• Following isn’t always fun.
• Jesus was the Messiah – that’s a Jewish word.  ”Christ” is the Greek version of that word, not Jesus’ last name.
• Peter was concerned about himself.  Many Christians today are using Jesus, not following Him.
• Jesus said following would require taking up a cross.
• C.S. Lewis said the cross didn’t become a part of Christian art until everyone who had seen one used had died.
• Your soul is more important than your stuff.
• Salvation is free; it costs us nothing.  Following Christ will eventually cost us something.

Watch this and other messages from Andy Stanley at followseries.org.

If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are some notes I took for you, with some of my additional thoughts in italics.

The things we’ve been taught about giving and charity actually undermine our ability to change the world.  Unfortunately, there are separate rules for non-profits and businesses.   From 1970 to 2009, only 144 non-profits crossed the $50 million barrier while 46,136 for-profit organizations crossed this threshold.   Why is that?  Pallotta gives five reasons:

1.Compensation.  We don’t care when people make a lot of money NOT helping people, but there’s something wrong with a non-profit leader making a good living.  We’ve set up unnecessary choices between doing well for yourself and family and doing good in the world. // Some churches set a pastor’s salary in order to help keep them humble.  This is just as inconsistent with Scripture as a selfish pursuit of wealth.

2. Advertising and Marketing.  We don’t like to see our dollars spent on advertising, as if the money invested in advertising couldn’t dramatically increase the money raised to help the needy.  The first 3-Day event raised $581 million by taking out full page ads in the New York Times, not by putting up flyers at the Laundrymat.  Non-profit fundraising hasn’t wrestled away market share from businesses, because they are not encouraged to advertise. // Palotta’s point that an organization should invest in fundraising resources is right on the mark.  Raising money IS ministry.

3. Taking risks on revenue ideas.  Nobody yells at Disney when a $200 million movie flops, but we crucify a charity that tries new things that might not work.

4. Time.  Amazon went for six years without turning a profit, but people had patience because they had a plan for market dominance.  Imagine a charity building a foundation for six years like that.

5. Profit to attract risk capital.  The profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion capital industry.

Non-profits have to battle a mindset that thinks overhead is all bad.  There are many problems with the overhead vs. cause thinking.  ”What percentage of my donation goes to the cause, not overhead,” is a dangerous way of thinking.

Somehow, we think overhead is not part of the cause.

Forcing organizations to go without overhead investments actually hinder growth.  Investing in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger.  Fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the money to help the cause we love so deeply.   $350,000 given to a breast cancer researcher is great, but investing $350,000 into the 3 day raised more than $192 Million.

Don’t confuse morality with frugality.  The bake sale with 5% overhead is not morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40% overhead.  You have to consider the actual size of the pies.  The bake sale might make $71 while the professionals might make $71 million – which do you propose hungry people would prefer?  

Our generation doesn’t want it’s epitaph to read “we kept overhead low,” we want it to read “We changed the world.”

The next time you look at a charity, don’t ask about the rate of their overhead.  Ask about the scale of their dreams.

While I would disagree with Pallotta on shifting more resources to human services and away from religious charities, he raises several interesting points that apply to all non-profits, especially churches  

I use Evernote to keep track of nearly everything – it’s my digital filing cabinet.  Here are ten quick tips on how you can use this powerful tool better.

1.  Get your unique Evernote email address and just forward stuff you want to save.
2. Use keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste stuff into evernote from any application.  Three seconds gets text or pictures from anywhere into Evernote.
3. Take pictures of stuff your kids make at school and save them a folder labeled personal.
4. Don’t worry about tagging everything or over-organizing folders.  The search feature is powerful.
5. Create a folder lableed !Inbox and set it as your default.  All new stuff will go there and you can sort it once a week.
6. The more stuff you put into Evernote, the more powerful it becomes.
7. You can save receipts, statement and financial stuff in a folder called taxes.  When you’re ready to work, all your stuff is there.
8. Getting a scanner like this takes Evernote to the next level.
9. This eBook is the absolute best way to learn how to use Evernote.  It’s the unofficial guide and 100% worth it.
10. Create a few folders for the big categories.  Things like Personal, Sermon Illustrations, Blog Posts, Kids, and Taxes.

Click the image below to learn more about Evernote Essentials and how you can use Evernote to organize everything.

Here are the benefits of building an email list of people in your community.

Here’s exactly how to do it.

She raised $5,500 in 31 days.  She is still working hard on the illustrations, but I thought I would take the time to write down some of the lessons we learned from a successful Kickstarter campaign.

1.  A video is worth a thousand pictures.

Kickstarter says a video is the most effective thing you can do to meet your goal, and they have stats to prove it.  According to Kickstarter, projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%).  I’m no Albert Einstein, but that means projects with videos are way more successful.

Videos are simple to make these days, and they are one of the most effective ways to tell stories.  For this project, Lauren and I just sat in her room and I shot simple video with my iPhone.  We edited on iMovie and uploaded it quickly.  The entire project took about an hour…here’s the video.

2.  The time to build a platform is before you need one.

Michael Hyatt says a platform is what you stand on to get your message out.  It harkens back to the days of the theater when people would stand on a literal platform to shout their message to a gathering crowd.  Today, platforms are digital.  And your audience isn’t crowded around a wooden box, they are your friends on Facebook, connections on LinkedIn and email addresses on your mailing list.

Too many people launch an idea before doing the groundwork of building a platform to sustain it.   They launch their product or service or idea only to realize there’s nobody to support it.

My platform is not huge, but I’ve spent some time attracting some followers on Twitter and building a mailing list through MailChimp.

3.  Specific request beat generic pleas every time.

I worked social media pretty hard for about a month, and I’m sure my friends and followers grew weary of hearing about Hairy the Clown.  In fact, more than one person told me they hoped the project would be funded soon so I would stop talking about it.

I’d estimate about 30% of backers came from social broadcasts on Facebook or Twitter.  While this is substantial, it would have never been enough to reach the goal.  Most people donated because they were specifically asked.

I let Lauren hijack my address book and send specific emails.  She called friends and family members on the phone and asked them to donate.  She passed out bookmarks at lunch and asked her classmates to get their parents to donate.

The principal here is really important – you’ve got to do more than throw out blanket pleas for help – you have to be willing to look someone in the eye and specifically ask them for help.  If you need someone to step up, a specific request will beat a blanket email.  If you need volunteers, a face-to-face request will work better than a generic stage announcement.

4.  You can’t spend retweets.

Lots of people retweeted and shared stuff to their followers, but those retweets did very little to reach the goal.  At first, I was excited when I saw someone with tons of followers RT it.  You can see how easy it would be to think that someone willing to share a link would surely support the project.  But in reality, most people who shared the project on Twitter or Facebook did NOT back the project.

Social Media has perpetuated the idea that by sharing or mentioning something, you’ve supported it.  But awareness that doesn’t lead to action is no good.  Spreading a message might send goodwill, but at least on Kickstarter, it didn’t help us reach the funding goal.  In fact, raising awareness without acting might have the opposite effect of desensitizing people over time.

I’m not at all upset; I’m just communicating reality.  I see people share causes and pleas for help all the time and I rarely click on those generic messages.  But when people reach out personally, it’s usually a different story.

5.  Mini deadlines make a big project small.  

Raising $5,500 the internet to publish a children’s book might not seem like a big goal, but I’ve never done anything like this before.  Lauren and I thought it was a big goal, and we were really nervous setting it.

So as we moved through the 40 days, we set little milestones.  Kickstarter actually provides simple tracking and reporting, so this made it easy.  There were several times when we would push harder to cross a milestone, whether it was the $2,000 mark or the halfway point.

These smaller goals not only kept us engaged in the process, they gave us the opportunity to stop and start a few different times along the way.  If you’ve got a  big project, breaking it up into smaller projects with milestones along the way is definitely the way to go.

6.  It takes focus to finish.

There’s a reason Kickstarter won’t let you run two projects at once – it’s hard enough to be successful at one.

And reaching the goal took hard work every day of this project.  We had to set aside all of our creative efforts – the editing and illustrating of the book itself – and focus on the fundraising.  We worked on something every day, whether it was updating backers, emailing family and friends, or writing blog posts about the project.  Every day, we worked on spreading the word.

Execution is underrated.  It’s sexier to start things, but if you want to be successful, you have to do less so you can focus more.  If you have seven top priorities, chances are, all of them will be average.  You can’t excel at anything if you’re trying to do everything.  So we made the decision to stop working on the book itself so we could focus on raising the money.

7.  Deadlines drive decisions.

I learned this principle from Casey Graham and it’s a part of the special offering coaching inside of Giving Rocket.

We set a deadline of 40 days to accomplish this project, 10 days longer than Kickstarter recommends, but far shorter than the maximum of 90 days the platform allows.  It seems that deadlines that are too far off don’t encourage participation.

50% of the backer activity happened within the first three days or the last three days, with the rest of the support spread out throughout the middle weeks.

As the deadline approached, it was so cool to watch people who had been following the project to jump in or share the news with others.

No matter what business, product or event you’re talking about, deadlines can help.  They create a sense of urgency.

1. Get it out of your head and on paper.

Years ago, I read a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. That book launched something of a movement in the productivity world, but it was quite a simple concept that revolutionized the way I got stuff done. David Allen taught me how to get something out of my head and on a sheet of paper (or a digital version), putting it into a flow and sequence of activity.

There’s something powerful about writing it down and getting to it later. It keeps me from thinking about something when I’m supposed to be working on something else. It keeps me from thinking about something when I need to rest.

This isn’t complicated, but it’s incredibly powerful. I used to use a Day-Timer, but today I use an app. Others keep track of stuff on post it notes or sheets of paper. No matter how you do it, write stuff down and get it out of your head.

2. Take time off.

It might sound counter productive to say taking time off is a key to getting things done, but it really is. Doctors, psychologists and Moses all say so.

Time off is good for the mind, body and soul. We were not made for endless amounts of never-ending work. We need time to rest. Like sharpening an axe, taking time off will give you more energy and more brain power to get things done during the week.

I’ve seen this first hand. When I go non-stop, my productivity decreases. I’m busy; I’m doing things. But I’m not getting things done. I’m active, but I’m not effective. But when I’m properly rested, it helps me get properly focused.

If you’re a person of faith (and I am), honoring the sabbath is on the same top ten list as don’t kill people. Resting and practicing the sabbath is literally commanded by God. If you want to be more effective six days a week, take that seventh day and rest.

3. Make appointments with yourself.

I started doing this a few weeks ago, so this pointer is relatively new to my work flow. But it’s worked really well so far so it’s worth mentioning.

Instead of making a list of a bunch of stuff i need to do, I block time off on my calendar to work on key projects. I treat these like appointments that I cannot break. They are appointments with myself – pre-determined time to work on projects. If have a big writing deadline, I block off two hours, and treat them like time in a meeting. With a block of time, I know I can’t schedule meetings (and so does my team).

4. Only use a few tools, but use them well.

Don’t be tempted to try out the task app that syncs with your microwave – pick a solid system and use it.  The tools you will use daily are better than new tools, no matter what new features you use.  Make it a part of your work flow. You’ve got to get all zen and become one with your system.

Despite all the options out there, I only use a few tools on a regular basis. They are:

• A moleskin notebook. It’s old school, but I carry it with me nearly every place I go. I take notes from talks I hear, dream on paper, and jot down things.
• I use a software tool called Evernote to store notes of all kind. Anything I want to keep goes in here – blog posts, meeting notes, feedback, and more. Evernote syncs with my phone, and it’s super easy to get stuff into Evernote. Here’s a blog post I did on how I use it.
• I use a task program called THINGS. Anything that requires action gets put into this tool. I keep an inbox there of running stuff I need to do, and assign dates to everything. Evernote stores notes and ideas…Things keeps track of tasks. Those are three primary tools I use to get things done.