Do the Word

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.

As I get ready for a ‘mapping meeting’ (more on what I mean by that in a sec) with a Seoul USA champion tonight, I’m reminded of a line of questioning I receive frequently from ministries:

Do I really need to use a coaching plan form when I meet with a champion? Isn’t it less mechanistic if I just wing it and rely on the Holy Spirit’s direction?

My reply:

Only use a coaching plan form with champions you actually want to see grow. For champions you don’t mind seeing go around and around in circles beeping their horns and chasing their taillights like Shriners in a parade, no coaching plan is necessary.

Yes, beginning to use a form will be an adjustment for you. But in most cases, so will coaching your champion to grow comprehensively in relation to your cause. So why not make all of these adjustments in one fell swoop?

Why is a plan necessary?

I mentioned that tonight I’m having a mapping meeting with a Seoul USA champion. Interestingly, the champion flew into town from halfway across the country at his own expense in order to meet with me so that we could create a coaching plan together. In other words, there is the possibility that rather than your champion finding it mechanistic or awkward to work with you on a coaching plan, he or she could find it exceedingly valuable. After all, if you’re truly taking a Transformational Giving approach, you’re equipping the champion to fulfill their calling and grow in an area of great passion and interest in their life.

That’s why I prefer the term ‘map’ to ‘coaching plan’. A map ensures that you know where you’re going, how you intend to get there, how long it will take, and what you’ll do and see along the way.

Is a map mechanistic? That would feel like an odd word to apply to a map, in my opinion. A map is formal, yes. Disciplined, absolutely. Detailed, you bet. Sometimes it’s even fun.

If instead of creating a map you ‘wing it’ (or you think to yourself, ‘I’ll do a map with this champion…after I build a strong relationship with them ‘), you will likely experience what folks experience when they hit the road together without a map: even folks you like get annoying when you’re lost, or when you’ve been with them for a while and you don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Some may contend that the Holy Spirit can act as a GPS and eliminate your need for a map, enabling you to wing it and enjoy the Spirit’s moment by moment guidance as to the correct next step for the champion, all the way to full maturity in the cause. I’ve heard sermons by people who believe like that, and I never enjoyed their sermons either.