Physician, download thyself

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Pastor Foley

I hope to have a link to enable you to order the Coach Your Champions book shortly. One of the core concepts therein is the idea of creating a “champion map” or champion migration strategy–a chart that lays out in a Participation/Engagement/Ownership trajectory how a champion has grown and is growing towards full maturity in Christ in the cause that you both share.

In order to get the book’s editor off my back, I had to promise that I would post bounteous numbers of sample champion maps on this blog. And indeed, I’d be shocked if we didn’t do just that over the coming months, though maybe in a form or fashion very different than what you might expect.

But here’s why I’m slow to make those my initial posts:

As the number of organizations with which I’ve created those “maps” grows, the three things I’m finding are:

(1) Each map is harrowingly unique. So different are they that you’d almost have a hard time telling that each organization was actually even engaged in the same process.

(2) The process requires that the map be constantly reviewed and revised in light of what you learn from and with your champions as you do maps with each champion. If it’s worth anything, it’s got to be a living, breathing chart. And the revisions we make to those charts are typically changes in kind, not merely degree.

(3) Organizations have a harder time trying to adapt a map from another organization than they do beginning from scratch and building their own. It’s like trying to tell your own life story and starting by editing someone else’s. There’s no generic template that starts with categories like “pray”, “give”, and “teach” that is productive, since, while each map ultimately involves some iteration of those things, it doesn’t seem to be helpful to do so in a formulaic way that enables you to start with another organization’s journey. (I surely do value examples; however, in our field examples quickly become Xeroxes.)

So if you can’t start from another organization’s journey, where can you start?

The answer is obvious, if not painful:

You have to start from your own journey, and that of your existing champions. This gets at the idea of collaborating with your champions that we wrote about in yesterday’s post.

You have to start by asking, “How did God move me from knowing and doing next to nothing in relation to my cause to the point where I’m at today, entrusted with this cause in a major way?”

What I find is that almost none of us intuitively have a really good sense of the steps that God used to bring us to the level of maturity and activity in the cause where we’re at now. And it’s very telling that the last place most of us look as a starting point for coaching our champions is our own story.

The New Testament of the Bible (NIV translation) records three places where we’re urged to imitate those who are farther along in the cause than we are. If my claim in the book is correct–that we’re the most major donors our organization will ever get–then why are we not urging our champions to imitate us?

I don’t think it’s modesty. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. I think we have a hard time believing that our champions can realistically surpass us in what they do for the cause. (Interesting that Jesus himself had no such vision problem–see John 14:12.)

So the first step in preparing our organization’s champion migration strategy is not to a generic map that we download and tweak with quick customizations. It’s to the long road of our own experience, retracing it prayerfully as we ask, “God, how in the world did you bring me here? What were the transformational steps and moments you took me through? And what can I learn from my own journey about how to create a path or at least leave some markers on the way for the champions you’ve sent me to coach?”

Rather than putting up a link that says “Download customizable maps here“, I want to instead model the process for you by doing some posts in which I analyze how God brought me to where I am in this cause of Transformational Giving, and how that can inform how I coach others to full maturity in this cause.

The baring-all begins in the next post.

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Development is Something We Do With, Not To

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Pastor Foley

Marketing guru David Meerman Scott is a total rock star (I was excited to see yesterday that my amazon.com preorder of his latest book, World Wide Rave, is now winging its way to my mailbox), but his recent summary of what marketers do left out a core element.

Scott wrote:

“Your job as a marketer is to tell stories that people are eager to share with their friends, colleagues, and family members.”

Another book from amazon.com, Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment, fills in what’s missing, namely: Most workplace conversations regrettably take the form of parent-child relationships, where the boss/parent controls the interaction with the employee/child such that the boss retains the power and gets what he/she wants.

In marketing/development/fundraising, is it really any different? In most marketing/development/fundraising interactions the organization/parent controls the interaction with the donor-customer-champion/child so as to retain the power and get what it wants.

That’s the shortcoming of Scott’s idea that marketing is about “tell[ing] stories that people are eager to share”. Though it’s not Scott’s intention, such storytelling can easily devolve into organizational parents storytelling for their donor children. The implication? Organizations create stories. Donors sit in rapt attention and listen to them with glee, perhaps passing them on to other potential donors but certainly at least writing a check.

Key element of Transformational Giving: It’s about co-creating individual stories with each of our champions–their own stories, now broadened to include meaningful interaction with and, ultimately, ownership of the cause in their sphere of influence.

Subject of these stories? The champion, not your organization.

Champions tell stories about their ownership of the cause in their sphere of influence, and they tell these stories to invite those in their sphere of influence into initial cause-centered participation with them.

Development, in other words, is something we do with champions, not to them.

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YOU Are the Gift!

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Pastor Foley

I came to a startling conclusion this weekend. I’ve been misreading Ephesians 4:7-16 my whole life.

As a result, I flat out missed the starting point of Transformational Giving…and the reason why many Christian ministries’ development efforts are not producing much more than gnashing of teeth.

You remember Ephesians 4:7-16? It’s where Paul writes that Jesus who descended is the one who ascended and gave gifts to men. He then goes on to say that He gave some to be prophets and some to be apostles and some to be evangelists, preachers, and teachers.

Here’s what I had been missing:

This is not a passage about Jesus giving the spiritual gifts of prophecy, evangelism, preaching, and teaching. The giver in the passage is indeed Jesus. But the recipients in the passage are not the guy who gets the gift of prophecy and the woman who gets the gift of evangelism.

The recipients in the passage are “the saints”–the Body of Christ!

The point of the passage is not that you are given a spiritual gift. The point of the passage is that if you are in ministry leadership, you are given as a gift to the Body of Christ.

So why does this matter when it comes to development/fundraising?

Transformational Giving doesn’t begin with you enhancing the generosity of your donors. It begins with God giving YOU to the Body of Christ!

  • God intends that you be given by your organization as a gift to your champions and potential champions. He did not send you out to raise support for your organization. He gave you as a gift to His champions and His potential champions so that they might produce fruit for Him.
  • This “coaching champions” work (what we used to call fundraising or marketing or development) is a huge investment of your organization’s time and money.
  • With what attitude does your organization give this gift to its champions? A begrudging one? Does your organization do this work as a necessary evil? As always seeking as quick and large a return for itself as possible? As unfortunate but necessary time away from the “real” work of the ministry?
  • 2 Corinthians 9:7 says that God loves a cheerful giver. How many Christian organizations cheerfully give their Executive Directors and Board Members and Development Officers to the saints–to the Body of Christ–to their champions and potential champions? Are they given cheerfully to disciple these champions?
  • What kind of fruit are you seeing and seeking from this giving of you and your board and your staff? Are you seeking that the first fruit be for God and His Kingdom in the form of  the perfecting of the saints for the work of ministry in relation to your cause? Or are you seeking that the first fruit be for your organization, to fund its own work? (Worse yet, are you seeking that the first fruit be a good personal relationship with your donor so that the second fruit can be money from the donor for your organization–the so-called “friendraising” philosophy?)

Giving from champions is always a response to your giving–the time and money your organization invests in discipling champions. And your giving to champions is always in response to God’s giving to you–raising you up to be a chief champion for your cause and equipping you with the gifts to replicate yourself. When you follow this approach, champions give to God–and God as the mover of the human heart controls what part comes to you.

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