people in the field to the people in the office, as well as the requests that run the other way.

But even those ministries aren’t on to the real jet fuel. They’re still playing around with something that resembles the old computer bulletin board systems of the 1980s – systems where one or two people could be ‘online’ together at a time. Fun – and a lot more fun than playing on a computer by yourself – but still limited.

The real power to transform the finances and futures of non-profit ministries comes from an n-way network, where n equals the total number of users on the network. A network built for the purpose of enabling and encouraging every donor to talk with every other donor. A network where everyone in it loves the network – because the network is the physical expression of the spiritual vision held by its members.

According to our friends in the world of computer networking, the value of a network wired primarily for the purpose of enabling each of the users to communicate with each of the other users is exponentially more valuable than a much larger series of two-way communication loops.

In our next post we’ll translate that into English and offer a real-world example.