Let Generosity Flow

What do a nonprofit hospital in Indiana, an evangelistic Christian ministry in Central America, and a legal team trying to root out the sex trade in Thailand all have in common? More than you think.

A few years ago, I wrote a short book titled: The Business of Generosity: How Companies, Nonprofits, and Churches are Working Together to Deliver Remarkable Good.  One of the things I learned was that generosity can be both an individual attribute and an organizational value, and it can thrive in just about any channel with the help of certain insights, guidelines, and collective right practices. 

Here are three common best practices I discovered that are galvanizing the world of generosity, and they’re still true today. 

1. Who’s the hero?

It’s easy for big donors, celebrity spokespeople, or the leaders of businesses and nonprofits to attract the spotlight of attention toward themselves. Look at me! Look at what we’re doing!

But the hero isn’t the do-gooder; the hero is the one who is the object of the good that is being done. 

Smart leaders shape the narrative of their organizations so that the focus isn’t on an organization doing good but on the recipient of that good. If an organization tries to make itself the protagonist of the narrative, they will lose their generosity cred.

Of course, if yours is a company engaging in generosity marketing, or a nonprofit hoping to raise your profile, you want some attention for yourself. And here’s where it gets dicey. You’ll need to tread carefully. It is hard to have two people on the stage in the spotlight at the same time. 

Remember how AT&T handled the original TOMS Shoes commercial a decade ago? I loved those original commercials. Did you realize you don’t hear the AT&T company name mentioned until twenty-eight seconds into the thirty-second commercial?

You should not be the center of the stage in the story of generosity.

2. Organic tastes better.

Every generous organization should make sure that the generosity fits comfortably with the organization’s ID.

Attempts to do good that are ill-fitting or self-serving create a bad taste in the public’s mouth. But if a generosity program is organic to the organization, it is more likely to survive and thrive. The issue is not is it real but is it core? In other words, the generosity work needs to be core to the organization’s mission, model, product lines, or service. Vaseline, Brita, Dove, Clorox, and many other companies have figured out that organic good works best.

Established companies that genuinely want to do good, as opposed to just looking good, can do it, but it may require some retooling of their ways. For every Warby Parker who has generosity as part of their startup DNA, there’s a Mars Candy that has put greater and greater emphasis on generosity as the years go by. It took transformation, time, and effort, but they’re doing it. 

Don’t just make generosity an artificial add-on to your company service and products. Make it a part of your reason for being.

3. Collaboration.

Some institutional leaders are little more than business bullies. Some organizations are battlefields for turf wars fought both inside and outside the walls of the company.

Internally, the spirit of competition can be a good thing. But it can also be a devil of division. In some companies, promotion comes through a kind of social Darwinism where predator vanquishes prey—I win, you lose.

I firmly believe we have lost the symphonic tone of collaboration today in most workspaces. The pursuit of competitive advantage has replaced working with others
to accomplish a greater good. Eventually, an unhealthy independence can eat through a company’s culture. But just as truly, rebuilding a collaborative strategy can make a company succeed while contributing to God’s process of social renewal.

Collaboration is a big idea to help solve many of the ills of our globe. For example, the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships bring together the government of Botswana, the Gates Foundation, and pharmaceutical giant Merck to enhance Botswana’s national response to AIDS.   

Collaboration doesn’t cost much. It’s usually not hard to do. Just about any organization of any size, with any type of social focus, can do it.

An African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.”

Conclusion

If there is ever a time of the year that pulls our attention to generosity, it is the holiday season. This time of the year is one extended manifestation of generosity. Since we are all recipients of generosity, we should also be the givers of generosity. Don’t let tight-fisted Scrooge take over your heart and mind during this holiday. Let generosity flow.

The 7 Enemies of Thanksgiving

We all have family Thanksgiving stories that fall on the scale between funny and sad and everything in between. Thanksgiving is pretty easy to mess up. Jimmy Fallon has a traditional segment on Thanksgiving fails, all of which are funny and fairly minor.

The true Thanksgiving collapse is when we celebrate the day but continue the very practices that destroy ongoing gratitude in our lives. And the lack of gratitude in our lives is harmful to our soul, not to mention our workplace.

So what keeps us from gratitude? Here’s a list of seven destroyers of thanksgiving. Check out this list and evaluate yourself. Which one empties the gratitude out of your heart? Or never lets gratitude get there in the first place?

1. Narcissism—I’m starting at the top. Narcissism is the king of all thanksgiving destroyers. Self-focused people are too busy considering their own desires and goals to recognize the litany of gifts that have been given to them—by God or by others.
2. Unbridled appetite—You may be thinking I thought Thanksgiving was all about unbridled appetites? Pass the gravy. I’m not talking about that kind of appetite. Grateful people are marked by contentment. Ungrateful people are the opposite. Their ambition and/or their greed makes them unable to say, “enough is enough.” And if you’re too busy looking for more, you never say thank you for what you have.
3. Disregard for the small and intangible—This problem is tied to an unbridled appetite, but I want to draw it out because it’s not just about being able to say “enough.” You need to be able to rejoice in what the world skips over, like the point this Charlotte, NC, church made. If everything has to be bigger and better, we’ll never be grateful. The most obvious way this appears is when valuing “stuff” over people.
4. Captured by the consumptive culture—Our culture has conditioned us to buy, consume, and discard. The average American throws out four pounds of trash daily. While that number is unsustainable, what’s truly eye-opening is that Americans make up 5% of the world’s population but we create 50% of its solid waste. Our ability to consume and discard is unlike anything in history. That consumption mentality preaches that anything I want is mine, and if I think I’m entitled to something, I’m not grateful for it.
5. Separated memory—Want to destroy gratitude? Forget the past. This article calls thanksgiving a “spiritual discipline,” and says that a good memory is key to developing gratitude. When I focus on the now, I forget the past. But when I consider the past, I recall blessings God gave me—that relationship, that opportunity, that first job, that second chance—and I recall times when I didn’t have what I do now.
6. Upward comparison—We tend to compare ourselves with people who have more—people in the stage of life who have slightly better cars or vacations or houses. Why not get in the habit of comparing ourselves with people who have less? Not only would that make us grateful, but it might make us more generous, as Cindy Jones-Nyland of the non-profit Heifer International writes.
7. Lack of vulnerability—If you don’t appear to have needs, you have placed yourself in the role of provider/giver/helper/leader. If you’re always in that role, it’s tempting to put your trust in yourself. Or said another way: you never have to say thanks to anyone for anything.

G.K. Chesterton said, “When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take things with gratitude.”

Conclusion
It’s interesting that we have to have a whole holiday dedicated to Thanksgiving. We don’t have to have an “Asking Day.” Why? Because we don’t have to be reminded to ask for things. But we do have to be reminded to say thank you.

Someone recently asked me if most of my prayers were more about “Please help me or give me this or that” or “Thank You for whatever”. We have to be reminded to say “Thank you.”

Thanksgiving is hard to do (as Edward Gibbon said, “Revenge is profitable. Gratitude is expensive”) but it’s easy to fake, especially on the fourth Thursday of November.

Doing the hard work of building a grateful spirit pays huge dividends, though. And avoiding these thanksgiving destroyers keeps you on the right side of the gratitude orchard. You’ve got to keep tilling the soil, but you’re giving gratitude a chance to grow.