Do the Word

Occasionally a development director will say to me, ‘We’re all about giving our champions opportunities for involvement. In fact, our latest brochure lists 50.’

Kudos for having 50 opportunities for involvement! That’s great!

Now just don’t present them all at the same time. And don’t confuse presenting opportunities for involvement with coaching.

Coaching your champions doesn’t mean giving them a menu of involvement options any more than diagnosing a patient means giving them a list of ailments they might have and then inviting them to choose which one you treat them for.

In both cases, the skill is really in the ‘diagnosis’.

I wrote you about Seoul USA champion Bob Faulkner in my post Behold A Champion Champions! last week.

Bob writes the Seoul USA weekly blog, and he received an excited email this weekend from a newbie to the blog. The woman wrote Bob that she was so excited to learn about Seoul USA because she had been aching to jump on an airplane to Pyongyang (the capital of North Korea) and share the Gospel, and Seoul USA seemed like an excellent vehicle to enable that to happen.

Now, the truth is the last thing Seoul USA would ever do is to enable or advise an American to jump on a plane and head to Pyongyang to share the Gospel!

So how to respond to this eager woman? Clearly she has a passion for the cause, and it seems altogether possible that God enabled the blog to cross her path as a way to pair her tremendous zeal with a bit of helpful knowledge.

Organizations (like the ones I mentioned in the opening sentence of my blog) might be inclined to send the woman a brochure that lists the 50 ways to get involved with Seoul USA.

But such an approach works from the organization back to the champion rather than from the champion forward to the cause. It misses the opportunity to begin by exploring where the woman has come from, where God is in all this, and what has led the woman to be so passionate as to want to head out on what is for all intents and purposes a suicide mission.

So a good coach will be slow to whip out the organizational brochure or to suggest analogous opportunities for involvement. (‘We don’t condone flying to Pyongyang to share the Gospel, but serving as a table host at our banquet might be equally painful and deadly…’)

Instead, a good coach will be quick to:

1. Ask questions (like ‘Why are you so passionate about going to Pyongyang?’ It’s amazing how seldom we in the champion development world ask questions like this when people first inquire or when they send a gift or even when they step up their involvement a notch);
2. Calibrate the champion’s interest to enter into a mutual accountability relationship to grow in the cause (in other words, is this a burst of enthusiasm that will soon dissipate, or is it something more?);
3. Always remember that God was at work to bring the champion to the organization in the first place, so we’d best figure out what trajectory God has the person on before we launch them out on a trajectory of their own.

Hence why I was so pleased with Bob’s champion-coaching email reply to the woman:

Seoul USA takes words like you have given and turns them into a question. Are you willing to enter a process that takes a thousand steps, and not just one? It may be indeed possible for you to get on that plane and find that translator and be so led of the Spirit that you will immediately be doing what your heart cries out to do…

… Or it may take a little longer. Are you willing to wait, and grow, and plan, and strategize, and pray, and do little things right where you are?

A great coaching reply. Behold, the champion champions again.

Tom at The Agitator sounds almost like a secularized St. Paul a la the 1 Corinthians quote we shared yesterday when he speaks in praise of imitation in his post today:

To grow an organization, the first thing I would try to do is identify my best donors and figure out how to clone them. What common demographic or attitudinal characteristics do they share? What kinds of appeals attracted them? Exactly how/where did I acquire them? As I listened to these best donors, I’d be trying to hear and distill the essential basis of their support — emotional and rational — for my organization.

Simply put, I’d apply the marketing truism: birds of a feather …! I’d expect to be able to achieve some decent, cost-effective growth following that strategy.

When we Christian fundraisers finally ascend to the summit of Biblical Fundraising Mountain, I fear we’ll find that all the secular fundraisers made it there first. Maybe that’s because we’re much more comfortable following the AFPs and CFREs and secular development gurus than we are leading the way based on the treasure trove of amazing insight into human development that fairly well bleeds out of each page of the Scriptures. Understandable…but sad.

In any case, there’s a whole chapter in our new Coach Your Champions book about how to do exactly the kind of cloning Tom is recommending–only in a Christian context that makes the process far more robust, in my view.

The folks at MIF HQ tell me we are within days of having the book available for sale online. Until then, here’s my Word doc draft of that chapter for your, um, imitation:

chapter-7-final

And this month we’re teaching this process as part of our workshop/lab series on how to stop soliciting major donors and start coaching champions. So make sure to sign up for the free workshop near you.

Imitating anyone or anything typically draws lawsuits more than praise in individualistic Western culture. It sure draws a lot of kudos, however, if you read the New Testament.

In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul writes, ‘Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ,’ and in 2 Thessalonians 3:7, he adds, ‘For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example.’

But the grandaddy of all the imitation verses is this one from the pen of Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:15-17:

In Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me. For this reason I am sending to you Timothy, my son whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord. He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere in every church.

What has me all blogified about this today was an email from Mission Increase Foundation Los Angeles Regional Giving and Training Officer Matt Bates, who was water-cooling it with two of our Giving and Training Officers, Tracy Tucker in Northern California and Jonathan Roe in Arizona:  

We had a nice discussion about the concept of imitation and how that should impact ministries’ decisions to hire directors of development.  If they really commit to TG, then they will look for mature champions of the cause with the skills and passion to lead others on a discipleship journey—more of a pastoral bent than you would usually find in a typical development candidate pool. 

I couldn’t agree more. I’m dying to receive correspondence from a ministry I support that says:

In Christ Jesus I became your coach in this Kingdom cause we share for the sake of the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me. For this reason I am sending to you Timothy, my Director of Development whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord. He will remind you of how I approach the cause in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach to each of our partners and champions.

Did you hire your development director because they were a mature champion in your cause? Normally these are the folks we put in “program” positions, not in the development department!

Unless, of course, we come to recognize that the frontline of any nonprofit ministry is always the development department.

What would a job description for a Development Director look like if it were based on 1 Corinthians 4:15-17?

For your download here–susa-dopacd2–is the first DOD job description of which I’m aware that is self-conciously styled around that verse. I wrote it for Seoul USA, the ministry my wife and I co-founded.

(The Seoul USA Director of Development position is now ably filled by Amy Karjala, whom we love, who is faithful in the Lord–she helped write the Coach Your Champions book, after all. She reminds our Seoul USA champions how my wife and I approach the NK cause in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what we teach to each of our partners and champions…)