Do the Word

House parties are an ideal venue for coaching champions; hence why Mission Increase Foundation devoted its January workshops and February labs to the subject. (If you missed ’em, my Colorado Springs workshop will be available on DVD soon.)

Mission Increase awards a Transformational Giving Implementation Award to the best homework submission from each office for each workshop/lab cycle. The house party award winner for SoCal, Pomona Hope, was my personal favorite of all the submissions. Let’s take a look at how they’re utilizing house parties to coach champions at all levels of their organization.

Who are these guys?

First, note how TG-compatible the organization itself is:

Pomona Hope began as a conversation. One evening a group of Pomona residents gathered to discuss the many deep problems and staggering challenges facing the city. People shared about the broad issues facing Pomona such as the widespread poverty, the decades of gang violence and drug abuse, and the palpable sense of despair that seems to loom over the city. Others shared more personally about friends and neighbors whose lives they have seen scarred by drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and by gang involvement.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the question: “What are we going to do about it?” Pomona Hope is our answer to that question.

Here’s the cool thing: This is not an organization supported by champions. This is a network of champions organizing to tackle the cause of, in their words, ‘Engaging the community with the Gospel of Jesus Christ [as] the essential and binding element necessary for true community transformation.’

Much easier to do TG when your organization is TG from the DNA on up.

So what’s the party?

A city tour. Most people avoid the area that Pomona Hope works in. The neighborhood is not a pleasant place to be, full of vagrants, prostitutes, closed businesses and run down homes. But the city of Pomona also has a number of beautiful neighborhoods, promising businesss, and of course incredible people. The experience portion of this house party would involve a scavenger hunt that would take participants into a variety of areas in Pomona, in hopes that they can see the city as a whole, not simply a city to be avoided or forgotten about.

We would also want participants to see the vast discrepancy of resources between the “nice” part of Pomona and the area we minister in. Each team would have at least one Pomona resident who is very familiar with the city to help ensure safety and help with directions. Areas that we would want people to experience would include a typical street near our facility, a family owned restaurant in the neighborhood, a school in an affluent area of the city as well as one of the schools that our children attend, a grocery store in the affluent area of the city as well in our neighborhood, a public park in both areas and a family home in our neighborhood.

Teams would end up coming back to the start location and sharing about the experience, their observations about the city and their feelings. A Pomona resident would take time to share statistics on our target area within Pomona and specific ways we are working to help residents have access to important resources.

So how would you use this party to grow Participants into Engaged champions?

The experiences above would be eye opening to a participant at an E level. Most people involved in our organization are unaware of the wide range of pressures and obstacles that our community residents face daily. Most people try to stay out of the area of the city that our program is located in. Some of our most faithful volunteers are retired educators who work with our youth on academic goals and objectives very successfully, but have less awareness in how to reach the student as a whole person….

The ability to be someone who is empowering another rather than simply providing something in the short term, requires a high degree of understanding in regards to the root causes of an issue. The house parties are one way to explore root causes and what effective responses might be.

Our hope is that an individual engaged in our organization who attends a house party, would develop a genuine love for the population they are working with and the city we are investing in. We hope that every E would consider ways that they can be more holistically involved in the root causes affecting our constituency and that they can understand their investment as part of a greater effort to erradicate large issues of injustice.

And how would you use a party like this to grow Engaged Champions into Owners?

There is an individual on our board who through an effort to identify with the community we are investing in, lives at the national median income level with his family in an apartment in our target area, and chooses to give the rest of the family income away. Many members of our board have chosen to live in Pomona and raise their children in some of the more depressed neighborhoods in the city in order to more directly and holistically identify with and minister to the at risk population that we work with. These are incredible people. What is reflected in them is a profound love for the people in Pomona, and a profound commitment to literally work alongside the disadvantaged of Pomona in hopes of a better life.

Not all of the O’s have embraced this call, nor should they all. But what I do want to see the O’s embrace is a deep investment in the city and the people, and that is largely accomplished by spending time in the city. I would like to see all of the O’s consider new ways to enter into life in Pomona. An O could serve on the Pomona rotary, eat with their friends in the city, attend cultural events offered in Pomona, attend city council meetings, become friends with one of the families we serve. For those who live and work in the city I would like them to consider ways to engage friends that live in surrounding suburbs to spend time in the city; eat in the city with friends, take friends shopping in the city. Help people see the beauty of the city that is worth fighting for as well as the necessity of fighting for it.

My hope is that the house parties would provide a forum for O’s to be reminded of the importance of the cause, see entry points by which they can engage their friends in conversations about and experiences in Pomona, and provide not only additional knowledge but personal testimonies that they can share in the effort to spread our cause in their sphere of influence.

Going to be in the area of Pomona May 16 or 17? Get in touch with Pomona Hope and see if you can drop in on the house party yourself.

At the start of the month, I fired my initial shot over the bow in preparation for the Transformational Giving seminars I’ll be teaching across the western U.S. in May, Lord permitting. That initial shot took the form of a definition of Transformational Giving:

Transformational Giving is a collaboration between you and God in which He infuses your corporate and personal assets with His grace as you offer them in the way He asks to the people and purposes that He directs.

Today, Mission Increase Foundation Colorado Giving and Training Officer Suzanne Dubois asked me to unpack this a bit more.

I recommend breaking the definition up into five pieces:

1. Transformational giving is a collaboration between you and God

 Most of the time we think of giving as something we do. But the Bible shows us that when God is on the scene, giving is not something we do. It’s a collaboration between us and God that occurs at God’s invitation. There’s no such thing as an act of authentic giving that God’s not on in. Giving can’t start with us. It can’t be done just by us. It’s not us initiating anything, and it’s not even us responding to anything. It’s something that can only be done with God. Simultaneously. Giving is a dance with God. (That dance looks nothing like this.)

2. in which He infuses your corporate and personal assets with His grace

 To infuse means to fill something in such a way that it completely saturates it. Personal assets are all the valuable things we have personally—our money, our possessions, our time, our emotions, our passions, our creativity. Corporate assets are the valuable things we have through our associations with other people—our friendships, our networks, our influence. In TG, God fills those assets to the point of saturating them. What does He fill them with? His grace. So our money becomes something more than money (and not just more money). Our time becomes something more than time. Consider the boy with the fishes and the loaves: his lunch becomes something more than lunch. This happens in the actual act of giving—hence the word “simultaneously” above.

3. as you offer them

 Transformational Giving is always an offering to God. It may happen through a nonprofit (or it may not), but it is always an offering to the Lord. So it is offered reverently, humbly, expectantly, worshipfully, without thought of return, and without preconception of what God will do with it. The moment it becomes rote, it becames as refreshing as stale, warm Mountain Dew left in the car. We don’t look to the nonprofit to transform the gift. We look to God to do that.

4. in the way He asks

 If we listen carefully, God will always give us directives about our giving, and those directives extend far beyond ‘when’, ‘to whom’, ‘how much’, and ‘for what’. God will often give us detailed instructions as to how. ‘Throw the net on the other side of the boat’, ‘Go catch a fish and open its mouth’, ‘Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me’ are the words of a God who pays exquisite attention to detail. How we give is at least as important to God as what, when, and why, yet this is the dimension of giving that draws the least attention in contemporary practice.

5. to the people and purposes that He directs.

 God calls us to give in ways that directly connect us with the recipients of our giving and with the cause. In TG, we don’t give to charity; we give through charity. That is to say, organizations are not the recipient of our donations; they are the means by which we are extended to encounter the recipient and the cause directly. That’s God’s way. He came Himself to give Himself. He didn’t send an intermediary. He doesn’t want us to utilize nonprofits as intermediaries, because He is at least as concerned that we be changed through our giving as that the recipient of our gift be blessed.

Much more to come in our Transformational Giving seminars in May, but I trust this will furrow Suzanne’s brow sufficiently for now.

I’m indebted to Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy for his post today, which drew my attention to a February post by Charity Navigator CEO Ken Berger on how less than 10% of charities measure the outcomes of their programs.

This subject of measuring not only your program outputs (meaning the number of people you helped) but your program outcomes (meaning the effect that your program actually had on solving the overall problem you set out to tackle in the first place) remains, sadly, quite virgin territory for nonprofits, especially Christian ministries. We tend to pull out the “Yes, but if at least one person is saved, then it’s all worth it” arguments, which works really well until you start checking into some of Christ’s own ROI (return on investment) language, where the consistent principle emerges that to one who is given much, much is expected.

In any case, I recommend Tom Ralser’s ROI for Nonprofits as the essential read in this area. It’s not near as dry as it sounds–it’s actually kind of a fun read. No one else explains the difference between outputs and outcomes better than Tom.

But what I wanted to draw your attention to today is that if 10% of nonprofits are measuring ROI, the number measuring RII must conservatively be estimated at the smallest fraction of 1%.

By ‘RII’ I mean ‘Return In Investor’–a term I just wove out of whole cloth to refer to something that is essential to–and, frankly, unique to–Transformational Giving and the subject of coaching champions.

In TG we say that satisfactory outcomes in the field are necessary but not sufficient measurements of giving success. We also must ask:

How was the giver changed (‘transformed’) as a result of this gift?

Secular fundraisers will almost certainly label such talk woefully naive and misplaced. After all, what does it matter how or even whether Bill Gates is being transformed so long as his foundation is making effective strides in the elimination of malaria?

But Christian fundraisers ought to carry the extra ‘burden’ of examining (and, yes, measuring) how champions change or ought to be changing as a result of their giving. At the risk of sounding like a heretical fundraiser but an orthodox Christian, I’d echo Jesus’ words in Mark 8:36, ‘What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?’

But is it really possible to measure RII?

Absolutely. For a great example, check out Frank Lofaro’s interview with World Vision’s Atul Tandon for the Christian Leadership Alliance magazine and website.

Hired to serve as VP of Marketing and Communication for World Vision, Tandon renamed his position Vice President of Donor Engagement, and the article about what he’s done is so good that it’s worth memorizing.

To quote Tandon:

When I arrived at World Vision, I found an organization singularly focused on its mission—building a better world for children. That is not a bad thing. It is wonderful. World Vision works in nearly 100 countries with over 5 million children and family members. If you add up the numbers, about 100 million people every year are helped.

But when we were embracing children, we had our backs to someone else: the donor. We seemed to think of them as ATM machines. You send out a direct-mail piece, make a phone call, do a presentation, get the check for $10 or $100,000, and off you go. To me, it was an earth-shattering realization that we were leaving out one of the two primary stakeholders in building a better world for children. The donor is a partner and an equal stakeholder in this transformation.

In other words, World Vision was doing a great job measuring ROI but its mechanisms for measuring and reviewing RII were nowhere near as developed.

So what mechanisms does World Vision now use to measure what I call RII? Tandon again:

We perform donor surveys once a year on key questions: Are you more aware of the poor? Is your time with World Vision enabling you to serve the poor better? Is your walk with Jesus Christ changing because of your walk with the poor? The critical question is, Have you changed the way you spend your money and your time? In 2003, 59 percent of our donors said they had changed the way they thought about and spent money and time. Today, that number is up to 76 percent. God has been faithful.

What does it profit a Christian nonprofit to measure its ROI if it does not also measure its RII?