Transformational Giving

Tom at The Agitator lends space to Lisa Sargent who highlights what she describes as “a trailblazing multilevel donor loyalty program used by M. D. Anderson, a Texas cancer center that has seen direct mail revenues increase five hundred percent since it started the program.”

The trailblazing element?

The program is open to donors who don’t give a lot, so long as they give for five years or more:

‘The Partner’s Circle sprang from the observation that people who gave a little bit of money continuously throughout their lifetime often ended up bequeathing the institution significant donations from their estates,’ says Cindy Lappetito, vice president and general manager at loyalty-marketing company Epsilon, which created M.D. Anderson’s direct marketing campaign and donor loyalty programs.

Effective? Yes. Transformational? Er, not so much. The impetus to include low dollar givers seems to arise more from shrewd traditional transactional marketing than from a James 2:1-7ish egalitarianism.

For sheer transformative value, consider the disloyalty card being distributed by World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies at East London coffee shop Prufrock. To get a free coffee at Davies’ Prufrock shop you have to go grab a cuppa at eight other East London coffee shops.

Comments James Hoffman via his coffee blog:

There is no catch, it isn’t some cunning ruse to sell more coffee.  It might work if one roaster supplied all the places on the card – but there is a complete mix from Burgil to Union, from Square Mile to Nude’s in house espresso.  Gwilym just wants people to go and try coffee in different places.

This man is a great ambassador for coffee.

“A great ambassador for coffee”–not a bad reputation. And if such be true for coffee, then how much moreso for us in the realm of world-shaking causes? Are we known as “great ambassadors for the cause”–or as effective fundraisers (or not) for our organizations?

What might a donor disloyalty program look like?

How about a monthly giving program where once a quarter the gifts accrue to your organization…and each of the other months the gifts accrue to a different nonprofit you highlight that is having a powerful impact on your cause that is different than your own?

The message?

We want to be great ambassadors for coffee.

Or, more precisely, we care about the cause, not just our organization, and we value a wide variety of approaches that we think you should know about–and invest in–too.

The SPP, or Signature Participation Project, is a key element of the Transformational Giving process of coaching champions.

If you’re new to the blog or would like a refresher on what an SPP is and what good and bad examples look like, click here and head down the rabbit hole of links in this first post. They’ll take you back through most if not all of the previous posts on this subject.

That most recent post on SPPs was about my vote for the worst SPP of 2010, Movember’s moustache growing campaign.

The campaign’s main flaw?

The, um, tenuous connection between a man’s prostate and his moustache.

That being duly and as tactfully noted as possible, let’s turn to one of my favorite SPPs for 2010, The Uniform Project.

Emma Carew just did a nice Chronicle of Philanthropy piece on the Project (I encourage you to click through so that you can see the video that follows that article):

Inspired by the school uniform she wore as a child in India, the New Yorker Sheena Matheiken has been wearing the same dress for 273 days in an attempt to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation, an Indian charty that supports children who would otherwise be unable to attend school.

She and her designer friend, Eliza Starbuck, made seven identical black dresses, and Ms. Matheiken has been wearing one every day with the addition of different accessories, with the goal of doing so for one full year. The Uniform Project, as they’ve dubbed it, has raised more than $53,000, or enough to keep 147 students in school, according to a widget on their Web site.

Ms. Matheiken calls the project “fashion philanthropy” on her Twitter page, and updates the project’s blog daily with a snapshot of her daily outfit, dressed up with accessories that have been designed or donated by others, or items she has purchased on e-Bay and Etsy. Each day readers rate the outfits, using labels such as “batty” and “brave” or adding their own.

Here’s what I like about this SPP:

1. It’s synecdochic in a deeply personal way. Ms. Matheiken was raised in India, where school uniforms were mandatory. By wearing a “uniform” for an entire year as an adult, she herself is experiencing a taste of school life once again, in solidarity with those whom through her own actions she hopes to keep in school.
2. It’s participatory. Champions can contribute to her outfit every day, and they can comment on her outfits on the blog. Through the outfits she selects, she is able not only to have fun but to illustrate certain aspects of the cause she is championing.
3. It’s high touch. I mean, let’s be respectful to Ms. Matheiken and ask permission first, but essentially you can touch and see and even send in accessory pieces for the dress she wears. This enables people to become progressively more involved. Donate a bow one day, a buck the next.
4. It’s understandable with reference to itself. That is, I don’t have to know anything about the Akanksha Foundation to understand what Ms. Matheiken is doing. I can see her in her uniform and understand that, just as when she was a child, there are children in India who need an education, to whom I can make a donation.
5. Because the dress and blog are such personal media, they can be vehicles for Ms. Matheiken to draw those she meets deeper into the cause, rather than just soliciting a transaction.

One major potential drawback: this appears to be a self-contained SPP which does not have the goal of drawing people deeper into the cause. But the concept is so delightful and so potentially able to be a means of drawing people deeper into a cause that anyone whose nonprofit primarily does work overseas ought to be able to draw upon this SPP for inspiration.

JoNel Aleccia, health writer at msnbc.com, pens a piece cataloging the well-intentioned but foolish efforts of those who would seek to do anything other than send a check to a reputable international NGO in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

It’s a recurring theme in many posts these days–the idea that writing a check to a highly-rated international disaster relief agency is the only logical course of the hour, and to try to attempt anything else could actually be harmful.

A different but equally pressing problem is the flood of ill-advised donations that aid agencies already are facing, organizers said. A handful of “Help Haiti” food and clothing drives across the country are inspiring cringes among some workers, said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a coalition of agencies….

“I guarantee you someone is going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes,” Brooks said.

Let me grant willingly and without hesitation the following points:

1. Disasters like this one bring scammers out of the woodwork; giving to telemarketers raising money for charities you’ve never heard of is obviously not the best way to help those in Haiti.
2. Collecting supplies to send to Haiti makes no sense if no one in Haiti has requested your supplies.
3. Someone is probably going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes.

Still, I categorically and emphatically resist two of the implied premises of the article, namely:

1. The idea that highly-rated disaster relief charities constitute an unmitigated good who know what they’re doing because, after all, they’re highly-rated disaster relief charities.
2. The idea that any kind of donor involvement outside of a cash donation to a highly-rated disaster relief charity constitutes an inferior form of help.

As to the first point, Tracy Kidder notes:

In the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve.

The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from corruption, doesn’t hold — all the more reason, indeed, to work with the government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise.

Hearkening back to the lessons we could have and should have learned from the tsunami (but didn’t), David Frum adds:

Initially, aid organizations had to base their relief distributions on informed guesses — overwhelmed by logistics, they lacked the time to undertake detailed assessments or consultations with affected people. The situation on the hardest-hit west coast [of the Indonesian island of Aceh] remained the big unknown. ‘We were taking steps in the dark,’ said one aid worker.

Although international agencies were right in guessing that water, food and shelter would be survivors’ initial needs, they were wrong to assume these needs would not be covered, at least partially, by Indonesians themselves. Agencies did little to suppress the myth of disaster victims dependent on external aid to survive. …

As dramatic stories of suffering hit the headlines, more agencies poured in, expecting the worst. But aid workers arriving at Meulaboh, dubbed ‘ground zero’ of the western coast, on 4 January were surprised to find survivors being well cared for by the Indonesian army and authorities. A scramble for beneficiaries began. Some agencies jealously guarded their information to ensure their ‘niche.’ Within weeks, the ‘humanitarian space’ had become too small for all these actors.

Coordination became difficult. Out of 200 agencies present in late January, only 46 submitted reports to U.N. coordinators. Joint needs assessments were rare. Language proved problematic, with U.N. meetings held in English and government meetings in Indonesian. Without knowing who was doing what and where, some communities were overwhelmed with aid while others were neglected.

At the root of coordination problems was one key factor: too much money. Nearly everyone could hire a helicopter or boat, make their own needs assessments and distributions, and ‘fly the flag’…

Frum contends that “[d]isaster relief is first and foremost a military relief operation. No one else has the reach and the lift”:

In the first half week after the quake, the U.S. military distributed 600,000 packaged meals and installed water purification systems that can pump 100,000 liters per day. Army helicopters deliver food inland, bypassing the miserable Haitian roads; the Navy has already converted the little port of Cap Haitien to receive modern containers.

The notion of NGOs as disaster relief experts beyond reproach dies hard. But what dies even harder is the idea that a donor can be anything but a dunderhead when he or she gives something other than cash to a highly-rated disaster relief NGO.

I’d love to do a list of reputable charities who are receiving non-cash relief supplies for distribution to Haiti, and/or who have opportunities for concerned individuals to volunteer in meaningful capacities. This is not to disparage the giving of cash but rather to recognize that being shaped in the image of Christ sometimes means responding to disasters by doing more than writing a check.

My own list would start with UMCOR, which not only has a long history of respectful partnership with Haitian churches and agencies but which also lost its Executive Director Samuel Dixon in the quake. Note that Dixon was there during the earthquake, which says something about UMCOR’s ongoing commitment to Haiti that goes beyond simply responding to a disaster.

UMCOR (which, incidentally, is acknowledged as a four-star charity by Charity Navigator) has robust programs for Haiti relief supply donation and volunteering.

Why does UMCOR do this? Do they not know that it is far more efficient for people to write checks so highly-rated disaster relief agencies can buy wholesale instead of donors wastefully dropping by the grocery store on the way to work and paying retail for relief supplies?

• Just perhaps UMCOR is training its champions how to respond to disasters wherever and whenever they occur, whether in Haiti, halfway around the world, or in a house down the block.
• Perhaps they want to help their champions understand why winter coats and high-heeled shoes aren’t helpful so that the next time a disaster happens, those champions will know how to respond more thoughtfully.
• Perhaps becoming personally involved–by, say, dropping by the grocery store to pay retail–changes the kind of people we are, makes us spend more than five minutes thinking about the situation and the people who are impacted, helps us to involve our children in such a way that the generation that follows us will not only be more compassionate than we are but more able to respond personally and knowledgeably in the face of disaster.

Rest in peace, Samuel Dixon. Thank you for believing that Christians could–and should–always be more than human ATM machines, and that aid that connects our hand, heart, and head has an impact not only on the immediate disaster at hand but upon the way we think about and pray about and respond to all of the disasters that follow.

Three weeks have now passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake swallowed Haiti.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that through last Wednesday, the first fifteen days post-quake, donors had so far given $528 million to US nonprofits.  (You can see which organizations received how much here.)

Katya Andresen notes how quickly donors are losing interest in Haiti, a fact attested to by the almost total absence of posts being done on Haiti by the usual fundraising and nonprofit blogger suspects I regularly quote on these pages (though Nathaniel Whittemore hit up with a first-rate relief-to-recovery Haiti post this morning at Change.org).

Sum it up and say: Another disaster come and gone from the news, and it’s not immediately apparent that we’ve been transformed by our initial giving in the process.

From a nonprofit standpoint, a familiar question is making the rounds, one typically asked at roughly this spot in the timeline during previous large-scale disasters:

Did that $528 million include money that would normally have come to my nonprofit?

In other words: Are donors diverting their money from your nonprofit/cause to Haiti?

Incomprehensibly little research has been done to date on this question in relation to previous disasters, leaving us pontificators to pontificate with impunity and without the niggling constraints of, say, actual data.

My own reply to the question takes the form of a simple thought experiment:

• Most nonprofit fundraising, especially mass fundraising, actually follows the form of disaster fundraising. That is, when a nonprofit executive director or ad agency sits down to write an appeal letter, he or she or they ask, “What is the most urgent, compelling, heart-tugging need we can muster at this moment?” And they write the appeal letter as a kind of “micro-disaster”, i.e., “We need your help today! This is a tragedy! Please respond with the most generous gift you can! Run, don’t walk, to your mailbox. Better yet, give online!”
• As a result, we train donors to give to disasters. Urgency, it seems, sells even better than “complimentary” address labels.
• When a big disaster like Haiti hits, donors trained (by us) to give to disasters give to the big disaster.
• As they do so, they sometimes leave out giving to the monthly “micro-disaster” letter from the charities whose “micro-disasters” they respond to intermittently…at least until we can convince them that our “micro-disaster” is once again more disastrous than what’s happening in the big disaster to which they previously diverted their giving.

There are three typical responses that normally crop up among nonprofits seeking to raise money for their cause in the midst of a disaster.

1. For a brief time, tell your donors to give to Haiti instead of giving to you. For the Haiti version of this, please refer to Haslam, Bill.
2. Try to explain your cause in terms of Haiti, working on the idea that if donors gave to Haiti, you can build on that by describing your own cause as similar to what’s happening there. No less a luminary than Bill Gates tried this one in his annual Gates Foundation letter.
3. Open with a compassionate mention of Haiti and then, as tactfully as possible, note that your organization still has needs, too, and would sure appreciate you remembering our light bill in your monthly giving. This is a variant on the strategy that nonprofits have been employing throughout the recession, i.e., “I know a lot of you reading this letter are out of work, and I want you to know that we’re praying for you: praying that you don’t cut us out of your monthly budget even if it means sending in money from your unemployment check.”

The problem with all three approaches is that they turn on two basic premises, both of which are fallacious, namely:

1. Money is scarce.
2. The only way donors give is if the need is urgent.

In other words, because money is scarce I should instruct you not to give to me so that you can give to Haiti. Because donors only give when the need is urgent, I need to prove to you that my need is significant, too. And because money is scarce and my need is significant, too, it’s not in bad taste for me to sigh for a minute about Haiti before putting the full court press on you to remember how badly we need your money in our corner of the world, too.

So if you are a nonprofit and you suspect your donations are down due to the Haiti disaster, what should you do?

1. Don’t–just don’t–write your donors and draw comparisons between the disaster in Haiti and the disaster your cause addresses. Never ever contemplate writing a letter that says, “It is a terrible tragedy that 200,000 people may be dead in Haiti due to the earthquake, but did you know that that number pales in comparison to the number of people who will die this year because of [insert your cause here] unless we do something today?” Even if that approach doesn’t backfire on you, it should. The deaths of 200,000 human beings should never be invoked as a means to any end.
2. Do accept the drop in your donation income as a sign that one sows what one reaps. If one motivates one’s donors through a micro-disaster-of-the-month-club approach, one must accept that when a bigger disaster comes along, your micro-disaster will be trumped that month.
3. Commit to a fundraising approach that recognizes that donors can–and should–be giving to a comprehensive range of causes. Encourage that with more than lip service. Provide resources (like Alan Gotthardt’s Eternity Portfolio) that enable your donors to learn to grow in their giving maturity, not just in their gross giving to your cause.
4. Don’t focus on sharing the desperate needs of your organization with your donors. Organizational desperation doesn’t motivate donors any more; in fact, if they smell death, they will move on and away from you as discretely as possible. Instead, continue to provide donors with meaningful opportunities for involvement with the cause about which both you and they care. Settle in your own mind that people can and do (and should) care about more than one cause, and reaffirming the comparative importance of the one you’re involved in is far less important (and dignified) than continuing to provide customized, personalized opportunities for donors to build on the important work they’ve already begun with you.
5. Convey your genuine interest in Haiti by being genuinely knowledgeable about the subject and transparent in your own response to the disaster. (You did respond…didn’t you?) If you are comprehensively involved in a wide range of causes other than your own (which you should be), your care and compassion will come across as a whole lot more compelling than if you have no idea what’s going on in Haiti and didn’t respond to the disaster at all. The best picture your donors will ever get of being appropriately involved in more than one cause…is you.

This won’t immediately refill your nonprofit’s coffers, but sometimes that’s good. Even more important than full coffers today is a fundraising strategy that is mature and steady and sustainable over time…one that enables your donors and you to care about all the causes about which we as human beings should care…not just the one we get paid to care about.

Kudos to the Los Angeles Mission for their video, 5 Ways To Help The Homeless. It’s a great example of how nonprofit ministries and missionaries can and should use video to coach champions in the cause rather than promoting their own ministry through tear jerking videos.

I encourage you to take a minute to watch the video. Here’s what I think is particularly well done:

1. The video doesn’t take place at the mission. It doesn’t feature sad, exaggerated images of homeless people that portray them as objects of pity. Rather, it shows homeless people where champions normally encounter them in LA, namely, on freeway offramps and panhandling on the street. It is so essential in champion coaching videos to depict where champions normally encounter the cause…not where you do (i.e., your building).
2. The video depicts other champions talking about the cause–their questions, insights, and experiences. Other champions are rarely seen in most nonprofit/missionary videos. Instead, what we get are shots of “the need”, “the solution”, “the testimony”, etc.
3. The video positions the champion as the actor (i.e., the one responsible to help the homeless) and the mission as an optional platform for collective action for interested champions. That is, the video doesn’t say that to help the homeless you should support the mission. Instead, it shows how you, the champion, can help the homeless through your own direct action, which can be enhanced by drawing on the mission’s experience, location, and resources. In the video, the mission is resourcing you, whether or not you choose to resource it.
4. The video gives champions something to do other than pray ‘n’ give, that classic pair. Pleasantly, when praying and giving are mentioned, the mission is not depicted as the recipient of either but rather as the platform for you to impact the cause directly. Note, for example, that you are given suggestions about how to pray for homeless people.
5. There is a homeless person in the video who is portrayed as an authority, rather than as an object of pity. Praise God. Rarely do I see nonprofit/missionary videos where the intended recipients of help are portrayed as wise, knowledgeable authorities worth listening to.

There are a few things the video lacks that would be nice additions, most particularly mention of what the Bible calls Christians (or, should the mission be seeking to reach a broader audience, people of faith in general) to do relative to the poor. A list of scriptures for further study would be great, as would an explicit invitation for champions to email their questions about helping the homeless.

I watched the other six videos the Los Angeles Mission has posted on their Vimeo site. Disappointingly, they’re all examples of traditional transactional fundraising rather than coaching champions. I hope the mission will make more videos like 5 Ways and less like their year-end message, which could be a traditional transactional fundraising year-end message for any charity with a little cut-and-paste action to change the organization’s name and swap in different tear-jerking footage.

I’ve enjoyed and grown from all of the posts and comments we’ve had on this site over the last two weeks about Haiti and a Transformational response to tragedy and crisis.

Still, before this blog meanders on to other subjects (though I hope our hearts, hands, and heads stay steadfastly on Haiti in no small part), I wanted to make sure you saw what I think is the best post on Haiti that, um, didn’t appear on our site.

It comes from Nathaniel Whittemore at the Social Entrepreneurship blog, under the heading, What Goes Wrong With Rebuilding Efforts (And How To Do Better This Time).

Whittemore’s post is so good that it would be worthwhile to cut and paste every word. Let me leave you to the link, however, and simply highlight what I believe is Whittemore’s best thought–one made in a disappointingly small number of articles on the quake in Haiti since it happened, and one that applies not only to every disaster but to every dimension of ministry:

Everyone impacted by this earthquake is a victim, but to successfully implement immediate and long-term relief programs, aid organizations have to be able to get beyond the “victimhood” of the people they’re serving to actively engage their ideas and talents to work with, not only for, local people.

You go, bro. We don’t simply give to; we suffer with.

And we don’t end with suffer with; we press on to listen to and  work with. And give with, too.

That’s the rarified air of Transformation. And I almost suspect that every tragedy and crisis that has received a lasting and effective response has been grounded in that principle.

Perhaps that’s what Augustine was thinking when he wrote about the biggest reclamation project of them all:

God made you without you. You didn’t, after all, give any consent to God making you. How were you to consent, if you didn’t yet exist? So while he made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you. So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it.

Since the earthquake in Haiti we’ve dedicated this space to voices dialoguing about two questions:

• What do you believe is a transformational response to disaster?
• Are there any unique dynamics that Transformational Giving brings to such a response?

As the voices have eloquently demonstrated, it’s anything but fiddling while Rome burns. The lead Haiti story for each of the last three days while I’ve been assembling these posts has been a variant on “Aid groups struggle to get food and water to Haitians”.

This in no way means that it’s not crucial for us to give. It is. It’s just that it’s crucial for us to give in ways that involve us doing more than hunting for the most reputable aid organization through which to give. As history and at least the last three global disasters have demonstrated:

• An initial flow of money is rarely the impediment to disaster relief
• That flow of money dries up astonishingly quickly, well before the need does, and typically well before we are changed by what we have learned (which tends to be a lot about disaster and comparatively little about the people who are experiencing it)
• There is a great deal of giver’s remorse a few short months after the disaster, as, inevitably, news stories crop up that disclose that Major Disaster Relief Organization X still has designated money in the bank from the last disaster that it has yet to spend, or the projects that Major Relief Agency Y undertook aren’t really helping a lot.

None of this excuses us from responding, and none of this means that major disaster relief agencies don’t, on the whole, do a great job.

It just means that getting an online donation to a major disaster relief agency may not–ought not–to be the beginning or the end of the story.

I hope that, like me, you’ve benefited from the voices who have guest posted and commented on the site. I found the whole experience to be, well, transformational–and I don’t mean that in the sense of emotionally gratifying, personally sizzling, neat, cool, or even fun.

I mean that the discussion has transformed what I understand about Haiti, instilled in me the importance of suffering with in addition to giving to in disaster relief, and given me a lot to process as my wife and I have considered how to respond to this tragedy that is so much bigger than anything the small screen of TV and laptop can convey.

It seems appropriate  to me to conclude this series by letting you know briefly how we chose to give, and why. I will withhold the name of the specific entity through which we are choosing to give, as my point is not to drum up support for a worthy institution. There are certainly enough websites doing that.

I want to share with you where and how we chose to give mainly as a very personal window into how the Transformational Giving process and what the contributors to this blog over the past week have written has impacted us. Mutual accountability and all that.

In following Jon Hirst’s six-step process to thinking through how to respond transformationally,  we learned something fascinating in our research on Haiti:

The World Bank reports that of the $1.2 billion sent from the US to Haiti in 2009, a surprisingly large share came from the 300,000 Haitians who live in the United States.

That reminded us of another people who certainly run the risk of potentially being named among the globe’s most tragic:

North Koreans.

Especially North Korean defectors, 300,000 of whom live illegally in hiding in China and 15,000 of whom live in challenging cultural and economic conditions in South Korea.

Going on a decade ago, my wife and I noticed that when it came to helping North Korea, most people opted for giving through reputable major aid agencies.

Very few people attempted to reach North Korea through North Korean defectors.

And yet when we talked to the aid agencies and the North Koreans, we consistently found that the North Korean defectors had strikingly better insights into how to help and who to help–and how not to help–than the aid agencies did.

After all, North Korean defectors weren’t simply motivated by humanitarian concerns. They were motivated by trying to help family members not die.

That will definitely motivate a person to stretch every aid dollar and press it into practice as quickly as possible.

So as we read about and prayed about and studied about Haiti, we couldn’t help but be drawn to the news stories (like this one) that shared how Haitians in America were reacting to the crisis.

The news stories would drop clues about how many of these Haitian Americans had been helping Haiti consistently, powerfully, and effectively long before this latest disaster. After all, if we’ve learned anything in the last few weeks, it’s that Haitians are fairly well used to a life of disasters.

We read the stories and looked at Haitian American Protestant churches and found ones for whom crisis response in Haiti was not only nothing new but was for them a way of life, in an effort to change the way of life that involves all too much crisis in Haiti.

And that’s how we are giving.

We wanted to show our faith in this group, to listen to them, to let them–rather than a major aid agency–take the lead in guiding the way we think about Haiti, and how to show the love of God to that country and its people, not just in this disaster, but in what may come.

May God bless you in your own journey of discerning where to give in response to this tragedy. May you be transformed as you give so that you not only give but suffer with, learn, and last with your Haitian brothers and sisters, long after the Internet and this blog have moved on to other things.

As we continue providing space in the blogosphere for people to think through a transformational response to the crisis in Haiti and to tragedy in general, we turn to Generous Mind Jon Hirst, who considers basic steps of obedience as well as thinking transformationally with his children about disaster:

When tragedy strikes it seems like there is a basic step of obedience to step out and give. This is in line with the Bible’s call to care for those in need. But simply stepping out is not enough.

For it to be transformational we have to step out in initial obedience and then as Matt Bates from Mission Increase Foundation said yesterday we have to ask the bigger questions about why a country like Haiti is struggling so and what are we called to do at the larger level of representing Jesus to the people of Haiti.

If we give at the moment of tragedy and then forget about the people of Haiti we have not grown.

It has been so interesting as I have been working with my kids about the Haiti tragedy. I have challenged them to tell their friends at school. My six year old and nine year old both did this. They came back and reported that they were able to tell kids that didn’t know about the tragedy. Now I’m trying to think through what my next step is with my kids to help them engage with the cause of caring for those in need at a deeper level. I’m still praying and seeking God about next steps.

Since Jon wrote this, he’s put together a 30-day Haiti prayer guide for he and his family to pray through and has graciously given us the ability to offer it here: 30 Day Prayer Calendar_Haiti Tragedy

We continue to devote our blog to serve as a place where we can do more than recommend organizations through which you can give your money to help those in Haiti–precisely because giving our money does not exhaust that to which God calls us in this hour.

To that end, Mission Increase Foundation Giving and Training Officer Matt Bates:

Marilyn McCord Adams has an interesting take on the problem of evil from a Christian perspective here.

Based on her position, a transformational question that springs to mind is: how can we, like God, suffer with those who are suffering in this tragedy and resist the temptation to remain aloof? And is it possible that some gifts inoculate us from suffering and permit us to remain aloof?

The main thrust of PEO [Participation/Engagement/Ownership] is to coach champions into the fullness of the image of Christ; Adams’ take is that, though we can’t know why God permits evil, He is present in human sufferings. So whatever our response to Haiti, a transformational element must be that we take on the condition of the Haitians as our own, to share in the burden of suffering with them.

The ttf [traditional transactional fundraising] model works in part because it buffers us from suffering. We’re told by the nonprofit that we can remain in our current state as long as we give. The impulse to actually do something is subtly discouraged and eventually deadened because the nonprofit is acting on behalf of its donors.

In recognition of the magnitude of the Haiti disaster, and in the prayerful hope that each of us is thoughtfully seeking the guidance of God on how to mobilize our personal and corporate assets so that the character of God may be evident in and to us and our brothers and sisters in Haiti and to a world groaning under the weight of it all, we continue to devote our posts over the next week to the subject of a Transformational response to tragedy and crisis, asking:

Today we hear from Mission Increase Foundation President Dave Farquhar, who, prior to serving at MIF, was one of the long-time cornerstones of Northwest Medical Teams, now Medical Teams International.

Few folks have seen as much up-close disaster as Dave has. (Er, not at Mission Increase, I mean. In the field. When he was at Northwest Medical Teams. You know what I mean.)

And yet, few folks have as much up-close experience with Transformational Giving as Dave, either.

So we asked Dave to share his thoughts on tragedy and transformation, especially in light of his sense that this present disaster may be among the largest and longest lasting of our lifetimes.

Here’s Dave:

I can see the wheels turning and many TGers wonder if sending a check in a situation like this is a transaction?  The answer is YES, and not all transactions are evil or bad.

All gifts to people and organizations are to some degree transactional.  Money has to transact, but the gift is not necessarily “transactional” in intent.  You may ask, “But I don’t know these organizations. Am I abdicating my responsibility or is this a lesser type of gift?”  That is a good question.  The answer is that sometimes you cannot know the end user, or the middleman organization, yet you feel compelled to give.  That is exactly what every donor feels as well.  I want to be a good steward and do good, but I don’t even know these people—but if I don’t give people will suffer.  That is the world of disaster relief, and much other giving as well, except in disaster relief all those thoughts and emotions are compressed into an urgency that does not come with giving to the girl scouts.

I have stood on the giving and receiving end of disasters supplies and seen people weep on both ends.  The givers weep as they send, and those who receive those truckloads of food, water and help, they weep and thank God as well.

When people send gifts, when they transact a check, the real issue is what is God stirring in their heart?  Urgency?  Impulsive giving?  Faith? Is God stirring at all?   Is the donor learning to hear from God?  Should they do more than just send a check?  If so—what?  I have encouraged people to seek out ways to multiply their giving by doing more than sending a check.  If this is a cause God is stirring in them, they need to take time to hear from God and serve.  That is exactly how Northwest Medical Teams, the disaster organization I served in, was born.  One man, Ron Post, was compelled by God to help in a disaster in Cambodia.  Instead of just cutting a check he got up and did what God was stirring him to do.  Is it normal to expect each donor to start a nonprofit like Ron did?  No.  But, what should we expect?  There is no answer to that question other than we teach people to give and serve in ways God directs.

To me, this is an amazing process.  Something stirs people to give.  Some of those stirrings are far more transformational than others.  We cannot label all giving to big boys [large nonprofit organizations] bad and giving to grass roots as more transformational.  I have seen serious corruption at the grass roots level and the big boy level that would turn you green.