Do the Word

Remember the story in Mark, Chapter 10, beginning in Verse 17? It’s the story of the rich young ruler. It goes like this:

And when he (Jesus) was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, ‘Good teacher, what small I do that I may inherit eternal life?’

And Jesus said unto him, ‘Why call me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.

You know the commandments. Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honor your father and your mother.

And he answered and said unto him, ‘Teacher, all these have I observed from my youth.

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, ‘One thing you lack: go your way, sell whatsoever you have, and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross and follow me.’

As a development professional, do you know what’s most interesting to me about this story? It’s how differently Christ sees the rich man, from the way that development professionals would likely see him.

Usually, we don’t see a lack when we look at a wealthy person who desires to live a righteous life – we see an opportunity, instead. Can you imagine the response of a development-professional Christ to the young ruler?

Well, if you want to be perfect, I have put together a great brochure with some of our key ministries that could really use your support, and here are some fantastic testimonials from folks I’ve healed. Here’s a testimony from a Gadarene man, we took care of a livestock problem he was having and now he sings our praises night and day. This woman here was on her fifth husband before she enrolled in our Living Water Marriage Refresher course, and you can sponsor more fifth wives like her for just 800 denarii apiece…hey, where are you going?

But Jesus didn’t focus on what the young ruler could do for his ministry. Instead, he perceived that the young ruler had a lack – while righteous, he had lived primarily focused on himself, and he was feeling an aching void. It wasn’t that the poor needed the young ruler’s money – it was that the young ruler needed to give his money away.

And that’s the seed of Transformational Giving, which will begin to sprout in our next post.

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.