It’s a rainy March Saturday in Portland, OR. A child’s bed is crushed against a radiator beneath a dilapidated window. A kitchen faucet drips. Mold covers the walls. Cold drafts chill a mother, in tears, standing with her children. “This is how I live,” she says.

But this is not her home, or even a real apartment. It’s part of a mobile display, parked for a few hours in downtown Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, for the Thrivent Builds with Habitat for Humanity program. A few steps beyond the decrepit apartment scene is a scene that shows a different future: a new home, built with sweat equity and help from community volunteers. Sue Donora, previous development director of Portland Habitat for Humanity, hands the “excited and grateful” woman an application to help build her own Habitat home.

The 67-foot tractor-trailer educates people about substandard housing and the Thrivent Builds for Habitat for Humanity alliance between Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and Habitat for Humanity International. The two organizations established the alliance in 2005 to build hundreds of new homes annually over a four-year run and to increase both of their memberships.

Unlike a typical financial-services company, Thrivent Financial is a nonprofit serving Lutherans that has enough assets — $6.2 billion according to Fortune magazine — to make the Fortune 500 list. With its subsidiaries, it offers financial products and services to 2.7 million Lutheran members. As a fraternal-benefit society, the company also provides charitable programs for the benefit of its members and society. Thrivent Financial has been working with Habitat since 1991.

building shared goals

In 2005, Thrivent Financial decided to expand its relationship with Habitat, in part because focus groups and a phone survey of its members told Thrivent that the problem of substandard housing was important to them. “It is our members’ money,” says Marie Uhrich, Thrivent’s senior vice president of communications. “We want to make sure we’re working on things that matter to them.”

The company pledged $105 million over four years to support the Thrivent Builds program. This support includes both monetary and advocacy aid, as it educates the public about the need for affordable housing while encouraging members to volunteer and donate. The Thrivent Builds road show only “a very small percentage” of the total budget, according to Uhrich.

Although the primary objective of the relationship with Habitat was on doing charitable work, Thrivent would also benefit from the publicity of a greater involvement with communities, increased name recognition, and the public attention typically generated by Habitat for Humanity’s prominent and well-regarded name. “Perhaps we end up reaching people who are Lutheran but not yet Thrivent members, who decide they want to work with an organization where the money doesn’t go back into profits,” Uhrich says.

At first glance, Thrivent and Habitat do not seem like a natural match for an intensive partnership. Although the former sees charitable work as critical, its primary mission is still helping members look out for their financial well-being through its regional offices and nearly 1,400 membership chapters throughout the country. Coming from the financial-services industry, Thrivent Financial is also driven by numeric goals and distinctly quantifiable metrics.

In contrast, Habitat for Humanity is a purely charitable umbrella organization with independent affiliates. Habitat is less focused on traditional management tools and relies more on personal relationships to manage the company, according to Mark Andrews, Habitat’s senior director for resource allocation, who recently completed a stint as the executive director of the Thrivent Builds alliance. “Historically there’s been a sense that God will make it work,” he says.

Any viable partnership between these two nonprofits would have to bridge the gap of these significantly different cultures. In addition, the goals of each organization had to mesh so both would realize specific successes from the alliance. “From the grass roots to headquarters infrastructure, there was a desire to use the alliance to increase the capacity for both organizations to do their work,” Andrews says.

It would be the first time that Thrivent had mobilized its members on a national basis for a single project with specific goals (such as raising $2 million annually by 2008), while Habitat wanted to help involved affiliates increase their building capacity by 7 percent.

The Right Medium for the Message

Both sides had their goals; however, there was still the question of how to meet them. In early 2005, representatives from Thrivent Financial met with Habitat in its Atlanta offices. During that brainstorming session the idea of a traveling exhibit that would host events across the country was born. A traveling exhibition would offer a number of benefits. The outside of the truck could be painted to deliver the underlying message about substandard housing and the Thrivent Builds program even while the truck was on the road. Upon arrival, the event would offer a way to recruit volunteers, generate local media coverage, and allow Thrivent to show its philanthropic impact in the community.

Great idea; now all Habitat and Thrivent needed was to design and construct an exhibit, plan the tour route, get local permits, find people to drive the truck and perform setup and breakdown, and manage the program. All this was far outside the competencies of the pair, so they did some research and selected Atlanta-based Mobile Media Enterprises to create the plan and manage the details.

“We met with Thrivent and Habitat, and they gave us their vision,” says Darlene Laird, an account director at Mobile Media. “Both wanted the truck to accomplish two things: to let visitors see what it would be like to live in substandard housing and to provide a call to action for volunteers. As the goal of both groups was to get more people involved in the actual process of building houses, simply creating and counting impressions would be inadequate. This was a campaign that could only succeed to the degree it could motivate people to donate their own time and money.”

The resulting 67-foot truck did more than inform — it told an emotional story. The interior of the truck was divided into two rooms, which, in turn, were divided into two halves. The four-part story was simple: 1. This is what substandard housing looks like; 2. Here’s how people end up living in such circumstances; 3. This is how Thrivent and Habitat for Humanity help people build new homes; and 4. Here are the people who have benefited from the new homes.

As attendees entered the first room, they found themselves in a simulated run-down apartment, the aforementioned setting that drove the woman to tears. Details such as a child’s backpack lying on the bed and lights that flickered on and off helped make the scenario seem more real. In the second half of the room, a multimedia presentation explained how good, hard-working people can easily find themselves in bad housing situations.

“I think that the person on the street doesn’t see or hear [the problem],” Donora says. “They don’t talk to anybody in these situations. People don’t believe that places like this exist and that landlords can get away with it.” While the video played, lighting moodily shifted at specific times to make the experience more dramatic. By combining the first-hand experiences of those living in such impoverished conditions with a visceral experience of substandard housing, the first room created an emotional impact on attendees, driving awareness and empathy for the cause.

While the first room demonstrated the problem, the second provided a solution. Also split into two parts, one half re-created a scene of volunteers building a new house. Life-sized, free-standing images of volunteers pasted on foam core “worked” on the house, and real pieces of wood along with sawdust glued to the floor extended the scene to emotionally include viewers. On the opposite side of the room, videos showed how Habitat for Humanity creates new homes and included interviews with new homeowners who had benefited from the process.

Groups of 10 to 20 attendees moved through the truck, first seeing the problem and then the solution, finally exiting with a strong sense that something had to be done and that they had the ability to help. Outside the truck, volunteer staffers provided an immediate opportunity to donate goods or money, or to volunteer their time.

As they waited outside for their turn inside the truck, attendees could participate in activities such as a craft tent for children and an adult nail-pounding competition. Immediately before entering the truck, visitors could have their pictures taken in front of a Thrivent Builds with Habitat building-site background. At least half of the visitors participated in the photo op. After the event, they visited the Thrivent Builds Web site, which reinforced the program messages and the brands of both organizations, to retrieve their photos and e-mail them to others, virally extending the campaign to potential contributors and volunteers who did not attend in person.

a powerful payoff

The Thrivent Builds Mobile travels 40 to 45 weeks per year with a three-person staff. Every stop must pay off for the project’s mission and the two organizations. Thrivent looks for locations with high densities of a Lutheran population, while Habitat seeks areas with local affiliates serving those who need housing and recruiting those who can help build it.

Of course, both want to reach large numbers of people. The final schedule included 114 stops in 2006, from high-traffic events such as the Minnesota and Wisconsin state fairs to the parking lot of the Grace Lutheran Church in San Marcos, CA. As the road show has progressed, Thrivent has refined the schedule to maximize impact. Sporting events, for example, have proven disappointing and have been downplayed on the 2007 schedule.

In its first year the tour exceeded Thrivent’s goals, attracting 32,420 visitors in 2006, 40 percent more than the program’s original goal of 23,030. The tour also generated nearly 200 stories in local and national media in 2006. Plus, Thrivent calculated that the truck generated more than 387,000 walk-by impressions and 4 million highway impressions.

Most important, the tour helped the Thrivent Builds program achieve its charitable goals. The alliance and tour were responsible for building 313 new homes and for driving more than half a million volunteer hours in 2006. (In the 14 years before the Thrivent Builds Mobile launch, Thrivent Financial and its volunteers built 500 homes with Habitat.) And sometimes the success is shown not in numbers but words, as Jensen notes: “A teenage boy at a recent visit said, ‘I can’t believe this. I actually learned something in church today.’” High praise, indeed. e