Interesting that two of my favorite blogs did posts this week on the subject of donor experience as the future of fundraising. (See The Agitator’s Offering “Touch” and “Experience” and Donor Power Blog’s Give donors more experience for their giving.)
Mike, however, has a different take.
Mike is a champion I met with yesterday. He shared with me how he is currently comprehensively active (what I call “all in”) with five nonprofits, which he selected after interviewing a number of them four years ago using a guide he received from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence.
He told me that he had an idea in his head of the causes in which he felt he should become involved, and then he interviewed nonprofits according to his criteria, which included his commitment to being directly involved in the cause rather than simply giving to a nonprofit so that they could impact the cause funded by his resources.
So the twin questions are these:
1. Are donors really looking for nonprofits to provide them with experiences? Or, to steal a CS Lewis analogy, when we think that way are we looking at the flashlight beam rather than what the flashlight is illuminating (which in this case is the idea that champions are cause-driven and are looking for nonprofits that can equip them to better impact the causes that draw them)?
2. Is Mike the exception to the rule or the firstfruits of what will soon become the “new normal” for donors-who-are-better-called-champions?
I would answer “yes” to this question, but even if I’m wrong, I would say that those of us in the Christian nonprofit sector ought to be working hard to Make More Mikes.
After all, Ephesians 4:11-13 doesn’t say that God gave you leadership of a ministry so that you can give donors experiences in exchange for their donations. It says that God gave you as a gift to His champions so they could be knit together and built up to full maturity in the cause you both share.
