Mike Fichter's blog

Most people will agree that there’s too much information and too little time to absorb it all. This is equally true of quality leadership material designed to sharpen and improve the productivity of anyone who desires to be a better leader.

In the life movement, better leaders mean higher impact, loftier vision, and greater confidence among those who are willing and ready to follow.

Most importantly, it means saving more lives from the pain and heartache of abortion.

So is there one source of leadership wisdom that no pro-life leader should be without?

I believe there is – and it’s called the book of Proverbs.

Seriously? Seriously.

One chapter a day. Slowly. Prayerfully. Openly.

Underline key phrases. Use a highlighter. Take time to think. Make your own notes. Step back and ask: how does this apply to my leadership today?

Then wait and watch what happens next.

Experiencing a lot of windshield time? Maybe you should rediscover the wonderfully efficient tool known as the digital voice recorder.

Put it in record mode, flip the pause on and off as thoughts and miscellaneous ideas hit you, and you’ll be surprised at the nuggets (and the clunkers – especially those inspirational ideas at 1 a.m. after three cups of White Castle coffee) that you’ll uncover when you revisit your ideas the next day.

No looking down at a device while driving. No pressure to rattle through a keynote speech. Just random thoughts verbalized and saved for future review.

You can’t beat its simplicity. Sure, your smart phone has a voice recorder app, but for sheer convenience and old school effectiveness, the digital voice recorder is still king of the hill.

Many ministries within the life movement have found fundraising banquets to be a mainstay on their annual development calendars. Here are five simple things you can do to increase the fundraising performance of your event:

1. Keep the program tight. In the fundraising banquet world, less is better. Avoid the temptation of adding too many things to the program. Your guests want to be inspired and they want to get home at a reasonable hour. Hint: if guests at your event are looking at their watches, you are in a big trouble.

2. Mention the fundraising purpose repeatedly. You should liberally sprinkle references to the evening’s fundraising purpose throughout the program. Don’t try to spring it on people at the end. Let them know from the start that the evening is about funding.

3. Ask the speaker to transition straight into the appeal. Every second that ticks by after your keynote speaker finishes is time when your guests are tempted to start thinking about home. If your speaker has a trusted track record (like Cal Thomas) ask him or her to do the appeal. Hint: if you’re not sure if your speaker has ever done the appeal for funds, ask the speaker to transition by inviting the appeal person on stage before they step away from the podium.

4. Make 100% sure the person doing the appeal knows what they are doing. The number one donation-waster at fundraising banquets is a result of well-meaning people who do not understand how to ask for funds. The person doing the appeal must be forceful, specific, and unwavering. Never start the appeal by apologizing or making excuses. If you have a worthy cause, be bold. If you don’t have a worthy cause, you shouldn’t be asking in the first place.

5. Ditch the pie charts. Your guests really don’t care to see stats on banquet night. They either trust you or they don’t – displaying a myriad of pie charts and graphs on where you spend the money will not make a bit of difference on banquet night if you fail to grip people emotionally – and if you haven’t developed a proven track record they can trust.

While the growing number of Americans who believe President Barack Obama is a Muslim grabbed the media thunder in the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s latest report titled Religion, Politics and the President released on August 19, 2010, a trend with much greater significance to the life movement has received far less attention.

The trend is a 9% increase in white, non-Hispanic Catholic voters who identify with, or lean toward, the Republican Party in 2010 as compared to 2008. By any statistic analysis that’s a major shift. In the political arena, it’s a stampede.

Why?

That’s a question which, unfortunately, is not clearly answered by the Pew report. Yes, there is indication that more voters view the Republican Party as more favorable towards religion (in a generic sense) than the Democratic Party, but that fails to dig into what I believe is a core reason why Catholic voters are shifting to the GOP.

Immediately following Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, moderate and conservative analysts opined that he would govern from the center, or at least make efforts to do so, in order to keep the more conservative members of the Democratic voting bloc on board. In the life issues arena – an arena that is core to a large number of Catholic voters – the president’s intentions are so thinly veiled that everyone realizes the hoped-for move to the center is not going to occur.

Who is included in this 9% shift to the GOP?

Maybe it’s the Catholic voters who now understand that the very essence of the Catholic health care system is threatened by an all-powerful federal government that wants to call the shots on who lives and who dies.

Or it could be the Catholic voters who watched as this administration dismantled barriers to sending federal funds overseas to promote abortion – including the promotion of abortion in countries where the Catholic church has worked so hard to build a culture of life.

Or maybe it’s the Catholic voters who once knew a Democratic Party that talked a lot about fighting for the little guy, only to see it become a party that’s saturated with an abortion mentality.

Whatever the reason, a 9% shift in Catholic voters is underway.

The Democratic Party has earned the right to lose these Catholic voters. Now the Republican Party must earn the right to keep them.

Are you adding something more than noise to the conversation?

That’s a question I am asking myself more and more.

Seems like the social media world is a two-edged sword: on one hand we know more about stuff than ever before. On the other hand, we know more about stuff than ever before.

The world is awash in everyone’s opinion on every news item that rolls down the pike. We can be like everyone else, or we can choose to limit ourselves when it comes to dishing out constant commentary on a never ending stream of news topics.

Why become one more play by play announcer in a press box already jammed at the seams when the world is looking for solutions, dreams, and something worth living and dying for?

Never forget, the real game is being played on the field – not in the press box.

Few things are as irritating as drivers who speed up, then slow down, then speed up again, then slow down again. If you’re behind such a driver, all you want to do is leave them in your rearview mirror as quickly as possible – presuming, that is, that they don’t mash the pedal as soon as you begin your pass.

It’s the inconsistency that drives you crazy.

It’s inconsistency that drives your supporters (or potential supporters) crazy as well.

Establish a strategic plan with measurable goals. Create an annual plan that takes you towards it. Then put your foot on the accelerator nice and easy.

Let your supporters experience consistency and they will reward you with loyalty.

If you are a life movement leader with even the slightest contact with the political process, you must read The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care) by Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer. You’ll find it an uncomfortable task (not unlike watching a movie in which the villain wins) but it will give you valuable insight into the mind of your opposition.

If for the sake of argument you are unwilling to spend the ten bucks to buy the book on Amazon, here is my condensed version of the Colorado model:

1. Get a few enormously wealthy people to underwrite your efforts.

2. Implement tactics of intimidation and distraction via lawsuits

3. Viciously attack Republicans.

4. Outsource personal destruction.

5. Use campaign finance reform to limit your opponent’s cash.

6. Feed government cash back to supporting groups.

7. Pretend it’s your messaging, not your money or your thuggery.

That’s the Colorado model, coming soon to a state near you.

When a top recruit says yes to joining your board of directors it signals the beginning of what should be a long term relationship. But when long term relationships fail to develop on a consistent basis, it could be that your leadership team is falling victim to these three reasons why board members leave:

1. Uncertainty about what is expected of them.

2. Unrealistic expectations they are unable to meet.

3. Lack of meaningful engagement.

Address these three issues and you will energize your board’s culture and pave the way for developing long term leadership and commitment.

“So if I’m willing, how can I stand by?”

Although you might expect to hear a statement like this from a faithful pro-life supporter, you might be troubled to learn its real source: it’s from an abortionist who is radically committed to expanding access to abortion by mainstreaming it into the medical community via the offices of your local doctor. The abortionist quoted is forty year-old Rachael Phelps, just one of the abortion backers featured in a July 18, 2010, New York Times Magazine article titled “The New Abortion Providers”.

Phelps’ comments provide deeper insight into the mind of someone who makes a living off of killing with apparently no remorse. In fact, Phelps has convinced herself she is serving the higher good, commenting in the same article that she views the act of abortion as an act of compassion, saying, “If I have the capability to help them [women seeking abortions], then I should do it.”

Another abortionist in the same article recalled doing an abortion on a baby at 18 weeks when she herself was 18 weeks pregnant. As she grabbed the unborn child’s leg with forceps (the baby whose life she was ending in a most brutal fashion), her own baby kicked inside of her womb. Later she described it as “one if the more raw moments of my life” that was “unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics.” But yet she remains firmly pro-abortion.

These examples are consistent with a June 30, 2010, London Times article entitled “Yes, Abortion is Killing. But It’s the Lesser Evil” by feminist Antonia Senior. Even after explaining how having a child of her own changed her perspectives of life in the womb, Senior defiantly refuses to back away from her support for abortion on demand, writing, “If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” In her instance, it means being willing to kill an unborn child as a badge to prove your commitment to the cause of “reproductive freedom”.

No wonder the phrase “now I’ve seen it all” is slowly vanishing from modern day vocabulary.

Truth is, as we learn more and more about the private, driving ambitions of these new abortion providers, we learn that they are not so new after all. They are just like their predecessors, just like the men and women throughout time who have preyed on the defenseless.

Abortion is not some type of social ill that exists in a vacuum. It breeds in a culture of greed, in a worldview that has no room for the sacred, and in a ubiquitous resentment of men, relationships, and experiences that all work together to sear the conscience. And when the conscience is seared, even the painful recoil of an unborn child from the clamp of stainless steel forceps no longer registers as an evil of monstrous proportions.

The feminist movement used to say “we’ve come a long way, baby”. Catchy. But tragically, tragically wrong.

The first time I visited Washington, D.C., with my family, it was like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose. If you’ve been there you know what I mean – everything from learning how to ride the Metro to figuring out the layout of the multiple Smithsonian buildings takes time. Trying to do it without looking like a tourist is impossible.

Then there is the issue of the beltway traffic. By comparison, you know when you’re getting close to Indianapolis when you get to I-465. You know when you’re getting close to Washington when you’re half a day away. I still have no idea whether it’s tougher getting out or getting in, but I do know that it took me over three hours on a holiday weekend to drive from Alexandria to Fredericksburg, Virginia – roughly forty miles away. That fits my definition of a traffic problem.

Still, there are few places like the nation’s capital when it comes to stirring up the patriotic blood. If you asked me to narrow it all down to the one place I would recommend to a friend traveling to Washington for the first time, my choice would be immediate: Arlington National Cemetery. In fact, I believe this is the one historic place that every American should visit at least once in life.

I cannot adequately express in words the emotions that I experienced the first time that I beheld the seemingly endless rows of white crosses that stand as a quiet but powerful reminder that our freedom was bought with a severe price. Like most visitors to Arlington, my family visited the graves of the well-known and the highly decorated. Yet my eyes kept glancing to the horizon, wondering about the lives and the stories and the families behind each of those crosses on the rolling lawn.

Then I noticed the Capitol building across the Potomac, and I wondered how many of those men and women elected to serve we the people, and to guard our hard-earned freedoms, are actually serving themselves instead.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville who said: “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” What would he say today, if he knew that America has allowed the abortion deaths of 176 times the number of Americans buried in Arlington? I fear we may already know the answer.