Transformational Giving

Isn’t there something even a little bit sad about the little old lady in your donor file who has been giving to your nonprofit every month for thirty years…but who is no more skilled at impacting the cause now than she was when she first started giving?

Some might say no. After all, said little old lady scores well on the R/F/M (Recency-Frequency-Monetary) scale traditionally used to segment donors:

• Recency: She gave this month.
• Frequency: She gives every month.
• Monetary: She’s not giving a lot. But there’s always the hope of scoring big in her will.

But there’s something deeper at issue here than whether such a classification scheme is sad (and, uh, morally reprehensible). There’s a question of whether such a classification will be sufficient or even relevant in the near future.

In a lengthy post that’s well worth the read, John Seely Brown and Richard Adler discuss Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. (Thanks to Weblogg-ed for the tip.)

Fundraising was probably the furthest thing from Seely Brown and Adler’s minds when they wrote the piece. Properly speaking, it’s about social learning and the future of education in the broadest possible terms. As you read, though, you’ll see how it’s virtually impossible to conceive of the future of fundraising without taking into serious account what the authors have to say.

First, the authors detail the seismic shift in thinking about how people learn. A cornerstone of the system that is passing away is the idea that teachers and learners differ by kind, not degree. That is, we’ve always assumed that in any given setting, one person teaches, the others learn, and crossover in roles is, at most, serendipitous.

This “Cartesian” (Descartes-inspired) way of thinking has a clear carryover to the way we think about fundraising. We think of some folks are “supporters” and some as “supported”–some as doers of the work, so to speak, and some as givers to the work. Or in Facebook terms, you’re either a Cause or a Fan but not both.

But that way of thinking is passing away, if not already dead:

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field. But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Did you catch that phrase “learning to be”? It contrasts with “learning about”, as in “Are you newsletters helping your donors learn to be the cause, or do they only help your donors learn about it?”

Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice. Historically, apprenticeship programs and supervised graduate research have provided students with opportunities to observe and then to emulate how experts function. Apprentices traditionally begin learning by taking on simple tasks, under the watchful eye of a master, through a process that has been described as “legitimate peripheral participation”; they then progress to more demanding tasks as their skills improve.

Instead of supporter/supported, in other words, the future bodes best for nonprofits who think in terms of apprentice/master, where the nonprofit is a community of practice where donors engage in what is called “limited peripheral participation”–in other words, they learn to be the cause by getting to do real, actual work that impacts the cause, though initially at a much simpler level than you do it. But the point of “donor cultivation” in this model is to help the donor grow to be the cause at the same level of skill that you are currently at:

Open source communities have developed a well-established path by which newcomers can “learn the ropes” and become trusted members of the community through a process of legitimate peripheral participation. New members typically begin participating in an open source community by working on relatively simple, noncritical development projects such as building or improving software drivers (e.g., print drivers). As they demonstrate their ability to make useful contributions and to work in the distinctive style and sensibilities/taste of that community, they are invited to take on more central projects. Those who become the most proficient may be asked to join the inner circle of people working on the critical kernel code of the system. Today, there are about one million people engaged in developing and refining open source products, and nearly all are improving their skills by participating in and contributing to these networked communities of practice

Writing computer software is one example. For purposes of nonprofit work, the more applicable example given by the authors may be the way people participate in Wikipedia:

Since the open source movement is based on the development of computer software, participation is effectively limited to people with programming skills. But its principles have been adopted by communities dedicated to the creation of other, more widely accessible types of resources. Perhaps the best known example is Wikipedia, the online “open source” encyclopedia that has challenged the supremacy of commercial encyclopedias. Becoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.

Follow this line of thinking to its logical fundraising conclusion and you have a sea change in the kinds of materials we need to be including in our newsletters, posting on our websites and blogs, and featuring in our banquets and volunteer events:

The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.

Sum it up and say:

If the involvement of the little old lady in your donor file differs from you in kind rather than in degree–if, that is, you categorize her by RFM rather than by Capacity–your nonprofit may not be around to train the next generation of little old ladies in the future.

In our June 30 Donors are the nonprofits of the future post, we wrote about “donor” Pamela Abdallah and one of her charitable “vehicles”, the Salvation Army, and how the Salvation Army is best described as a supporter of  Abdallah rather than Abdallah being a supporter of the Salvation Army.

Today we introduce you to America’s “next great nonprofit”: 8-year old Abby Enck, and her charitable vehicle, Lutheran General Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois.

Plenty of elementary school kids run lemonade stands during the summer. Few turn those lemonade stands into charitable franchises that help sick kids.

But 8-year-old Abby Enck found a way to use her refreshing entrepreneurial enterprise to bring some color into the life of her 6-year-old brother, Cameron, and his cohorts at Lutheran General Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge.  Cameron was born with Cerebral Palsy…

Cameron was diagnosed with the disease when he was just one week old. Big sister Abby has accompanied him to almost all of his appointments and noticed that the kids at the hospital liked coloring.

So when Abby made $4.50 from selling delicious lemonade to neighborhood locals, she decided use the money to buy 36 boxes of crayons for Cameron and the other kids at the hospital.

Alright, so far so cute…but read on:

When 2010 rolled around, Abby thought she could best last year’s donation.  So rather than sling lemonade on her own, she created “lemonade kits” that consisted of a bottle of water, a packet of lemonade and a homemade tag that explained her goal.  Abby made 52 kits and recruited family and friends to help sell them for $1 each.

The franchise idea turned out to be crayon boom-town, and Abby has been able to purchase 869 boxes of Crayola Crayons so far this year. She hopes to make it to her goal of 1,000 boxes in the next few weeks.

Now, here’s the payoff:

“What’s special about this donation is that she took it upon herself and made it personal,” said Lutheran General’s communications manager, Nate Llewellyn…

It doesn’t hurt that the kids at Lutheran General love using the gifts.

“Coloring is a great creative outlet for kids,” Llewellyn said.  “It helps them work through any issues they may be going through and take their mind of metal or physical pain. It really creates a sense of home, safety and comfort for them.”

Becki said Abby handled the whole operation herself.  She created a to-do list, compiled a list of family and friends to whom she planned to reach, designed a company logo on the computer and came up with a slogan:  “If life gives you lemons, COLOR!”

The whole experience has been good for Abby and Cameron.

“She used to be very shy, but this is really bringing her out of her shell,” Becki said.  “She wants to share and this is something exciting that she can be recognized for.”

Abby says the best part about making the kits is buying and donating the crayons.  When her mother asked what she had learned from the project, the 8-year-old replied, “Everybody can make a difference.”

So through this process Abby has experienced personal transformation, as have those she helped. Her project is more than salutary; it has made a demonstrable and significant impact. Next year she plans on moving up to giving away DVDs. The article doesn’t say why, but one presumes it is as a result of Abby growing in her personal knowledge of and ablity to impact the cause.

Now, the question every nonprofit should be asking with regard to its “nonprofits of the future”–that is to say, its “donors”:

How is Lutheran General Children’s Hospital supporting Abby? And how can they grow in their support of her in the future?

Six months after the quake, how much of the $1.6 billion raised by NGOs for Haiti has been spent?

$627 million, or 39% of the $1.6 billion raised.

As Holden Karnofsky notes, $627 million is roughly equivalent to the amount raised in the first nine days following the quake.

Now, in and of itself there’s nothing fundamentally objectionable about that statistic. Long term recovery projects are, after all, key to Haiti’s recovery.

The potentially objectionable part comes in questions like:

Was this reality reflected in the Haiti disaster relief fundraising? In other words, did NGOs make clear that “a little more than half of your donation may not be used in the first year or go toward emergency relief efforts?

A July 8 press release on The Red Cross website notes, “The American Red Cross is on track to meet its goal of spending more than $200 million to address immediate needs – mostly in the first 12 months after the earthquake. The remainder of the funds raised will go to longer-term recovery over the next three to five years, with spending plans likely to evolve to respond to changing needs.”

So of the $468 million Red Cross raised for Haiti, the plan was–and remains–to spend less than half of that in year 1.

The question I’m raising is not whether that is a good idea but rather:

Was that plan made clear in the disaster relief fundraising efforts?

The answer may be, “Yes, it was.” Or it may be, “It took us a while to put together the plan” or “We never know how much we can expect in donations” or some combination thereof, like “Our plan is generally to spend about XX% in the first year (depending on what we raise), and we don’t have budget numbers or plans available at the time we’re doing the fundraising because, good heavens, the disaster just happened, and it takes us a while to assess the damage and plan the recovery.”

That all makes sense. It really does.

It just doesn’t square, in my view, with two elements of disaster relief fundraising:

First, disaster relief fundraising turns on the urgent need for money now. Is it really too much to ask that an NGO fully integrates its strategic approach into its fundraising, i.e.,  ”Our plan is generally to spend about XX% of what you give in the first year (depending on what we raise), and we don’t have budget numbers or plans available at this time because, good heavens, the disaster just happened, and it takes us a while to assess the damage and plan the recovery.

Second, much ado is made at the time of every major disaster about the importance of donors giving through highly-rated disaster relief agencies. Otherwise, the argument goes, you might as well just hand out cash to victims on the street.

That being the case, one part of the Red Cross press release bears particular mention:

Innovative Text (SMS) Cash Transfer Program
In addition, the Red Cross said today that it is launching a major $50 million SMS cash transfer program to give cash grants of approximately $125 to up to 400,000 Haitian families over the next several months. Recently, the American Red Cross tested a technologically innovative program to give cash grants to families using cell phones and text messaging. During this successful pilot, smaller $50 cash grants were given out to help nearly 1,800 families move from at-risk camps to camps in safer areas. This newly expanded program will enable families to buy food and supplies, fund the education of their children, purchase medicine, repair homes, relocate from camps, and invest in their businesses and livelihoods.

“Through these programs, families who once stood in line for relief distributions will now be empowered to buy some of the basic items they need most, which in turn should help stimulate the country’s economy,” McGovern said, noting that even modest amounts of money can make a big difference to Haitian families, as 70 percent of Haitians lived on less than $2 a day prior to the earthquake.

“The same cell phone technology that enabled Americans to text donations for Haiti will now enable earthquake survivors to access money to support their families,” said McGovern.

So after six months we are now on the verge of being able to do the technological equivalent of handing out money to people on the streets.

Again, I actually think this is probably a great program. My question is still the one I asked back on February 3: Who’s hindering the help in Haiti: “Disaster do-gooders” or NGOs?

And my answer–and my recommendation of how we consider giving at least a part of our donations in such circumstances in the future–is still the one I gave on January 25: Give through credible (denominationally-affiliated) ethnic church congregations and–in consultation with or through expats you know and trust–to institutions (like churches) in the country where the disaster occurred. Give, in other words, to credible groups whose connections to disaster victims is personal, not merely humanitarian and whose knowledge of the area is personal, not merely researched.

I wrote then:

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.

So $627 million down, $1 billion left to go. I wonder if this is what everyone had in mind when they texted in their urgently needed life-saving donations six months ago?

Hooray to my bud Jason Dick at A Small Change for his interview with Adam Penenberg, author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves.

And hooray to Adam Penenberg for applying the concept of the viral loop to nonprofits.

(And hooray to Give and Take for calling the article to our attention!)

Since we’re in the midst of this series on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits, however, I’d like to suggest to Adam that we apply his concept differently. Sustainably, you know.

Here’s Adam’s recommendation:

Viral marketing relies on people passing on information they deem worthy–whether it’s a link to a funny video on YouTube, a political message, petitions, etc. If a nonprofit has a passionate core group of donors then the key would be to incentivize these donors to reach out to their social networks of friends, family, colleagues and neighbors. It would work well with a specific campaign. Ideally, the non-profit could create a Facebook application that could incentivize donations. Let’s say your organization is called Save the Cats (STC). I’d set it up like this: Create a Save the Cats branded app fueled by virtual currency. Just by downloading the you receive $100 in STC dollars. They can be spent at any number of retailers that donate inventory the retailer would like to sell anyway. You then get $30 off a shirt from the Gap, $20 off a rental car, $40 off a pair of rollerblades, etc. As your cash reserves dwindle you can earn more virtual currency–it doesn’t cost STC anything–by getting 5 friends to download the app and donating a certain amount of money. It should be small increments, say, $10 each. And so on and so on. Once you have a large enough installed base you can try al sorts of things. At the very least you gain thousands or even hundreds of thousands of new names to add to your donor lists. You raise money for your non-profit. And you spread your message. It’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.

What’s not sustainable about such an approach?

It makes the marketing campaign viral, not the cause.

That is, taken in isolation, Adam’s recommendation makes perfect sense. But envision two nonprofits doing the same thing and you’ll begin to see a challenge emerging:

Should I work for $20 in Save The Cat dollars? Or should I instead work for $20 in Save The Marmot dollars, since STM dollars are redeemable at Banana Republic, whereas STC dollars are only redeemable at Old Navy, which I like much less?

Multiply this by ten nonprofits, and then ten thousand–just a fraction of the 1.5 million or so nonprofits in existence today–and you bring to the virtual arena the very same kind of challenges we have in the physical world with fruitcake sales, nonprofit auctions, golf scrambles, and every other kind of fundraising event where we promote involvement through self-interest rather than direct, personal involvement in the cause: Commodification. As these kind of campaigns proliferate, we select our involvement more and more based on the self-interest reward and less and less on the cause.

Not sustainable.

The alternative?

What Lave, Wenger, and other Situated Learning specialists call Legitimate Peripheral Participation:

Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) is a theoretical description of how newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice or collaborative project (Lave & Wenger 1991). According to LPP, newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community. Through peripheral activities, novices become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community.

Gradually, as newcomers become old timers, their participation takes forms that are more and more central to the functioning of the community. LPP suggests that membership in a community of practice is mediated by the possible forms of participation to which newcomers have access, both physically and socially. If newcomers can directly observe the practices of experts, they understand the broader context into which their own efforts fit. Conversely LPP suggests that newcomers who are separated from the experts have limited access to their tools and community and therefore have limited growth.

In other words, rather than making a Save The Cat Dollars campaign go viral, find ways for people to save cats through social networking that are “simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community” such that saving cats itself becomes a viral cause.

For ideas on how nonprofits are already doing this, read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus at the same time you’re reading Adam’s Viral Loop.

It may take you two books to learn how to do it this way. But, hey, at least then you’ll be on the road to fundraising sustainability.

Sustainable fundraising means embodying the cause in your, um, body:

In the 1980s, John and Leslie Miller owned several thriving retail businesses in Colorado Springs.

In 1992, the Millers sold their businesses to pay off their house mortgage and business loans, which John Miller said was to follow God’s directive to get out of debt. That same year they founded Crossfire Ministries, a [Colorado] Springs Christian nonprofit at 307 N. Union Blvd. that gives away food, clothes and toiletries to the needy.

Crossfire Ministries is within a sagging gabled house with loose and missing shingles. The building used to be a flower shop owned by the Millers….

The ministry averages 27,000 visits per year from thousands in the area, Crossfire records show. Its annual budget is about $90,000…

The Millers have no savings or investments. They live solely on monetary and in-kind donations made directly to them, John Miller told me. One person, for instance, pays the Millers’ home electric bill.

A no-frills kind of guy, Miller typically dresses in ministry-donated clothes and eats ministry-donated food. During my interview, he munched on a day-old Safeway muffin.

(Make sure to read the rest of Mark Barna’s article on Crossfire. In fact, make sure to sign up for Mark’s RSS feed. He’s a great local religion columnist–a genuine rarity, enjoyable and meaningful no matter what your locale.)

There’s something about restricting your diet to muffins donated to your ministry that is far more compelling to donors than handing them the most poignant brochure. You are the cause you eat, you know.

What would it look like for you to truly embody your cause, not just raise money to support it?

The practice is actually quite ancient. Check out poor Ezekiel as God speaks to him in Ezekiel 4:9-17:

⁹ “Also take for yourself wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread of them for yourself. During the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days, you shall eat it. ¹⁰ And your food which you eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day; from time to time you shall eat it. ¹¹ You shall also drink water by measure, one-sixth of a hin; from time to time you shall drink. ¹² And you shall eat it as barley cakes; and bake it using fuel of human waste in their sight.”
¹³ Then the LORD said, “So shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, where I will drive them.”
¹⁴ So I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Indeed I have never defiled myself from my youth till now; I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has abominable flesh ever come into my mouth.”
¹⁵ Then He said to me, “See, I am giving you cow dung instead of human waste, and you shall prepare your bread over it.”
¹⁶ Moreover He said to me, “Son of man, surely I will cut off the supply of bread in Jerusalem; they shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and shall drink water by measure and with dread, ¹⁷ that they may lack bread and water, and be dismayed with one another, and waste away because of their iniquity.

Man. Be thankful for those day-old muffins, John and Leslie.

In our next post on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits: Make the cause viral, not the marketing campaign.

Most nonprofit fundraising practices are not sustainable.

By that I’m not referring to the cost of reply cards and the stamps to mail them, nor am I referring to the salaries of development officers in comparison to most nonprofit budgets.

Instead, I’m referring to the well nigh universal nonprofit practice of attempting to grow by recruiting prospective donors totally unrelated to an organization’s existing donors.

Yes, I actually did mean what it sounded like I meant in the previous sentence. I’m questioning the sustainability of a fundamental practice of traditional fundraising. I’m suggesting that this practice, which we accept and employ uncritically and consider basic to our nonprofit survival, is:

• not sustainable given the staggering growth in the number of nonprofits worldwide
• a major contributor to fundraising anemia and mission drift among nonprofits
• a major culprit in why the average American is no more generous today (as a function of percentage of income donated to charity) than s/he was fifty years ago before the advent of modern fundraising.

This contention is likely to raise more than a few eyebrows, blank stares, and dismissive contempt. That’s OK. Let’s consider this the Silent Spring of blog posts on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits. And to that end, let’s summon some of the wisdom on sustainability in general from the environmental movement itself.

Gannon Sims writes on a totally different subject in Call & Response this past week, but his summary of Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow” is too good to pass up and eminently applicable to the topic at hand:

In “Jayber Crow,” Wendell Berry tells the story of Athey Keith, a farmer determined to leave his land better than he found it. A true conservationist, Athey never plowed more than he could fertilize — with the manure from his own animals. When Athey looked over his land he saw more than he needed and he had more than he used. Athey knew the land and the land knew him. No one element of his farm took priority over the other. Feed, cattle, crops — it all mattered. He couldn’t have one without the other.

Then one day everything changed. Athey’s son-in-law bought a tractor. He was tired of the old way. He wanted something new and wanted it now. The tractor had a headlight and he could use it to plow after dusk. If he maintained the engine, the tractor didn’t need to rest. It plowed more land and faster than ever before. He learned that he could make more money by planting more corn than anything else. In his quest to replace the old with the new, the son-in-law lost the balance.

Lost the balance.

If there’s a phrase that aptly describes the state of modern nonprofit fundraising, that’s it. Aren’t we yet totally disgusted with wealth identifier indices, acquisition campaigns that cost more money than they raise, and pandering to the affluent in hopes of getting a donation (or even just an appointment or a referral)?

What’s the alternative? What does sustainability look like in fundraising practice?

Simply put, it means three practices:

• Us being the lead giver to our cause (1) by percentage of our personal incomes, not total dollars given, and (2) comprehensively, meaning that our heads, hearts, hands, and pocketbooks are all fully involved in the cause. No more giving instead of volunteering or volunteering instead of giving, and no more delegating our involvement to professionals and experts “far more qualified” than we are to impact the cause;
• Us restricting our fundraising only to those within our sphere of influence, and only in ways that promote comprehensive involvement with the cause, i.e., no more letting people write checks to “support” us. No more giving in place of volunteering to personally impact the cause. Henceforth we only accept money from people when money is part of a commitment to comprehensive involvement on their part;
• All organizational growth deriving from us training those in our sphere of influence to spread the cause (1) only to others in their sphere of influence, and (2) only in ways that promote comprehensive involvement that includes but extends beyond financial giving.

What would be the result of the implementation of those three sustainable fundraising practices?

The end of the tragedy of the nonprofit commons, where a few nonprofits use bigger and bigger tractors to cultivate more and more acres in ways that make whole crops of human potential vulnerable to the diseases that prevent meaningful involvement in causes (i.e., “I did my part; I made a donation at the wine tasting event”) rather than building hearty strains of humanity personally and directly impacting the great causes of our time and being changed by that involvement in a sustainable nonprofit ecosphere.

In our next post on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits:

A husband and wife food pantry director team, formerly successful businesspeople, whose personal diet consists only of food items donated through their organization.

Take a hard look at your donor file.

What is it, anyway?

For most of us, it’s a list of all the people who have given us money at some point in time.

Some donor files also contain lists of people who we think may give us money at some point in time. Other donor files are segmented into people who have given us money recently (“active” donors) and those who haven’t given money to us in a while (“inactive” donors).

What would happen if we ditched the idea of a donor file and instead created a community of practice–a list of individuals and organizations ranging from…

• Those who blog about our cause
• Nonprofit leaders from other organizations who share our cause
• Experts in fields related to our cause
• Churches, clubs, and service groups actively practicing our cause
• Individuals who have taken steps to become involved in our cause?

(That last category would include but not be limited to those who have given financially. And it might even exclude those who gave but did so in ways that did not reflect involvement in the cause, i.e., they gave because they knew the founder, because they participated in an auction or wine tasting or golf scramble or jog-a-thon where their giving was tied to the non-cause related event rather than the cause.)

What if, in other words, the glue that held our donor file together was a commitment to practice the cause and to grow in that practice with others of like mind and commitment rather than a financial transaction? 

McKnight and Block, authors of The Abundant Community, authored a recent post entitled Gifts, Skills, Interests and Passions: The Glue That Holds Communities Together that is ostensibly about neighborhoods but has at least as much applicability to donor files:

When we consider your block or neighborhood, if it is organized it is because something in common leads people to want to come together. Where blocks are not organized, it is because neighbors don’t know what they share or have in common.  Just living on the same block is not enough to pull many people out of their homes to join with neighbors except for an annual block party.  One step up is the block club created to deal with crime, safety and security.  But that is a community drawn together by fear — creating a fortress mentality.

There are some neighborhoods, however, drawn together because they have discovered the gifts, skills, interests and passions of their fellow residents.  This knowledge is the catalyst for all kinds of new relationships.  The connections may be between two neighbors who discover a mutual interest in jazz.  Or it may be several neighbors with an interest in gardening. Or it may be all the neighbors who discover their common interest in being a village that raises a child.

Whenever a neighborhood comes together in powerful and satisfying ways, it is because two things have happened.  First, they have found out about each other’s gifts.  Second, they have made new connections based on these gifts.  It is the sum of these connections that “glues” a neighborhood together.

Is your donor file a group of individuals “glued” to you because at some time in the past they wrote you a check? Or is your donor file a “virtual cause neighborhood” glued to each other with you in their midst because they have found out about each other’s–and your–gifts and made connections and commitments to grow together accordingly?

How would our approach to our donors change if we thought of them as fellow students of the cause rather than as supporters of our organization?

“Well, what if they grew in the cause but didn’t give to our organization?”

My question in reply: Is it really possible for them to genuinely grow in the cause without growing in their giving?

Change your identity. Stop being the recipient of your donors’ gifts and start being the vehicle for your donors’ maturing and comprehensive activity in relation to the cause.

To that end, rebuild your newsletter around your donors’ ability to answer the following five questions after reading each issue. These come from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed, a great site on learning and instruction that doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with donor development only because, regretfully, we persist in thinking of donors as supporters and not students of the cause.

• Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
• Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
• Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
• Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
• Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)

If we think that donors can answer these questions well and passionately without giving, we understand neither donors nor causes at all.

Sadly, that very well may be the case.

Instead of just buying your gelato from the ice cream shop, why not help them make it by supplying organic fruit from your own garden?

That’s the premise of New Zealand’s Giapo Gelato, whose new “Giapo Certified Organic” line is crowdsourced from its customers. From Springwise:

Located in Auckland, Giapo Gelato serves up an all-natural line of healthful gelato and sorbets, with inventive flavours including Spirulina, Feijoa and Chili Chocolate. Earlier this week, it kicked off its new crowdsourcing effort to incorporate organic fruits supplied by the crowds. To be eligible for consideration, consumers must guarantee that no herbicides or pesticides have been used within the growing area of their fruit; samples will be randomly tested to ensure compliance. The price of the fruit supplied will then be calculated in current market prices, and Giapo will give suppliers free Giapo Gelato in return.

Springwise goes on to note that trading extra produce for gelato is an exchange that many gardeners will likely be willing to make. But I think there’s more here than free ice cream. If I’m supplying the fruit for an ice cream store, am I likely to mention that to my friends? Invite them down to the store to taste it? Explain how I got involved and challenge them to do the same?

Yes on all three counts.

And this is the “secret sauce” that has powered Habitat For Humanity for years.

It would be infinitely less enticing to say to people, “The poor in our community need homes. Our organization can build them for a good price. Please make the most generous donation you can today.”

Instead, Habitat sticks a hammer in your chest and says, “The poor in our community need homes.” And we reply by saying, “But I don’t know how to build a home?” And they reply by saying, “We’ll show you how, and we’ll do it with you.”

As we noted in a previous post, volunteers donate 50% more than non-volunteers. What that tells us is that when we crowdsource more than money from our donors, we end up crowdsourcing more money from our donors as well.

This is the most basic lesson of fundraising in modern times and yet perhaps the most resisted. We nonprofit leaders protest that it’s more efficient if donors give us money–rather than their labor or their creativity or their word of mouth–so we can use the money to fund our labor, our creativity, and our advertising that is the cost of not equipping and relying completely our donors to share the cause in their sphere of influence.

What can you crowdsource from your donors other than their money?

Yes, it will require you to fundamentally rework your “supply chain”, your way of approaching the cause, your identity as an organization, and your management structure.

But lest you protest that your cause doesn’t lend itself to this, note that it’s the causes we never dreamed could be crowdsourced–from building homes to microlending in the developing world to large-scale adoption of children–are now the hottest and fastest growing causes.

What cause will be crowdsourced next? I hope the answer is:

Yours.

AA gets a great send-up in a Wired Magazine piece by Brendan Koerner. It’s a lengthy piece but well worth the read for many reasons, not the least of which is Koerner’s discussion of something that still puzzles scientists about AA–and something, I would add, that nonprofit executive directors would do well to heed:

To begin with, there is evidence that a big part of AA’s effectiveness may have nothing to do with the actual steps. It may derive from something more fundamental: the power of the group. Psychologists have long known that one of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems into groups, rather than treat them individually. The first to note this phenomenon was Joseph Pratt, a Boston physician who started organizing weekly meetings of tubercular patients in 1905. These groups were intended to teach members better health habits, but Pratt quickly realized they were also effective at lifting emotional spirits, by giving patients the chance to share their tales of hardship. (“In a common disease, they have a bond,” he would later observe.) More than 70 years later, after a review of nearly 200 articles on group therapy, a pair of Stanford University researchers pinpointed why the approach works so well: “Members find the group to be a compelling emotional experience; they develop close bonds with the other members and are deeply influenced by their acceptance and feedback.”

Note especially that last line as you ask yourself:

• Are you drawing your donors together into groups?
• If so, are those groups focused on giving donors the opportunity to articulate their experience…or to admire and appreciate your experience?

We regularly take groups from around the world to South Korea to participate with North Korean defectors in the projects they’re undertaking in an effort to transform their homeland. They stay in the homes of North Korean defectors in order to hear their stories and live a little of their life. They launch Gospel flyers via giant hot air type balloons into North Korea. They teach in our Underground University that equips NKs to serve the underground NK church in South Korea, China, North Korea, and around the world.

And some of the most intense time these visitors have is in their discussion time with each other between each of the activities.

Earlier this week I got an email from one of our past guests–one who had experienced real trauma on the trip as he was overwhelmed with the reality of NK defector life, so much so that he had dropped out of participating with our organization altogether. He noted offhandedly that he and his wife had just returned from a vacation with another of the families he had met on the trip two years ago.

He then asked me for an update on the situation in NK so that he could post it on his blog and mobilize his network to get involved.

Writes Koerner:

Addiction-medicine specialists often raise the concern that AA meetings aren’t led by professionals. But there is evidence that this may actually help foster a sense of intimacy between members, since the fundamental AA relationship is between fellow alcoholics rather than between alcoholics and the therapist. These close social bonds allow members to slowly learn how to connect to others without the lubricating effects of alcohol. In a study published last year in Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, Tonigan found that “participation in AA is associated with an increased sense of security, comfort, and mutuality in close relationships.”

Makes me wonder whether the most effective reaction strategy for lapsed donors may be a camping trip with a current donor rather than a letter that says, “We haven’t heard from you in a while, and we’re concerned…”