Charitable giving comes in many forms. Cash donations and hands-on volunteerism are only two.

I have mentioned before the Sonlight Rice Bag Project. The repercussions of that project continue to reverberate in my mind and heart.

This morning, I woke up with the idea that I should write to some people with whom our family business competes. Not about our business, per se, but, rather, about opportunities we–both they and we–have to influence our customers for good.

This is a slightly edited version of the letter I sent.

I hope maybe it can encourage you, too, to expand your concept of what you have to offer the charities of your choice.

Whether you are a business owner or not; whether you have a large audience or not, What you say influences others. May I encourage you to use that influence . . . for good?

Dear D____ & M____:

I remember, D____, how you visited us several years ago and mentioned y’all’s commitment to support missions. For some reason, that comment popped into my head a couple of weeks ago as I spoke with our representative from Mission India about what Sarita and I would do this coming year to follow up on the “Sonlight Rice Bag Project” we did with them last year. I thought maybe I could encourage you-all to consider doing something similar with Mission India while we move on to another project with another agency. . . . If Mission India wasn’t reasonable, I thought, perhaps our story (of what we did and how we did it) might be encouraging and thought-provoking the you. And even if none of those things were true, perhaps you might have some thoughts or insights that you could offer to help or encourage us as we seek to honor the Lord through our missions and charitable giving. (If you go to my StrategicInheritance.com website, you will see that this–the idea of mutual encouragement–is actually a broader theme of my life right now.)

Anyway.

With the thoughts above in mind, this morning I visited your Missions page at _________.com and the ______________ PDF letter to which you link from that page. Clearly, you are doing some really great work; you have chosen a specific focus; and, based on that focus, I can see that a potential partnership with Mission India is out of the picture. BUT . . .

It strikes me that there are relatively few of us in the American Christian homeschooling movement who really have much of a vision for the impact of the gospel around the world. If we can encourage each other or offer support in these endeavors, then I hope we can and will!

Specifically, if you have never thought of these things before (or even if you have!), I thought the following ideas might inspire you in some good way . . .

• Offer your customers a “matching grant challenge” (“We have committed to match your donations dollar-for-dollar up to $______.” –Or some such). As one of our daughters has said, “That’s a ‘deal’ that’s hard to ignore!”

  Here’s how we promoted such an offer to our customers last year. (The link will send you to an uncompressed PDF of the hard-copy letter we mailed–yes, snail mail!–to our Sonlight list of customers who had purchased in the last couple or three years.)

• Incorporate some kind of incremental target(s) that would not only pique your customers’ interest, but their children’s interest, and that would lend itself/themselves to educating these children about the ministry opportunities that have so gripped your hearts.

  I expect you want to multiply your vision to future generations, not merely call people to come alongside you. So, again, I’d like to encourage you to take a look at the matching grant letter for the Rice Bag Project and, then, the “Weekly Activities” link at the Mission India Sonlight Rice Bag Project page . . . a link that will take you to a page with links to all kinds of collateral materials MI developed to help “get the word out”–not only about the project, but about life in India, about the spiritual needs, about the value of the work we (Sonlight and Mission India) were asking participants in the project to support, etc.

• Give vision-building gifts to your customers. (We have done that several times through the years, usually at Christmas. One year it was a CD full of narrated stories about Gospel outreach among Muslims; one year a DVD set called The Cross – Jesus in China; this past Christmas we sent a CD with 22 stories of the impact of Bible translation among people groups who had never, previously, heard the Scriptures–stories narrated by Morgan Jackson of Faith Comes by Hearing . . .
• Possibly create a forum on which you and your customers could interact about these kinds of interests. . . .
• I would like to call your attention to the fact that we “touch” our customers not only via the web and/or emails, but by hard-copy snail mail and physical gifts that they (and their children) can hold in their hands. And the educational material doesn’t come “just once,” but is “dribbled out” over the school year. –The Rice Bag Project over an eight-week period so participants were encouraged many times through those weeks. The final appeal, too (for people to send in their donations) came in the form of–I don’t remember exactly, but it was at least four or five–emails.

  I point these things out because . . . it is extremely useful to “touch” your customers multiple times, and not only by one medium but by many. . . . These create deeper and lasting impressions. . . .

If you would like to discuss these ideas, or anything related–please know this is a real passion of mine (see my StrategicInheritance.com blog as well). If I can be a help or encouragement to you in any way, I would love to “partner” with you in helping to advance the Kingdom.

Sincerely, In Christ,

John Holzmann, Co-Owner
Sonlight Curriculum, Ltd. . . .

I have shared our story about the Rice Bag Project with many people, including a number of fund-raising professionals. One of these latter people said, “Do you know how difficult it is for me to get a donor to open his or her Rolodex for me? –Pretty much impossible! So the value of your making your customer list available to an agency, as it were, is really quite amazing.”

And I think I’d like to point out that, though functionally Mission India received the benefit of having access to our mailing list, we actually never gave them access to the list. They never saw the least part of our list. We wrote to our list. We controlled the letter. It was our letter to our own list. And the only way Mission India ever got access to anyone’s information was if and/or when the customer him-or herself contacted Mission India.

Vice-versa, the only way Sonlight could discover if someone had signed up with Mission India or donated to the program was if they–the customer–told us or sent something to Mission India that granted Mission India permission to reveal their identity publicly, . . . and then we might have been able to figure out who a customer was if we had paid close enough attention.

In other words, there was a complete firewall between the two organizations.

I want to emphasize this “firewall” because it also placed us in a rather unique position vis-à-vis Mission India.

Suppose we had “simply” offered a standard matching grant: “We would like to give up to $100,000 in a dollar-for-dollar match.” In that circumstance, Mission India would have approached potential donors, would have written the letter, and would have had a final control over what, exactly, the appeal letter said. In this case, because it was our letter, sent at our expense, to our customer base, we had total and final control of the message. As it turned out, but found the task overwhelming because I don’t have any experience writing fundraising letters. So I sent my half-finished rough draft to Mission India (so they could have some idea of the general direction I would have preferred to follow) and let them do the real heavy lifting of writing the first draft.

They sent it back to me for Sarita’s and my approval. We felt they had missed several key items that needed to be included in the letter, and, of course, it was not written in the “voice” that we would have preferred. So we engaged in a rather significant rewrite and sent it back.

It required two or three further iterations with them correcting errors in our understanding of what we were really going to be offering, and us placing words and what we believe to be a more effective form, but, ultimately, it was our letter to send as we decided we wanted to to send it.

That placed us in a significant position of control! We said what we wanted to. (Now, partially because of our character, we were committed not to send anything that Mission India, itself, would not approve. But the point is: if push came to shove, both of us knew we–the people on the Sonlight Curriculum side–had final say over what the letter would say and how it looked.)

Similarly, the “firewall” meant that Mission India, itself, also had full flexibility to do what it felt it needed to do once someone had signed up with them.

Now. The two organizations interacted a lot throughout the entire campaign. I think I invested about 10 hours a week, on average, observing what they were doing and saying, and giving them feed back and input I thought might be useful to them. And I think it says something about the character of Mission India that they were wide open to our input as well.

Indeed, all the way through, they openly thanked me for my input. They knew that I knew our customers better than they did. So they appreciated my input on certain things that might possibly enable them to communicate more effectively to this unique group of people.

As I said a few months ago, by offering your unique skills, abilities, and resources–far beyond cash–you can become involved in some truly strategic breakthroughs for a charity of your choice.

Today’s letter is “merely” an extension of this idea.

How might you expand your influence for good? To whom might you communicate? What will you say?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

 |  Email This Post  |  Print This Post  |  Subscribe to It!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under charity, giving, philanthropy, resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.