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Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention has just come out with an new Nonprofit Tagline Report that is awesome!

I’m still digesting the extensive report, but she does a great job of distilling a lot of research into taglines into easy-to-understand concepts and lists.

For example, her   include:

• Must convey your nonprofit’s or program’s impact or value;
• Must be eight words or less; and
• Should clearly complement and/or clarify your organization’s name
  without duplicating it.

I’ve worked with a lot of groups that don’t have taglines. After all, in some ways Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, Campaign for Labor Rights, and East Timor Action Network are almost taglines in themselves. They convey the essence of the organization.

But Nancy’s report does have me thinking that maybe a tagline would be useful to answer some of the next questions: Labor rights in the U.S. or globally? Why work for peace in an interfaith context? What action does East Timor need?

I’m sure after I read her report I’ll have plenty of ideas about how we can help people undertand what we do and why we’re unique.

As we discuss the importance of focusing on transformation, we need to remember that it happens one step at a time.

I was reminded of this listening to the Fundraising is Beautiful podcast. Jeff Brook and Steven Screen remind listeners to do one thing at a time.

They point out that many fundraising efforts fail when they try to accomplish too much at once. They try to educate, inspire grassroots lobbying, show impact, fundraise, raise awareness and more all in one communication. Jeff and Steven point out that when you try to do all that at once, you usually fail at everything.

Instead, they recommend doing one thing at a time. If it’s a fundraising letter, focus the letter on raising funds. Then you can follow up with showing impact or educating in the newsletter.

A key part of their argument is that you have a relationship with your members, so over time you can work on your laundry list of goals, but it has to happen one action at a time.

So while I’m championing the importance of transformation, likewise transformation happens one step at a time.

You can’t transform someone from a passive bystander to an uber-activist in one step; and you’ll probably scare them away if you try.

So plan each action with an eye toward transformation and recognize you’ll get there one step at a time.

Personal transformation and congregational transformation are important in themselves, but they aren’t what get me up in the morning.

I see them as part of building a broader social transformation.

Let me give you an example.

In 2006, the minimum wage in Michigan was just $5.15 per hour. That’s ridiculous! There’s no way you can pay the bills with a wage that low.

The state legislature wouldn’t do anything to raise the wage, so ICPJ joined with a statewide campaign to put the question to the voters.

It didn’t take long to see that we were serious and that we would get this on the ballot and win. So the folks in Lansing who once opposed the wage increase realized that they would rather have a wage increase than to have the voting booths filled with low-wage workers thinking about which candidate will be best for them.

So Lansing passed a wage increase.

We didn’t even have to take it to the ballot box.

We won!

Now low-wage workers have a bit more in their pockets to pay for food, housing, and health care. It was one more step toward justice.

It was one example of social transformation.

[Note: this is one in a series of blog posts dealing with the importance of transformation iN social change organizing]

Generally when I review an action or event, I use a simple plus/delta evaluation: what went well and what could we change (delta is the mathematical sign for change, it’s more pro-active than saying plus/minus).

In You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, the authors offer a more elaborate reflection tool. It asks:

• What did we plan for?
• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What were the key events?
• What assumptions did we make?
• What have we learned?

What I like about this model is that it puts more emphasis on not just learning from what happened at the event, but also learning and refining the planning that brought us to the event. It goes deeper.

The authors also point out that it is vital to include different people in this review. You will find very different answers to the question, “what happened” depending on who you ask.

Will I actually use this evaluation system?

I don’t know.

Sometimes it can be a struggle to get an all-volunteer group to do any review at all. I will copy these questions into my Palm so that I can have them ready and try them out for a future event (if I remember that they are there).

Last Saturday at the Michigan Policy Summit, Jim Hightower drove home the power of story and narrative when he reminded us that, “Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘I have a policy paper.’”

Nonetheless, I heard plenty of statistics that day.

And I’ve forgotten them all.

But I do remember the story that Amy Goodman told about a military family who lost their son to a suicide after he came home from Iraq.

It was a spellbinding story, you knew where it was going when she talked about his obsession with weapons after he came home from the war, and how his parents had to keep sharp objects away from him.

You knew where it was going when she told about how he asked his father to hold him one night.

You knew where it was going when she described his father coming home to a quiet house.

And then she told how his father found that his son had hanged himself in basement, and the last time he held his son was cutting him down from the rafter.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forget that story.

I also remember the story of the mom whose toddler was sick over the holidays. Many babies have times when they don’t keep food down, so for the first few days she didn’t go to the hospital.

By New Year’s Eve, though, the child was still sick, and Mom knew it was time to go to the doctor. There she found out her child had tried to become a human piggy bank, and a quarter was lodged in the toddler’s esaphogus.

She didn’t go into the details of the New Year’s Day surgery, but I’m certain she was terrified. She did tell us about the bureaucratic nightmare she faced when the bills came due.

You see, even though she had insurance, she was changing insurance as of January first, so her carriers and the hospital fought to try to get each other to cover the bills.

I don’t remember how much the anesthesiologist cost, but I do remember how hard it was on this woman to go through that. And even if I don’t know the dollar amount, I know there was a lot of wasted money as people fought to get someone else to cover the bill.

There is a time and place for statistics. They are important for analyzing alternatives.

But if you want something that people will remember, don’t give them a factoid, give them a story.

In Amy Goodman’s opening remarks at the Michigan Policy Summit, she told the story of some students in New York and their fight against censorship.

These drama students had developed a play that enacted soldiers’ words about the the war in Iraq. They learned their lines, built the sets, but their principal told them they could not perform it at school.

Why not? “The play is too controversial when it deals with war.”

Of course, artists make lousy slaves, so when the New York theater community heard about this censorship, they rallied to the students’ support. The students got to present on a major New York stage, and the play got more exposure than they ever would have at their high school.

Why did this strike me so much?

Because right now my organization is organizing to support the National Religious Action Campaign Against Torture “Banners Across America” campaign to invite houses of worship to display banners that simply say, “Torture is wrong.”

One local pastor declined, saying “we don’t want to hang controversial banners on the Church.”

When students are denied opportunities to provoke discussion of the most important social issue of today and when pastors are afraid to declare “torture is wrong,” because it is too controversial, we live in dire times. We live in a time when we need to fight for the soul of America.

I don’t mean that the way that Billy Graham means that, calling for a religious conversion.

Rather, I mean a fight for our conscience. A fight for our values. A fight for open discussion.

We need a fight to live in a nation when it is a matter of course that students discuss social issues.

We need to fight for a world in which saying “torture is wrong” is controversial, and that we don’t even have to worbanner because the belief that torture is wrong runs so deep and is so uncontroversial that even the thought of U.S. sponsorship of torture is inconceivable.

For some things, there should be no controversy.

I just finished A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. I picked it up expecting to be entertained, and I was.

What’s not to like about a modern-day germ-phobic secular Jew from New York with obsessive-compulsive disorder trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year? He even stones an adulterer (but since the Bible doesn’t specify, he uses a very small stone).

What I didn’t expect was to relate to his spiritual experience.

At the end, A.J. says:

I’m no a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.

I fully agree with Jacobs’ experience here. I do not know for sure if there is a God or not, but I do know I have experienced the sacred.

What’s more, I have also found the Quakerism, Christianity, and the Bible to be tools to help me understand Truth and to experience the Sacred.

And that is enough for me

Another issue ICPJ needs to address is how much we should focus.

I learned from splitting wood that you need to put your effort into one thing at a time if you’re going to succeed.

Right now we’re putting our effort into seven things.

Do we have enough focus to split any of them open?

It’s a thorny issue. I’m not sure our Hunger volunteers would all join up on our health care campaign if we decided to narrow our focus. We’d likely loose some people.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if one-seventh effort will ever be enough to get our Latin America Task Force to get Rep. Dingell to stop supporting the SOA.

So do we narrow our focus, or do support efforts toward justice no matter how diffuse we may be?

Do we split one piece of wood? Or do we let 100 flowers bloom?

When I grew up, we heated our home with wood heat. That meant I spent a lot of time with my dad hauling, splitting, and stacking wood.

Now, the thing about splitting wood is you have to do it one piece at a time. You set up a chunk of wood, swing the splitting maul, and put all your force into splitting one piece of wood.

One piece of wood.

But what does splitting wood have to do with organizing?

1. Swing for all your worth: You don’t get anywhere with half-measures. If you’re gonna swing that maul, swing like you mean it. Likewise, if you’re gonna work on an issue, be prepared to put you back into it and your heart into it and make it worth it.
2. Keep at it: Sometimes you didn’t split the wood on your first swing. Sometimes you missed the seam that would split the log. Sometimes you just plain missed. The thing to do was to pick up the maul and swing again. Likewise, we won’t win every campaign on the first try. We need to be ready to give it another go.
3. But know when to quit: Some chunks of wood were so nobby and twisted they just wouldn’t split. Those were the ones to set aside. Use them for bonfires. See if more drying time softened them up. Don’t spend all day trying to split the impossible log when there’s a whole pile that will split waiting for you. In community organizing, we need to know when to say enough, it’s time to work on another issue or another campaign.
4. And most important, you can only split one log at at time. It doesn’t work if you try to tap 10 pieces of wood ten times.The Onceler’s “super axe hacker” that “chops down four truffula trees in one smacker” may work for Dr. Seuss, but I never had that luxury. Likewise, when we’re working on issues, we need to be able to put enough umph into each of them that can split them open. Otherwise, we’re just going through the motions.

One of the big questions facing ICPJ is how to deal with generation change between 60s and 70s-era activists and younger activists (more on that later).

That’s  why, effective immediately, I’m observing a zero-tolerance policy for generation bashing in activist circles.

No longer will I silently sit by as people dismiss younger generations for not living up to some mythic standard of 60s anti-draft organizing or bemoan the “quiescence” of today’s students.

Nor will I tolerate people upbraiding older generations for being out of touch or selling out (though I hear much less of this).

If I hear such generation bashing, my plan is to call the person on it. If they don’t stop, I’ll give them a simple choice: stop the bashing to continue the meeting without me (hmm, a similar policy could work well for sexist, racist, homophobic, or classist comments; though I rarely get these is activist settings).

Why the hard line?

1. I’m sick of the bashing (and I’m sick right not too, so probably especially grumpy);
2. the bashing ignores generational differences such as the placating effect of increased affluence, post-Watergate  cynicism, the lack of a draft, and technology change;
3. the bashing ignores other forms of involvement, such as through-the-roof levels of volunteerism among younger generations; and
4. it’s just plain bad organizing. You don’t recruit new followers by demeaning them.

Now back to our previously-scheduled organizing.