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Chapter 8: Pen For Hire
A Soldier of Fortune turned Fundraiser of Fortune(1) has weapons at their disposal, just like all good mercenaries.
A carpenter owns their own table saw and angle grinder. The swarthy private contractor operating in the icy foothills of the Himalayas in Afghanistan carries their own gun, grenades, and radios and has their own callsigns. To be a good fundraiser, you must understand that you have the means to fight a fundraising war yourself2. In the same way a mercenary soldier doesn’t need to rely on Uncle Sam to outfit them, you own your own tools and don’t need to pledge fealty to one or another nonprofit to do your dirty work.
The mercenary fundraiser’s mantra is this: ANY MISSION WILL DO.
Fortunate for the Fundraiser of Fortune is that you don’t have to oil these tools you carry with you. They’re innate. Be happy about this. There are many who have to buy their own tools, keep them maintained, and, should they be stripped naked and left for dead, no longer have the tools of their trade with them.
The skills of the development officer rotate around the clever use of language. I have bamboozled corporate sponsors of their money. I’ve made cold calls that charmed little old ladies out of their Social Security checks. I’ve found money when there was none to be found. Mastery of your native language will make you a better fundraiser. It is the essential tool for the job.
Your deployment of language will be different from mine. Continuing our mercenary analogy, a modern military squad usually consists of several roles working in concert. Scouts, a machine gun team, fire support, and non-commissioned officers. A mercenary outfit knows the strengths of the individual members and deploys accordingly.
I come back to one method of fundraising again and again. I can’t help myself. It’s the way I’m wired. If you were to open my brain, you’d find a lot of corroded leads, paper-clipped connections, and sparking capacitors. But you’d also see a few connections in there working. One of them connects my thoughts to my fingers. Compared to the parts of the brain responsible for making good conversation at cocktail parties, this part of my brain looks sleek — diodes in place, resistors all pointed in the right direction, and barely any duct tape.
If you haven’t already guessed from the fact that you’re reading a book, I’m a writer. My pen does the lion’s share of my fundraising. If you put me into other kinds of fundraising, say, major gift work, you’ll start to see short circuits and frequent breakdowns. You might get electrocuted watching me try to handle an event.
And frankly, I think my preferred method of fundraising is the best way to get money.
While the sit-down meeting with the donor is important, it is the written word that drives mailings, it’s the written word that drives newspaper stories, it’s the written word that spells out the request for foundation funding. Boards write strategic plans3. Consultants write overpriced reports telling you what you already knew. A phone script for your phone banking night guides the callers.
A writer starts the conversation.
The writer, most often, gets drafted into the art of proposal writing. There is a secret reason that proposal writers (often called grant writers or corporate, foundation, or government relations officers, or some such) are always the coolest people in your development department.
As we discussed in Chapter 6 when covering the garbage-can theory, an annual mailing that goes out to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people each year, requires dozens of eyes. The board president wants to see it. The executive director will opine. Your staff, if you’re lucky to have one, will proofread. It will be seen by the board during their monthly two and a half minutes of fundraising talk4. I have produced annual mailings that have elicited more hours of debate than the Magna Carta.
If the final draft reads like it was designed by committee, that’s because it was.
For this reason, grant writing is my preferred method of fundraising. Pound for pound, success can bring in a tremendous amount of money. And almost nobody ever needs to know what you’re writing about. What I mean is, if you are working in a functional organization, grants can leave the organization without ever eliciting comments from the executive director or the board. Nobody except you and the program officer has time to sit down and read such a long, boring document.
In some organizations, the executive director and the board want to comment on every grant application. They want to review the grant work of the director of development. You may have experienced this yourself. I suggest not staying in those organizations. A major gift officer doesn’t have the ED watching all their interactions with the donor, so why does every written word need a double check by someone who isn’t a good writer anyway?
A grant writer can get away with gross exaggerations, embellishment, and impossible promises. And should. Literary sleight of hand has brought my missions tens of millions of dollars. By the time the reader is done with one of my grant applications, a tear runs down their cheek, and they scramble for their checkbook. That is, about a third of the time. Hit rates aren’t what they used to be5.
If you haven’t yet dipped into the fantastic world of being a mercenary pen, let me bring you through the basics of a grant application.
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