I’m glad I began my career before Twitter really existed.
Deep in the archives of my hard drive, I’ve stumbled across more than one Powerpoint presentation that makes me eyes roll. Recently, I found one I used with a church about the superior effectiveness of HOPE International’s work compared to our peers. One slide included a bar chart illustrating how much it “costs” HOPE and our peers to serve one person per year. Of course, HOPE came out the clear bargain winner in contrast to our peers fighting human trafficking, promoting child sponsorship and developing clean water.
It’s tough to know where to start in critiquing my own approach.
Let’s start with what likely undergirded my decision to make this presentation: I believed it was my job to quantifiably prove HOPE’s superiority. No matter whether that’s possible—more on that in a second—my first fallacy was assuming it was my job to make the point. In our culture, we excuse some forms of peacocking. We expect politicians to flaunt their records. We applaud musicians and athletes who declare their own excellence. But for most of history and in most areas of life, self-declaring our preeminence is off-putting.
And yet, there I stood. In my memory, and I hope I was more nuanced, my remarks went something like, “As you can see in this chart, HOPE is ten times more effective than these wiener organizations.”
There’s nothing wrong with talking about why we love the work we do. There’s nothing wrong with sharing the ways our teammates have innovated, nor about the ways God has provided and the lessons we’ve learned. But there’s everything wrong with telling everyone how awesome we are. Bragging should never get a free pass, even if it’s for a good cause.
I’m not saying nonprofit leaders shouldn’t quantify our impact, assess our work’s effectiveness, and invite the critiques of charity evaluators. I’m just saying we shouldn’t be pompous jerks about it.
Then there’s the claim itself—that Christ-centered microfinance was a better dollar-for-dollar investment than other types of charity. For a while, I thought this tack was novel. I sure wish it were. But nonprofits regularly employ this chest-puffing approach to tell our organizations’ stories. I’ve visited enough nonprofit galas and web sites to know it’s commonplace. Nonprofit leaders play nice when we’re in the same room, but get us in front of a room of philanthropists? Well, we just aren’t afraid to tell them about the many ways our approach trumps our peers.
Doctoral students have written tens of thousands about how to best assess nonprofit effectiveness. I won’t try and summarize that here. But what is obvious is my approach was, at best, apples-to-oranges, and perhaps apples-to-fences. Making comparisons like mine demand far more nuance and far less naïve exuberance.
But even if my claim was true—there’s absolutely no way of ever knowing—is that a ranking HOPE wants to win? If scholar Jeremy Beer is right, charities winning at efficiency are often losing at love. In an effort to prove effectiveness and rank how logical it is to support our cause, are we at risk of losing the heart and soul of why we do what we do? The perfect example of love and service to humanity was one that made no logical sense on the surface. Frankly, a lot of what we see in the life and teaching of Jesus rubs against pure rationality.
If I was to go back and share some advice with my younger self, I would frame my advice this way:
First, people care deeply about the why. We want to know why leaders do what we do. We’re interested in how we go about our work, but only if we first know why it matters. When we skip the why and talk about the how—as I did—it is like we’re providing directions but never sharing the destination.
Second, people rally around collaborators. Americans give away somewhere around three percent of their gross incomes. I’m quite certain the approach I employed would do little to move that needle. Instead, it would simply mean HOPE’s slice of the three percent might grow marginally larger. Leaders who collaborate, though, have a shot at actually increasing that pie. Leaders who link arms with others and celebrate the importance of their peers can cast a vision big enough to draw people more fully into the big problems facing our world and more into opportunities for us to respond to them.
Finally, I’d encourage me to remember the world is not mine to save. Posturing like my organization with our amazing methods had the market cornered on brilliance shined a light on me. In so doing, it did not shine a light on the one who is the creator of all good ideas and the one who understands more fully the concerns of humanity more intimately than I ever will.
When I gave that talk seven years ago, Twitter was thankfully still in its infancy. Nobody tweeted a picture of those embarrassing Powerpoint slides. I’m done trying to elevate HOPE at the expense of other great organizations. It was and is a flawed strategy—and it’s a lot less fun than celebrating our peers for the wonderful work they do.
