Do the Word

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?

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.