Don't confuse the harvest with the growth

I got summoned for jury duty last week, which meant hours of sitting and, for once, nothing competing for them. So I finally read "Future Demand" by James Hurman. It's smart, well-researched, and practical, and it's the book I wish someone had handed me years ago.

Here's the thing: I've come to genuinely appreciate performance marketing. It's clear. It's measurable. It works. In a field full of uncertainty, that is no small gift. But as Hurman lays out, performance marketing isn't built for growth. It's built for harvesting. And harvesting is not what makes anything grow.

The gardener who only harvests

Imagine a gardener convinced that harvesting is what produces the crop. No soil prep. No planting. No watering, no weeding, no waiting. Just out there every morning with a basket, wondering why the yield keeps shrinking. Ridiculous. And yet that's how a lot of us, me included, have treated growth: all our energy on capturing demand, none on the slower upstream work of creating it. Eventually there's nothing left to capture.

We've been using short-term tactics to chase long-term goals, then wondering why the growth stops.

The evidence behind this is stronger than most of us realize. Research on what gets called the multiplier effect shows that rebalancing investment between brand and performance can lift revenue returns dramatically, in some studies by as much as 90 percent. The logic is simple once you see it: brand creates future demand, performance converts the demand that already exists. Performance asks "why now?" Brand answers "why you?"

Do both, and do both well, and you get the thing every Christian nonprofit actually wants: growth that lasts longer than a campaign. So enjoy the harvest. Celebrate it, report it, thank God for it. Just don't confuse it with the growth. If you want a harvest next season, you'd better be planting something today.