We began this week with a disconcerting fundraising analogy from Fund Raising Success magazine.
I never imagined we’d find an even worse analogy to top that by week’s end, but in fact we have one!
Our pal Joe Milligan at the Springs Rescue Mission received the following astonishing fundraising advice by email from a Christian college fundraiser (truly, we Christians corner the market on un-Christian ways of thinking about fundraising) the same day he attended the Transformational Giving seminar in Colorado Springs:
LIONS, MICE & ANTELOPE
A lion can actually capture, kill and eat a field mouse.
However, it turns out that the energy to do that is greater than the caloric content of the mouse. So, if a lion spent his whole day hunting and eating field mice… it would slowly starve itself to death!
A lion cannot live on mice. Lions need antelope. Antelope are big. While they take more speed and strength to capture and kill, once killed, they provide a huge feast for a lion and its pride.
A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope.
The difference between mice and antelope is really, really important relative to Major Gifts!
If you’re spending all of your time and energy going after ‘field mice’… your short-term rewards are a feeling of activity and maybe even accomplishment. However, in the long run, you’re going to die.
Do you spend your day chasing mice or hunting antelope???
So here we have the following transactional fundraising analogy:
Fundraiser:Lion::Donor:Mouse (or Antelope, if it’s a high net worth donor you’re disemboweling)
Um… Have you ever seen video of a lion chasing, snaring, and then gorging itself on an antelope, flinging its prey’s limbs in all directions as blood flows like Hawaiian Fruit Punch?
And we wonder why people get a leeeeeeetle nervous around fundraisers.
(Alternative comment from MIF’s Tracy Nordyke: ‘Did you notice that in the analogy both the mouse and the antelope end up dead?’)
In honor of the completion of this month’s day-long seminars on Transformational Giving in Korea and across the western US, I offer the following lion/antelope video clip as a prophetic vision of a future in which fundraiser/predators are in for a BIG surprise from their TG counterparts…
…and where antelopes and mice triumph in the end!
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