Countdown to Tübingen

I may be in the support raising doldrums, but at least the scenery is nice.

In the past I may have mentioned the element of design involved in raising support. It’s freaking everywhere.

I did it as I interned at GTCCF. I did it to raise support. I did it as a part of ministry in Germany. And now I am doing it again as I raise support a second time. The only place I didn’t do any design was in any part of my formal education.

In fact, as I consider how to lay out the next pages of the support-raising packet I’m working on (example page above), I look back and see how many skills my job as campus minister requires of me that are not products of formal education… music, public speaking, sports, Biblical literacy, even carpentry. These are all things I picked up on the side of whatever more important thing I was doing at the time. Like calculus.

Well, now the tables have been inverted (to use a calculus term). Nothing makes a person rely on God like woeful underqualification, and here we are. If this packet looks good, it almost certainly wasn’t my doing.

Let the miracles occur.

There was a time where *hand-written* was done without the use of a keyboard.

When raising support, why not copy the experts?

Dad’s Garage, of whom I am a supporting member (oh yeah, I support things, too), sent me a support raising packet yesterday. Included in the packet: a calendar featuring the improv theater’s regular cast of actors in hilariously provocative and suggestive poses with important theater dates in red; a few sheets of paper describing the various cleverly-named levels of membership; and a simple bright pink order/giving form with a self-addressed envelope. Could I use any of this for my upcoming packet?

And now, the news.

In Tübingen, Unterwegs just returned from our first “retreat” of sorts to the monastery in Taize, France. Daniel Silliman was kind enough to take pictures of the trip and post them on flickr.

In Tucker, now that the mass-mailing has been sent out and received, I’ve turned my attention to hand-written letters asking (A) supporters who have given gifts in the past to match those gifts again and (B) supporters who have been supporting monthly to increase their giving. The packet still pends.

In Atlanta, I am continuing to do Devo Lunch at GTCCF. Some possible verses: Luke 4:22, Exodus 33:12-22.

That was delicious. AND you're hired.

One of the tools of the effective support raiser is the lunch meeting. It’s great because you’re meeting a potential supporter when they have a low-gravity break in their day, and it’s lunch. Truly, there are very few things in this world whose value is lessened by the presence of food.

I’m still learning the in’s and out’s (thx, Microsoft) of the official business lunch. My team members have made it into an art form. Beth would schedule two lunches a day with supporters when she came Stateside for a week.

It’s a chance to connect with people about the ministry, but lunch can go longer than the time required to catch someone up on the events of the past year. Other pressing life topics might be broached. For example, this is a conversation I had at a lunch meeting yesterday…

“So, my wife wants to get a puppy.”
“Dogs are good. I’m pro-dog.”
“My fear is that this dog is practice for having a baby.”
“A baby? Are you guys ready?”
“We promised ourselves that we would wait three years before having one, and, wow, it’s already been three. It went so fast.”
“I’m way too selfish to give up my twenties for some baby.”
“Yeah…”
“You know what my reaction would be? ‘A baby? Why? Aren’t we having a good time? Why ruin that with a baby?’”

Not sure if that falls within Microsoft’s guidelines for a business lunch, but, then again, their specialty is software. Not what topics are appropriate at the dinner table.

Speaking of software, you can check off one item on my support-raising dream list. I wrote a WordPress plugin for the new imkeller.net, and WordPress accepted it for publishing. You can see the page here, and you can donate here.

Not trying to brag, but it was rated five stars. Out of five. Now I just wait for the donations to start rolling in.

Mighty Joe Espresso - or just a picture of Mighty Joe Espresso?

I have avoided the new version of Microsoft Office for as long as I can. Today I uninstall Office 2003 in order that I might enjoy the newer Office 2010 and all the progress that seven years of word processing R&D brings with it. Maybe now my support letters will write themselves.

While I work on putting a packet together that sums up the progress of Globalscope Germany, I have written a letter to be mass-mailed to my personal mailing list. The letter explains how my stay in the U.S.(of)A. is just temporary. It’s not the end of the work or, as I have been joking, “a chance to brush up on my English”; rather, it is finance trip and a recruiting trip (in that I am getting married and taking her back with me).

Did you know that my mailing list is comprised of 50 financial supporters and 60 others? It may interest you to know that it interests me.

Every great organization deserves a great website.

Marcus Aurelius once said that “the secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.” And he did pretty well for himself.

I may not have much in common with Marcus Aurelius, but we have both done well in Europe, and we are both of the same mind when it comes to planning. My approach in the first week of support raising has been to prepare the tools that will see me through the $5,000 mark, the first of which is the new and improved support-raising website for Globalscope Germany, imkeller.net.

Allow me a minute to brag: flexible and robust, built on WordPress to make content management a snap for multiple users, the new website will allow a greater level of communication with our supporters. We can keep the new website up to date much more easily – automatically in the case of the blog feed aggregator and flickr widget in the sidebar – and contact forms and links to Facebook make communication with the team members in the field a cinch.

And it just looks cool.

It’s just a baby right now – barely eight (awesome) pages to the whole thing – but whatever non-obvious problems and needs arise over the coming months, perhaps some of them will be solved/met by my latest creation.

Holy crap: that's more than twice as much as I currently have.

This is the word from on high at CMF. Shalynn and I will need to raise $5,000 per month in monthly support to get back to Germany in January.

Just to give you an idea of how big that is, I spent a year and a half raising $2,000 and change in monthly support.

So, we have an incredibly daunting number in front of us. But if I’ve learned anything from my years in campus ministry under people who have overcome similarly ridiculous odds, it’s that nearly-impossible challenges are overcome with impossibly over-the-top dreaming. So let’s get creative about raising support.

This is brainstorming. There are no bad ideas.

So that’s a start. Whatever happens in the next six months, the key is going to be unrelenting effort.

Hike up those sleeves. Let’s get to work.

Globalscope Germany supports local business.

There are some things I missed about America during my first year in Germany: peanut butter; free refills on fountain drinks; Pandora (who is supposed to tell me what music I like in Europe?); my fiance, of course… I might even say I missed many things.

But one thing I did not miss was raising support in a down economy.

Well, here we are back in Mighty Joe Espresso (and in what may be the final weeks of business for the local establishment) with a daunting challenge ahead of us. The goal: to fully fund a couple and get back to Tübingen by January.

Here’s what’s different this time:

• The economy has been down for some time now, and things seem less hopeful than when last I was here. Things are definitely not helped by headlines like Still, times are dreary — in the economy, in the national mood, overseas. Isn’t anything positive happening?
• Contacts at many of the churches I had developed have left or gone to other churches.

But all is not lost:

• This time I am armed with stories and experiences from the field – not just a hypothetical plan.
• I’ll be married. I’m told this communicates stability.
• The recession has had time to reach Europe. Things are down here, but they’re down there, too. Accordingly, the Dollar-Euro exchange rate has improved significantly.

Plus, January is a must. With only three teammates in the field – and no extra staff, exchange students, interns, or volunteers – if we’re not there, well… It won’t be a problem, because we’ll be there in January.

Now it’s time to write an email newsletter.

let your powers combine: american coffee and german pastry.

Creativity demands coffee. Good creativity demands great coffee. That’s why this morning I’m drinking Mighty Joe Espresso.

You see, today I’m in total creative mode. Not only am I writing a newsletter recapping the last two months of work here at Unterwegs, I am also beginning work on the next Unterwegs video to be shown at the Core Student Dinner next week – and then used for supporters afterwards.

Mmm. That is good coffee.

So, here are my tools… my laptop with USB mouse (can’t edit video effectively with the trackpad), my external terabyte drive, my brand new headphones with extra bass (thanks, Sony), and a few sheets of clean paper and writing implements for sketching out ideas.

Monday is the due date. Auf geht’s.

I don't care if it *is* half past noon - my day doesn't start until after this.

Living here in Germany, you learn to do without some things. For example: I don’t have a car. In its stead, I have a bike and a bus ticket. Another example: I don’t have a microwave. Rather, I have a jumbo bottle of vegetable oil and a frying pan with more mileage on it than my car, bike, and bus ticket combined. It’s Europe, baby. There are some things that – like AirTran – just don’t fly over here.

But I’ll tell you what hasn’t changed: I still love Jesus, I love my girlfriend, and I love my coffee.

Sure, instead of indie rock and hip-hop with my morning brew, now I listen to Euro-electro (read: techno), but that just goes to show: good coffee, like bad bureaucracy, is something that unites an otherwise divided and fractured human race. Sure, instead of a Morning Harvest muffin from Mighty Joe Espresso, now I have a Doppel Keks with my joe (or, if I’m feeling extra spendy, a day-old, half-price croissant from the bakery around the corner from Unterwegs), but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make…

Which leads me to ask: if, as a supporter, you really want to go the extra mile, would you please send me some coffee beans from Mighty Joe? My Quetzal Breakfast Blend stash is running out.

If you’re like me, you are a stickler for quality. Call it perfectionism. Call it anal retentivity. I just like things good ‘n polished. And then polished some more.

The point, of course, is that I set a high bar for everything I do. In tenth grade, I was the star/envy/object-of-hatred-and-misunderstanding of my algebra class because I drew all my graphed functions on graph paper, cut them out with neat, square corners, and pasted them onto the notebook-paper where I would write sub-captions and explanations. Don’t worry, I’ve relaxed a little since then to a more reasonable level. But doesn’t the thought of a person with such professionalism in even the smallest details excite you about supporting that person as a professional missionary? Please say it does!

There’s something to be said for spinning straw into gold. Exhibit A: Cirque du Soleil has made a huge business out of it – taking the lowly art of the circus and elevating and perfecting it into something beautiful and amazing – and expensive. Exhibit B: Life for Children Ministry had a bunch of video clips and pictures from their work in Kenya and needed someone to put it all together in an engaging, exciting package. They came to me and asked me to make a video for them in my spare time – check it out above. It ain’t perfect, but I have to take a step back and admire that, yes, even my half-hearted attempts still turn out pretty good.

Now I just need to charge Cirque du Soleil prices.