Transformational Giving

Few things are likely to induce greater growth in our own personal generosity than teaching our children to be generous. That this is a process rather than an event is well understood conceptually but executed less well in practice.

That is, parents who do focus intentionally on teaching their children to be more generous typically do so through a series of discrete moments and events, with the implicit assumption being that children who experience enough discrete encounters with generosity will grow up to be generous people.

This, however, violates a fundamental premise of Transformational Giving, about which we’ve previously written here and here, namely:

P + P + P + P ≠ E

In other words:

Doing a lot of different charitable projects with your children does not in and of itself usher them into a mature lifestyle of generosity. Instead, it ushers them into a lifestyle of doing a lot of different charitable projects.

In Transformational Giving we distinguish between three different kinds (not degrees) of relationship to charitable causes. In brief:

• Participation (P) is project focused, short-term, high-touch, and understandable without external reference to an organization. Child sponsorship, filling Christmas shoeboxes, and giving gifts of Christmas goats to global south countries are all examples of Participation activities.
• Engagement (E) is lifestyle focused. At this level, commitment to a cause extends beyond a series of discrete participation projects and into a significant and mature level of daily awareness and involvement in a cause. Here the person is fundamentally changed through equipping, education, and experience.
• Ownership (O) is replication oriented. Here we understand that it is our responsibility, not a nonprofit’s responsibility to spread a cause [editor's note: that's different than spreading a nonprofit!] in our sphere of influence.

Typically, parents who seek to help their children to be generous do so through P-level activities, for example: ”Kids, let’s buy a turkey to donate at church this Sunday. There are other families who don’t have food to eat like we do, so let’s help out.”

In and of itself, it’s a great move: We absolutely need to begin with P-level activities like this to get our children on the generosity curve in the first place.

The challenge comes when we stay at this level with our children and simply repeat the same activities or bounce from activity to activity. Then we run the risk of inadvertently convincing our children that donating a Thanksgiving turkey is “doing our part”.

Instead, just as we ourselves need to grow from Participation to Engagement to Ownership in causes, we need to help our children be aware of and experience the same growth.

A few ideas in this regard:

• When doing a Participation-level activity with your children, ask yourself ahead of time, “How can I build on this activity in growing them into Engagement in the cause?” For example, the first year you might bring a turkey to church.  The second year you might take your children to a rescue mission to serve a meal. The third year you might invite a poor family to share Thanksgiving dinner with you in your home, and so on. Rather than a series of Participation activities, in other words, seek a progression that helps grow your children from thinking of a cause in terms of seasonal projects into thinking of a cause in terms of a lifestyle.
• Be careful not to simply give your children the “fun” part of the giving project. In other words, having them write the monthly letter to the child you sponsor while you write the sponsorship check does indeed teach them something about charity…but likely not the lesson you really want to teach them.
• Consider matching your children’s giving, perhaps even on a 10 to 1 basis. This is a great way to motivate generosity in adults, and it works no less well with children. All of us are fascinated by our own efforts being multiplied.
• Help your children create their own Eternity Portfolio. Teach them from a young age to give strategically and comprehensively. Teach giving the same way you teach saving and investing. (Oops–I guess we’d better start teaching our children those things, too…)
• Involve your children in deciding where and what percentage of the family resources as a whole are given. You can even set aside part of your family’s giving as “Kid’s choice”. Have them help you determine how much in such a way that they are making trade-offs that genuinely impact them. For example, help them see how eating a meal at home instead of going out for pizza translates into more money to give away. The way children will make generous choices when they grow up is to give them the opportunity to make generous choices as children.
• Be an O to your children’s P…which is a fancy way of saying: walk your children through your own growth in the causes that are important to you. Why did you get involved in a cause in the first place? What have you learned the longer you’ve been involved? When did you experience disappointment in relation to the cause, and why, and what did you do to address that?
• Debrief your P-level family jaunts with E in mind. In other words, after you take the kids down to the homeless shelter to serve a meal, ask them challenging questions. Give them books and articles to read.

Becoming generous takes at least as much intentionality as learning to drive, and yet we devote far less time, resources, attention, and wisdom to the task. By becoming more intentional about growing our children in the grace of generosity, we accrue a great unanticipated benefit:

We become more mature in our own generosity as well.

Biblically, generosity grows when we give as God directs (namely, comprehensively, strategically, and accountably) rather than as our passion or opportunities direct (spontaneously, unpredictably, and emotionally).

This will sound surprising to some, as the virtue of generosity is more typically associated in the popular imagination with the latter set of characteristics than with the former. A person who is truly generous, so the popular imagination conceives, will be delighting himself and others by popping off with surprising acts of generosity as the Spirit moves, like paying for the Egg McMuffin ordered by the guy in the car behind him as he tools through the McDonald’s drive-through. Here the great good is not falling into a pattern like tithing or providing ongoing funding for a project or cause, both of which smack of an unthinking formalism.

In Part I of our series, we sought to confound both the tithers and the anti-tithers by commending the practice of giving away an increasing percentage of one’s income every year.

In this second post, we seek to confound both the spontaneous givers and those who carefully and strategically invest their giving in a single area of great passion.

Fortunately there’s actually a text for that sort of confounding, namely, Alan Gotthardt’s Eternity Portfolio. I’ve previously written about the book, calling it my “if-you-are-heading-to-a-desert-island-soon-and-can-only-take-one-book” book. If you haven’t yet read that previous post, please click on the preceding link and have a go. It’s absolutely no problem–I’ll wait for you.

Dum de dum de dum…

So you’re back? Great. And better equipped to hit your next desert island, I hope.

Gotthardt’s book is not perfect, but it makes a great point:

In the Bible, God doesn’t commend random acts of senseless giving.

Instead, God really does commend specific areas for investment, which Gotthardt organizes along two axes:

• Location: Local, regional, and global
• Allocation: Reaching (evangelism), teaching (discipleship), and ministering to needs (mercy)

Gotthardt also contends that God doesn’t simply commend us for giving generously; rather, He holds us accountable for selecting investments that yield a sizable return. This means, of course, that God is holding us–not only the nonprofit through which we’re giving–accountable for what happened to the money we gave. So when we say, “Well, I give to the homeless guy on the street corner; what he does with the money is between him and God”, we’re missing the biblical giving boat.

But note:

It’s not only the spontaneous givers who miss that boat. It’s those whose invest the majority of their giving deeply and carefully in the cause that most fully aligns with their area of passion.

Such givers say to themselves and others, “I feel like I’m called to direct my giving to evangelism (or discipleship, or mercy ministry). Others are passionate about different areas, and God will move everyone’s hearts so that all of these important causes can be funded.”

This is an expressly unscriptural principle. There’s simply nothing even approximating a warrant for this approach anywhere in the Bible.

It’s the byproduct of our age of professionalization that we idolize efficiency and specialization, even in the area of being fully formed in Christ. When there are areas of Christian growth that we know to be important but that we’re not passionate about or natively good at or interested in, we turn to Paul’s Body of Christ excursus in 1 Corinthians 12 and say, “See? I’m not a part of the body that does evangelism. Instead, I’m in the part of the body that does ushering and preparing the scrambled eggs for the monthly men’s breakfast.”

When we give our time and money only to the area of our passion, we ensure that we remain Peter Pan Christians. We never grow up.

Conversely, God’s call is that not only His Body as a whole but we as individuals grow up into the likeness of Christ. That doesn’t mean that each of us does everything, but it sure does mean that each of us is active locally, regionally, and globally in ministries of evangelism, discipleship, and mercy.

What you do in each of those areas of focus is up to you–there’s certainly a lot of latitude there scripturally.

But that you do something in each of those areas of focus is the second key to giving that is guided by more than a feeling.

As this year draws to a close, why not snag a copy of Gotthardt’s book and endeavor to build your own Eternity Portfolio, paying special attention to filling in the gaps where your passions/experiences/interests have not yet led you?

In doing so, you’ll find something interesting will happen over time:

God’s passions will become your passions, and the things that before didn’t register with you at all will suddenly become inestimably precious.

And that is real growth in generosity.

Several years ago, the concept of random acts of kindness became popular. Commit random acts of kindness, the idea was, and the world will become a better place.

Perhaps the world will become a better place through your random acts of kindness. But odds on, you yourself will not become a consistently kinder person through random acts of kindness any more than you will become a more physically fit person through random acts of exercise.

Developing virtues like kindness and generosity requires consistent, regular discipline under the leading of the Holy Spirit. That’s why we Christians call it discipleship, y’know.

And there are fewer disciplines more effective in developing generosity than making a commitment to give away an increasing percentage of your income each year.

Notice that I said an increasing percentage, not an increasing amount. Christian ministries are struggling today precisely because we failed to understand that distinction.

Check this out:

Over the past fifty years the amount of money Christians have given to churches and missionaries and charities has steadily increased–well, up to this year anyway.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the percentage of income Christians give to charity. Whether we’re in the midst of boom or bust, recession, depression, or progression, bear or bull, over the past fifty years the percentage of income American Christians have given to charity has remained between 2.9 and 3.1%.

That means giving has gone up over the past fifty years only because Christians have steadily been making more money. In other words:

Christian giving in the US is tied to GDP (gross domestic product), not generosity of the heart.

How do we begin to change that?

Well, we can’t teach what we haven’t learned. So we Christian leaders–both pastors and nonprofit ministry leaders–need to grow in the discipline of generosity in order to be able to teach others to do so. A simple–but deeply challenging–way to do that is to make a commitment to increase the percentage of income you give away each year.

My wife and I learned that discipline from a much beloved champion in Billings, Montana named Doc Haggstrom.

Doc married Evie as he was completing his medical education as a urologist. Serving in the military during the Korean War. Financially strapped young couple with promise–you get the picture.

Doc had been raised in a Christian home where tithing (giving away 10% of one’s income) was standard practice. Evie, not so much. So when Doc talked to Evie about tithing from their meager income, she found the whole concept irresponsible.

“We can’t even pay our own bills,” she protested. “What business do we have trying to pay everyone else’s?”

Now Doc could have simply insisted that they were going to tithe, but I suspect that not only did Doc not want to sleep on the couch; he also wanted to help Evie (and himself) grow in the grace of generosity, and he knew that forcing her to tithe was likely to make her more resentful, not more generous.

So Doc proposed that they begin their married life by giving away 5% of their income, and then, every year at the end of the year, they would evaluate whether God had been faithful in providing for them, and, if He had, they would then increase the amount that they gave away the next year by another half a percent.

Evie agreed, and the two did just that. They both passed away a few years ago, at a point when they were giving away the vast majority of their income. They have forever impacted the town of Billings, not to mention everyone in their sphere of influence, with their generosity. I still think about Doc often for so very many different reasons, and his practice lives on in my own family, among others.

There’s nothing magical about the percentage you increase every year. If you don’t like half a percent, try .25%. Some folks, like John Wesley and Tony Campolo, went cold turkey, determining comparatively early in their lives the absolute base amount on which they could subsist and then giving away the rest. Myself, I think it would be hard for me to rightly judge what that base amount ought to be, and as the father of four children who are college and upper high school age, I tend to think that that number rightly and responsibly changes as we grow older.

But all of that personal reflection is secondary to simply making the overall commitment to give away an increasing percentage of your income each year. That’s a decision you can make regardless of your age or position in life or present income. You can make the commitment to do that as you head into 2010, taking the next month and a half to pray about it, run the numbers, bite your fingernails, gird your loins, and git ‘ir done.

With respect to the donors-as-dunderheads pundits about whom I wrote in my previous post, I find that there’s nothing like giving away an increasing percentage of your income every year to make you less inclined to base your giving on your feelings and more inclined to think strategically, prayerfully, and intentionally about what you’re supposed to be accomplishing through your generosity.

But before Holden Karnofsky and others pat me on the back and shake my hand and compliment me for coming to my senses and realizing that this is what they’ve been saying all along, and that such intentionality should lead givers to GiveWell, Charity Navigator, and other charity ranking websites in order to discover which charity they can give through in order to make the biggest difference…

…I’d recommend they wait to shake my hand until after Monday’s post.

I describe this discussion as genuinely uninspiring because it treats donors like dunderheads and nonprofit organizations like diligent and dedicated public servants.

Holden Karnofsky’s blog at GiveWell is a particularly notable stronghold of the donors-as-dunderheads camp.

In his post entitled Perspectives on Donor Irrationality, Holden approvingly highlights the quotes of Jeanne Panossian, who, in commenting on a couple of Holden’s donors-as-dunderheads posts, wrote:

• On donor illusions: ” … It takes extraordinary ethical fortitude to openly tell people how complicated your organization is, normally a donor has made their basic decision in the first 15 to 30 seconds of a conversation …”
• On the administrative expense ratio: “…While I love to talk all day about [my charity’s impact], I have learned it is not worth my while. Waving a flag and telling people how we pay for our paper clips yields me more funds faster …”

Donors yielding up their funds in a 15 to 30 second conversation arising from their frenzied passion for paperclips?

I can honestly say that I have met not one person in my more than twenty years of work in coaching champions for whom that would be even a remotely accurate caricature.

One of Holden’s other commenters heroically takes on the burden of educating the great unwashed donors of the world to better understand the needs and intricate workings of how we nonprofit types must run our organizations as we change the world:

If the donors don’t understand, it’s the responsiblity of the entire non-profit sector to educate them.

Yikes.

Perhaps when donations drop, donor-dunderhead talk rises. After all, if you’re not giving to my organization, what’s wrong with you?

My own experience has been that individuals want to champion causes and be able to effect real change in the world. Ironically, that puts them in competition with many nonprofits, who prefer to champion causes and effect real change in the world but who need individuals’ money to be able to do that. So they have to convince individuals:

• Don’t try this change-the-world stuff at home.
• It’s dangerous work, better left to professionals.
• We’re the best professionals for the job.
• Your giving card is enclosed. Because, after all,
• It’s safer for the world and more effective in general for you to impact causes indirectly, by giving to intelligent, effective types like us.
• By the way, did we mention that we don’t use a lot of paperclips?

Holden wrote a post that shocked me in which he contended that nonprofits focus too much attention on givers. (My experience has been that givers are shocked when nonprofits send them a timely receipt and give them a thank you call, but I digress.)

I suggested to Holden that it was eminently possible–yea verily, even advisable–that nonprofits need to focus more on giver-related measurements, and that such measurements need not–yea verily, even should not–be focused on a giver’s feelings about giving.

(TG Principle 5 says, for example, “A Transformational Giving relationship between a champion and an organization is primarily a peer-level accountability relationship, not merely a friendship or a mutual admiration society.”)

In response to my comment, Holden replied:

Eric: if a charity serves donors by doing a better job on its programs, I’m all for that.

Er…?

Our whole nonprofit sector seems to suffer from a crisis of imagination when it comes to thinking about how we can do a better job coaching our champions about giving. When the best we can do is to suggest that we need to better educate donors about why they should feel good about giving towards overhead and not just program, that’s not good, friend.

Philanthrobloggers are bogged down with the idea that donors give primarily based on friendship, feelings, and flash.

I beg to disagree vehemently with that perspective, while admitting and asserting at the same time that (TG Principle #9) giving is learned, not latent in donors (whom I prefer to call champions). So if givers give to friendship, feelings, and flash…where do ya suppose they learnt that from?

That’s why I’m launching into a new six-part series on this blog entitled, More than a feeling: Six ways to grow (and measure your own growth) in giving that aren’t about feelings. Because ultimately there are not donors and nonprofit organizations but truly only champions seeking to impact causes, and if we have not first learned individually how to grow and measure our own growth in giving and impacting causes, we will not fare so well when it comes our turn to serve at the helm of nonprofits seeking to do that same thing.

Series begins next post. Until then, I’m off to play with my paperclips.

Since this blog is all about Transformational Giving, and since Transformational Giving is all about being comprehensively formed in the image of Christ through what God commends in scripture, and since scripture commends the practice of gleaning (i.e., giving the poor and the alien the opportunity to harvest leftover crop portions), we were excited to see a story about a young gleaner named Corinne Almquist on ABC News.

The story doesn’t quite hit the biblical bullseye in that Corinne Almquist is not herself poor but rather a surrogate who gleans the food herself and then provides it to the poor:

Ideally, people who take free food from a food shelf would help with gleaning. But “that’s really a time issue,” she says. “Many of the people using the food shelf are working multiple jobs and are already struggling to find time to cook and feed their families. They don’t necessarily have time to come out and help pick.”

In an economy with a 10% unemployment rate it seems like there’s room for some further thought on that one, but we’ll leave it alone for now.

What is worth ruminating about for now, however, is that the article says Corrine received a one year fellowship (from Compton Foundation Inc. in Redwood City, California)  to practice gleaning and spread the practice within her sphere of influence, namely, Northwestern Vermont.

Almquist’s quest to introduce gleaning is “quite inspiring,” says Ms. Snow, who is acting as her mentor for the fellowship. “She has tremendous energy and drive and sees her potential to make an impact.”

So my question is this:

What could happen if churches began to see themselves as Transformational Giving foundations, granting fellowships to champions in their congregation with tremendous energy and drive to spread certain practices of biblical giving within their sphere of influence?

At present, churches see themselves as recipients of donations and tend to hire giving consultants (for example, capital campaign consultants) for the purpose of getting congregation members to give more donations.

But imagine a church providing a one-year fellowship to an individual within the congregation who has been faithful to practice a particular kind of Transformational Giving (say, for example, Corinne and her gleaning), for the purpose of enabling that individual to devote themselves full time to growing even deeper in that practice–and to spreading that Transformational Giving practice within the church and the community? (And don’t miss the mentorship component in all of that, by the way.)

Corinne, interestingly, does not appear to have started a nonprofit gleaning organization; instead, she works directly with farmers and food banks, individuals and idealogues, to glean and to encourage others to glean, to offer gleaned food and to encourage others to eat it.

She even includes recipes with the turnips she gleans so that people will know what to use them for.

Once churches overcome their institutional survival instincts (which, while completely sensible, are not completely biblical), they will be set free to set others free through Transformational Giving fellowships. And when they do that, who do you suppose will benefit the most from that practice?

The church, of course.

As TG Principle  7 notes:

In a church-based TG fellowship program, the congregational Corinnes would influence, mentor, and grow the other members of the congregation, with the pastor and other leaders influencing, mentoring, and growing the congregational Corinnes. After all, wouldn’t it make sense for the pastor and other leaders, instead of spreading their time out to try to teach giving to the whole congregation who may or may not be ready, to teach the Corinnes who can then reach many in the whole congregation who can then reach many in the whole congregation–a far more effective progression?

That’s 2 Timothy 2:2 in action…and that’s the basis for the (yet largely untested in modern times) practice of Transformational Giving training and transmission in the New Testament.

When it comes to fundraising, there’s transformational, transactional…and aversional?

Just in time for your year-end fundraising, ThinkGeek is now offering the SnūzNLūz Wi-Fi Donation alarm clock:

The SnūzNLūz uses the very complex psychological phenomemon known as ‘HATRED’. Basically it’s human nature to wish harm upon your enemies. Similarly, it’s human nature not to give your enemies gobs of cash so that they can grow big and dominate the world with their totally wrong, stupid and invalid point of view. ThinkGeek realized that. That’s why everytime you hit the snooze button, the SnūzNLūz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate. The problem of sleeping in is solved.

The New York Times notes that you can select from more than 6,200 hated charities (ThinkGeek suggests PETA, the ACLU, The Wilderness Society, the GOP, Moveon.org, and the American Coal Foundation.)

And it’s easy to setup and use too! Just plug your SnūzNLūz in and either connect it to your network via the RJ45 jack on the back, or via WiFi (WPA supported) if available. Then simply configure via the embedded web browser configuration utility. From here it’s a snap. Simply select your online banking institution from the list of supported banks (currently over 1600 are supported). Supply your login information and then select your favorite HATED charity or non-profit from the included lists (over 6200 currently supported). Then plug in your donation amount per snooze incident ($10 or more), set the time, and alarm, and voila, instant time profit!

For all those who know traditional transactional fundraising has run its course but are reluctant to coach champions transformationally, the third way has officially emerged.

Truth:

“Giving” today is less and less synonymous with “giving to a nonprofit organization”.

This is the challenge for groups like Holden Karnofsky’s GiveWell and Charity Navigator, which dream of a day when donors can consult objective rankings of charities’ real world impact (and, presumably, invest their charitable dollars accordingly).

The challenge, simply put, is that to start with nonprofits as a “given”–the de facto social impact vehicle–is an increasingly dicey proposition.

That’s because there are so many gradations of cause-focused networks today that donation-driven nonprofits are but one of dozens of organizational structures seeking to change the world. Asking the question “Which nonprofit should I give to?” presumes that giving money through a nonprofit is of course the way we impact causes.

But is it?

Check out the Synovate study of people’s changing attitudes towards money in the recession. 80% of the global survey respondents “believed their generation had a responsibility to leave their country better off for the younger generation, even if it involves dramatically altering their lifestyles”.

Before we nonprofits start salivating too much, keep in mind that nothing in that response indicates that those 80% believe that the best way to leave their country better off than they found it is to give to a nonprofit organization.

Astonishingly little research has been done to quantify the amount of giving that happens outside of nonprofit organizations…but in your heart of hearts, do you really doubt that it dwarfs the most optimistic calculations of the money that clinks and clatters through 501(c)(3)s?

Thus, I want to introduce the concept of the “cause cloud”. Drawn from the concept of cloud computing, “cause cloud” is an image that suggests that in the future, the concept of meaning mediated by discrete nonprofit organizations will be seriously outdated, replaced by the notion of individuals, informal associations, and nonprofits clustering around causes and making their impact irrespective of organizational boundaries.

This will happen precisely because individuals are increasingly seeking platforms to impact causes directly and personally, not nonprofits to which they write checks in order to impact causes indirectly.

Check out this description of cloud computing from wikinvest.com, blur your eyes, and see if you can see in it the cause clouds of the future:

Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth. Cloud computing is broken down into three segments: “applications,” “platforms,” and “infrastructure.”

Cause cloud applications? Participation projects.

Cause cloud platforms? Nonprofit organizations.

Cause cloud infrastructure? Participation/Engagement/Ownership charts.

Get ready for the cloud.

While we’ve been hacking through the Engagement underbrush in the last half month’s series of posts, the rest of the philanthroblogger world has been grappling anew with the questions of social impact and personal impact as giving motivators (the four posts here, here, here, and our favorite post here from Katya Andresen ought to get you nicely up to speed, as will Bronfman and Solomon’s new book,  The Art of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan, which is being nicely profiled on Sean Stannard Stockton’s blog).

In short, the question under discussion is this:

• Which is the greater spur to philanthropy–personal feelings or the desire for outcome-based impact–and what if anything can and should be done to change that?

The disdain on the part of many bloggers for personal feelings as the trigger for giving is not hard to detect, which leads to a fascinating follow-up question:

• Do donors rely on personal feelings because they lack outcome-based impact data, and would (and should) they become more oriented to outcome-based motivations for giving if such data were available?

Katya Andresen and I are working on reframing the debate as necessarily a both/and rather than an either/or, in the form of an “impact index” that contends that asks that chart high on both axes, social impact and personal impact, are (and should be) preferred to asks that chart high on one or the other. Perhaps I am foolishly optimistic, but I take that to be such a straightforward and simple proposition that I think we’ll be able to carry the day once the terminology dust settles.

But that’s only one side of the coin.

The other–and, in my view, much more intriguing–side of the coin isn’t related to giving motivation at all. This second coin side is all about the role of the individual and the nonprofit in relation to the cause, and here the issues aren’t terminological at all.

The question at issue on this reverse side of the coin:

• How can individuals make the greatest impact on a cause–by being trained to impact the cause directly, with the nonprofit serving as impact platform/convening mechanism, or by impacting the cause indirectly, giving money to the nonprofits judged by experts as the most effective in making a difference?

My suspicion is that most of the people involved in the personal versus social impact debate will find this question preposterous and even spurious. The consensus of our age (among charitable foundations and nonprofit execs, anyway) is that nonprofits impact causes and donors support nonprofits. The only question being discussed is whether, in the end, donors are flibbertigibbets or hard-nosed impact calculators who will vote responsibly for the best nonprofits with their giving dollars.

Such a view is hardly flattering to individuals. And it’s far too kind to nonprofits.

As I’ve noted previously, we live in a day when a multitude of examples exist of individuals and informal networks of amateurs beating the pants off of big, credible nonprofit organizations when it comes to making a deep, direct, lasting, measurable, critically important impact on the cause. The phenomenon has reached the mainstream so much so that even FEMA has to acknowledge it:

The critical role of local organizations and their ability to reach community members in need cannot be ignored. While these small nonprofits and faith-based organizations do not have the resources for national public service announcements and billion dollar fundraising campaigns, they need access to some of the donated dollars that flow into the coffers of larger organizations able to broadcast commercials across the country. FEMA might consider exploring ways that donated dollars can be split proportionally or that even a small percentage (5-10%) can be used to support the important work of local organizations.

Distributed computing–”in which anyone with an Internet connection can participate and in which results benefit everyone”–is such a well established phenomenon in the technology fields that it’s simultaneously surprising and disappointing that the concept of distributed causing–in which individuals join causes rather than just giving to them (as “donors”)–is little discussed in philanthropic circles.

As Angela Eikenberry points out in her must-read book, Giving Circles, nonprofits have become exponentially more formal in their efforts to tackle causes in a matter of but a few generations; consequently, they are more and more exclusive, less and less participatory…and less and less democratic. They no longer even feel to need to justify their causal elitism; causes and cures are, you know, so complicated that the heavy lifting is so obviously better left to the professionals that the role of so-called “donors” is whittled down to little more than reading newsletters, embracing new tools (created by the nonprofit sector itself, of course) to better judge which nonprofit does the best and most efficientwork..and then writing a check.

Eikenberry’s killer observation is this:

• Voluntarism is now viewed less as a duty of the citizen…and more as a “privilege granted by philanthropic agencies to those who accepted their discipline.”

Ouch, do we need to hear that. Let the games continue.

We’ve spent more than half a month now on posts detailing the Engagement level of Transformational Giving (TG). And E deserves every bit of the attention–it truly is the heart of TG.

I’m going to give the subject a rest for now until we teach it in even greater detail in our free January Mission Increase Foundation workshop, after this concluding post courtesy of World Gospel Mission’s Tim Rickel which details one of the most vital and yet least well known P to E moves in US history:

Stephen Mather got 15 wealthy industrialists together—prominent publishers, politicians, industry leaders, and railroad  builders—and took them on a long camping trip in the wilderness out west and called it The Mather Mountain Party. They stood before stunning beauty and reflected on the amazing treasure God has given us in our wilderness places. They saw where people had trashed an area camping out, and Stephen had them work together to clean it up. They dined on 5 star cuisine prepared by top chefs and served on linen tablecloths under a canopy of trees or next to a beautiful wilderness view throughout the whole trip. At the end he gathered them together. He told them that now they owned this cause. That this wasn’t the end, it was the beginning, of using their influence to move congress to preserve these spaces for generations to come. In the commentary on the series, one man says, “He didn’t preach to the choir, he took people who didn’t even go to the church and showed them the wilderness beauty and urged them to take up the cause.”

Talk about CMS [Champion Migration Strategy--WGM's term for Transformational Giving] in action. There’s some reference material for you, no charge. Does CMS work? Go to a national park!

The perfect P to E move, Tim–thanks for a fitting conclusion to our Notes in the key of E series. May the Lord bless you with a vacant RV space during your next camping trip!