Do the Word

Interesting that two of my favorite blogs did posts this week on the subject of donor experience as the future of fundraising. (See The Agitator’s Offering “Touch” and “Experience” and Donor Power Blog’s Give donors more experience for their giving.)

Mike, however, has a different take.

Mike is a champion I met with yesterday. He shared with me how he is currently comprehensively active (what I call “all in”) with five nonprofits, which he selected after interviewing a number of them four years ago using a guide he received from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence.

He told me that he had an idea in his head of the causes in which he felt he should become involved, and then he interviewed nonprofits according to his criteria, which included his commitment to being directly involved in the cause rather than simply giving to a nonprofit so that they could impact the cause funded by his resources.

So the twin questions are these:

1. Are donors really looking for nonprofits to provide them with experiences? Or, to steal a CS Lewis analogy, when we think that way are we looking at the flashlight beam rather than what the flashlight is illuminating (which in this case is the idea that champions are cause-driven and are looking for nonprofits that can equip them to better impact the causes that draw them)?

2. Is Mike the exception to the rule or the firstfruits of what will soon become the “new normal” for donors-who-are-better-called-champions?

I would answer “yes” to this question, but even if I’m wrong, I would say that those of us in the Christian nonprofit sector ought to be working hard to Make More Mikes.

After all, Ephesians 4:11-13 doesn’t say that God gave you leadership of a ministry so that you can give donors experiences in exchange for their donations. It says that God gave you as a gift to His champions so they could be knit together and built up to full maturity in the cause you both share.

We’re continuing our discussion of how to use your past experience to create champion maturation strategies, using my own experience as a model.

In today’s episode, I’m 21 years old, serving as associate pastor of Covenant United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, IN. At the time it was a church of about 400, growing quickly, largely due to the fact that the north side of Fort Wayne was growing quickly.

Each week I’d look out on the congregation and see more and more cheerful new people who appeared competent and capable of doing something more than just sitting there. Are they content just to sit there?, I’d wonder. By and large they certainly didn’t jump at the invitations we extended to attend this special event or volunteer for that activity.

One day I received a flyer to attend a training session on the Every Member In Ministry strategy utilized by Frazier Memorial United Methodist Church in Montgomery, AL. What they taught blew me away:

Every member makes two commitments when joining our church family: a commitment to Jesus Christ and a commitment to support the Frazer family through prayers, presence, gifts, and service. Our In His Steps Commitment cards reflect annual commitments of prayers, presence, gifts, and service by each member— children…students…and adults. Our commitments in these areas determine how and where Frazer will minister in the coming year.

The idea of people making a commitment in the areas of prayer, presence, gifts, and service wasn’t what blew me away. What blew me away was the final sentence above: What people committed in each of those areas would determine how and where the church ministered in the coming year. If members had gifts to run a nursery and the inclination to put those gifts to use, the church would have a nursery; otherwise, they would not.

That experience has profoundly shaped my thinking about nonprofits. In general, nonprofits determine what they’re going to do in a given year and how much that will cost. Then they turn to donors to give the money to cover the cost of that program.

But what would happen if the length, breadth, heighth, and depth of a nonprofit’s ministry–and its how and where–were determined solely by the corporate and personal assets of its champions (and you know from previous posts that I’m talking about far more than just the financial here), and the work of the nonprofit’s staff was to build those assets (rather than to solicit them)?

So how might I apply this insight from my personal journey to a champion maturation strategy for the cause of Transformational Giving through Mission Increase Foundation? (I’m doing this to model how you might apply your own experiences in relation to your cause.)

In yesterday’s post I laid out a P-level step based on my experience as a seven-year old. So today it seems fitting to lay out an E-level step based on this gift-experience the Lord gave me when I was 21:

I’d ask a champion to make appointments with me to visit each of the charities they presently support, touring and meeting with the ED at each charity. In those appointments, I’d ask the champion, “As we walk through this place, what are the corporate and personal assets you have that you think you could potentially deploy to make a difference in this cause? Why have you so far not chosen to do so?” And then in the meeting between the champion and the ED, I’d get both parties to consider the question, “How could and should Mr. Champion grow in relation to the cause this year? How can your nonprofit assist in the building of his personal and corporate assets in this regard?”

We’re moving here towards the idea that once it reaches the E level, the relationship between champion and nonprofit is covenantal–something we’ll be developing in MIF’s June workshop on Reactivating Lapsed Donors.

We’re in the middle of a series of posts about how to create migration (or maturation) plans for your champions and potential champions by drawing upon your own growth journey by which you became a champion for your cause.

In our immediately preceding post, I began to show you how I would draw upon my own growth in Transformational Giving as I develop a maturation plan for a potential Mission Increase Foundation champion. (MIF is the charitable foundation for which I teach and the organization promoting the cause of Transformational Giving. Hope to see you at an upcoming training event, most of which are free.)

I concluded the post by asking: What kind of a maturation step could I develop for a potential MIF champion based on what I experienced as a seven-year old?

Answer:

What happened to me when I was seven was that a cause to which I had been  indirectly related (church) suddenly became available to me as a cause I could experience directly (leading worship in our living room).

If I were to talk with a potential MIF champion and I wanted them to begin to participate in the cause of Transformational Giving, I would ask them:

“Let’s think through the charities you presently support one by one. You don’t even have to tell me what they are. But as you think of each one, I want you to ask yourself, ‘Does my giving here connect me directly to the cause, or is my giving here in lieu of a direction connection?’ For the causes where your giving is currently indirect (likely because you are giving to a nonprofit so that they can connect directly with the cause), why do you suppose you are choosing to be indirectly related to the cause? How does this impact your growth in relation to the cause? And what ideas can you think of to give directly and relate directly to the cause? How would that direct giving change the relationship you have with the nonprofit in question?”

If, for example, someone was giving to a rescue mission to help the homeless, they might ask themselves, “Is this giving connecting me directly to cause of caring for the poor? Or am I doing this giving in lieu of caring directly for the poor?” They might then ask, “Why am I giving indirectly to this cause? What would it look like for me to give directly to the poor?” And that would be a fascinating conversation indeed–worthy of a few blog posts in and of itself.

In any case, that’s how I would use my own experience to create a P-level (Participation level–it’ll make more sense when you read the book) champion maturation step for my cause of TG.

In our next post we’ll push on past my seven year old self to an experience I had in my late teens as I continue to model for you how to draw upon your own maturation journey as a model for your champions and potential champions.