The network effect – lesson learned
Recently the pastor of my church here in Raleigh received a request to assist the people in Pakistan whose homes were torched and burned and whose were people badly injured or murdered.
If you did not hear about it, there were approximately 2000 families that were driven from their homes by Muslim radicals. The village affected was primarily Christian. I am not naive enough to think that this is isolated to just these particular two faiths, or that something like this could not happen in the opposite way, but what made this particular incident unique for me is that our church had a connection to one of the churches in Pakistan that was affected.
Elliot Grudem, the pastor of our church, was looking to raise enough support to assist 50 families in getting back on their feet, and turned to members of the church to help.
I proposed that, as an experiment, we should open up the opportunity to help to our wider community. That included Elliot’s Twitter following, as well as a few key others. We set up a page on CTK’s website that allowed people to donate via Paypal, then started talking about it on all available outlets.
What happened next was nothing short of remarkable. The announcement about our efforts was picked up by several key leaders, all of whom follow Elliot on Twitter, and donations started pouring in from literally all over the world.
What I learned / confirmed from this exercise:
- There is nothing like word of mouth in a trusted network to spread a story worth telling
- Making things simple is so very important. We had one page on the website that told the story and allowed users to get involved. Simple, to the point, and compelling enough that people took action.
- Believing in something enough to take the time to do it right, and think about all the questions users will raise will produce the right results in the end. For us, we spent time thinking about all of the objections people would raise around getting spammed, making sure gifts were given thru a trusted source ( Paypal ), and clearly communicating how the gifts would be used. We also went so far as to take a page from Charity Water’s book and offered to cover all credit card processing charges taken by PayPal so that 100% of money given would go to the people needing the help.
- I believe our efforts were inspired by and blessed by God. That may sound strange to some, but I truly believe it.
