The Fundraising Survival Guide 9798985902648, 9798985902631

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
1. Fundraising Is Impossible
2. Those Who Give
3. Hunting Those Who Give
4. Those Who Govern
5. Those Who Work For Free
6. All Organizations Are Garbage
7. Finding Money For People Who Don’t Deserve It
8. Pen For Hire
9. Thanks For Nothing
10. Saving/Slaying The Profession
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Citation preview

THE FUNDRAISING SURVIVAL GUIDE

WILL CAVERLY

ARETE BOOKS

The Fundraising Survival Guide was published in the United States by Arete Books, a division of 3C Services LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Will Caverly All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form on by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in accordance with Fair Use principles, such as by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. This is a work of satire. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The version of the book you possess is unabridged. Not one word has been omitted. All images used in the text are in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Cover design by Rooster Republic Press; book design by Arete Books ISBN 979-8-9859026-4-8 ISBN 979-8-9859026-3-1 First Edition | 2022

This is for my parents.

CONTENTS Introduction 1. Fundraising Is Impossible A nonprofit does not need reserves or savings A nonprofit does not need staff A nonprofit does not need to listen to the community The Guilty and the Damned 2. Those Who Give Love of Humanity What’s Been Missed But It’s Gotten Worse The Iron Law 3. Hunting Those Who Give The Aerial View Ground Level The Study The Kill Life Eats Life 4. Those Who Govern The Patients Running the Asylum The Development Officer’s Dilemma How to Retake the Asylum 5. Those Who Work For Free Isn’t This What a Coordinator is For? It’s Not That Bad, Is It? How to Manage Volunteers 6. All Organizations Are Garbage The Peter Principle The Garbage-Can Theory Parkinson’s Law You Don’t Need to Fear 7. Finding Money For People Who Don’t Deserve It How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It

How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It How to Find Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It 8. Pen For Hire Your Introduction Your Narrative Your Budget Your Attachments A Few Myths about Grants Why You Should Write a Grant 9. Thanks For Nothing Scrambling to Thanksgiving Pauses in Calamity 10. Saving/Slaying The Profession Rationing Give Nothing to the Donor Death of a Fundraiser Notes Acknowledgments About the Author

INTRODUCTION It is with great regret that I inform you of a tragedy: your dream of fortune and fame is over. Fortune, because you have elected to play in the sewers of commerce by committing yourself to a nonprofit enterprise. Fame because you have chosen the path of development, the thankless pursuit of funding for organizations that don’t deserve it. I don’t know what brought you so low, but I have an inkling that I’d recognize you if you passed me on the street. You are underpaid and despised. You are a fundraiser, a development officer, and a sucker for a good cause. In the springtime of your life, you daydreamt of a career spent amongst exceptional people doing important work. Your idealism blossomed. The world had problems, and it was the standup folk that solved them. Not machines, not trends, not time. People. Relationships mattered, and you had enough social intelligence to understand that. You knew an exceptional person or two. Perhaps a mentor took you under their wing and set you on a righteous path. Or a parent inspired you through blisteringly hard work. Or maybe, from your careful review of world history and social trends, problems seemed resolved through a special person’s personality of motivation and grit: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Vaclav Havel, Malala Yousafzai, Gandhi. They were, after all, mortals, but mortals possessed of excellence. You revered exceptional humans during their life and thought that you could emulate them. Or, at least, follow in their footsteps. You were mistaken. The results manifested, and you came up short. Putting on the glasses of

reality, you found you suffer from metaphysical myopia. You made, or were perhaps inspired to make by the well-wishers and charlatans around you, a categorical error. You are the bartender who, upon seeing a Rabbi, an Imam, and a Priest walk into a bar, asked what the joke was. But it is you that is the joke. The Rabbi, the Imam, and the Priest don’t tip. They’ve taken vows of poverty. Now you will too. I think you’ve found the right book, though, to deal with the situation. I say that humbly as someone who has failed more often than he’s succeeded. And unless people start listening to me for once in my life, my book won’t make a difference in solving the problem, which is that fundraising is a dismal enterprise and one of the most degrading white-collar professions on the planet. Think of this book as a manual for someone who strives to excel despite the realities of fundraising. You make the choice to continue in this profession each day. You pull up your underwear and walk out your door in pursuit of enough money to keep your miserable job 1 because, really, you don’t do development work for the pay. You do it because you hate yourself and want to be a better person. We’ll get to that. There are few reasons you should take my guidance to heart or listen to anyone else peddling advice about the development world. We’re fundraisers, after all, selling mission on commission. But let me list my primary credential: I have done everything but whore myself out in pursuit of money for causes. That I never put out for donations wasn’t a matter of pride. It’s just that the gift was never big enough. Like you, I’m also an idealist who thinks well of people, even if their wellness is just a sense of well-meaning and not proof of any competency on their part. I’ve toiled for mission. I’ve worked pro bono when I should have charged and have been underpaid without even knowing it. Crucially, though, I have been a development officer and have seen it all. Every development office looks different. Some are “departments” employing tens of people, like the lumbering nonprofit titans of higher education (barely nonprofit at all, if you ask me). Or they can look like a temporary, part-time major gift officer/grant writer at an organization with an IRS Form 990 showing that it is already bankrupt. I have raised millions of dollars in larger development offices and spent hours coloring my hair gray

trying to find a $500 sponsor for a friendraiser. This book might help those in the small shops. Bringing one of the tiny nonprofits into solvency is a Herculean task. The large development offices may not have the charm you’ve come to love, but they do have a better shot at raising the big bucks. In my experience, the titanic development offices crash through the landscape, reaching into prospect’s houses to gobble up money to fund their war machine. The small fries might get the leavings-off of the giants, the crumbs falling from their gnashing teeth. But, be honest, we’ll probably just pick through what comes out the other end. That isn’t to say this book won’t suit the development officer in a large organization full of impenetrable silos, middle managers without a clue, and career-ending office politics. If I have learned anything from working in a multitude of organizations, it is that the development officer is always on their own. Unlike everyone else in the organization, we have metrics. Your metrics are your own; mine are my own. A development officer succeeds or fails on their numbers. If you work in a larger organization, this book will explain the entrepreneurial mindset that all boards say they desire but desperately fear. Self-flagellating individuals like you and me live for the challenge. When we tell stories about how we “kept that place running in spite of it all,” we leave out the drug abuse and alcoholism because it doesn’t fit the rosy picture. A carpenter needs their hammer, and a plumber needs their wrench. You’ve gotten drunk before and during a work event because it’s the charm that counts. However you got here, I wrote this book for you — a fellow traveler on a rutted, unmarked road, a path that winds through a radioactive waste depot and the local bog, past discarded dishwashers, used needles, and a dead cat. I hope the words here help you on the journey leading to your inevitable burnout. Here’s what you’ll read about: In Chapter 1, “Fundraising is Impossible,” we’ll discuss why the core motivation of the nonprofit sector, penitence, is an incredibly inefficient way to run a business. The core cultural motives behind nonprofit missions set up development professionals for certain failure since we will inevitably be the only people in the organization who care about seeking out money. We talk in depth about that hated donor in Chapter 2, “Those Who Give,”

and what drives them to get involved with philanthropy in the first place. The pathetic egotism of the gluttonous donor is demonstrated to be the pitiful enterprise it is. Hopefully, you’ll leave the chapter with a healthy sense of disgust for the people you’re supposed to solicit. Our resultant contempt segues into Chapter 3, “How to Deal With Those That Give,” where we talk about how a development professional can apply the lessons of big game hunting to taking down this most dangerous quarry. Chapter 4, “Those Who Govern,” begins this book’s turn toward the organizational embarrassments of the modern nonprofit. Dissecting the most uncouth players in the nonprofit organization, the board member, will help you escape the horror show of governance that has claimed the careers of many development professionals who came before you. Similarly, Chapter 5, “Those Who Work for Free,” centers around the volunteer, who, while not in the business of governance, can still ruin your life. We talk through the trap of volunteer management and how to escape one of the worst aspects of the nonprofit game. Our section on organizations in Chapter 6, “All Organizations are Garbage,” is a philosophical treatise drawing on the most cynical organization theories around. Nonprofits have already gone a long way to ruin your life, so it’s a great idea to understand how. Having discussed survival strategy in the nonprofit organization, we’ll turn to the tactical concerns. In Chapter 7, “Finding Money for People Who Don’t Deserve It,” you’ll encounter that perennial problem: how can I possibly raise enough money when all the organization wants to do is spend it on frivolous nonsense? The answer, in short, is that you will never be good enough. Chapter 8, “Pen For Hire,” will put the idea of never being good enough in perspective, hopefully inculcating you with a strong sense of independence as a mercenary fundraiser for hire. I’ll discuss my own love for grant writing and why selling your pen to the highest bidder is a way to make a living. Chapter 9, “Thanks for Nothing,” will introduce a novel strategy for dealing with acknowledgment and stewardship. The upshot is that you shouldn’t do it at all because it’s a waste of time. There, I just saved you fifteen minutes. We end with Chapter 10, “Saving/Slaying the Profession,” which wraps up our discussions on fundraising by trying to imagine a world without us, the humble fundraisers. Severing the destructive dialectical relationship

between donor and development could usher in a new era. In this bright future, real work can be done, and all the wrongs of philanthropy can be righted by fixing what’s wrong with the world. Throughout the text, you’ll find various examples of the fantastic foibles and farcical failings of the not-for-profit enterprise. These examples are all entirely satirical but, in my attempt at emulating the best satire I’ve read, contain the inescapable truths of our discipline. I’m hoping this satire will point out and criticize the shortfalls of the nonprofit industry. The bottom line is that I want these chapters to comfort you as you search for meaning. I understand the mission you’re on. As bad as we want to jettison outdated and, frankly, idiotic views of the primacy of goodness in the universe, people like you and me can’t. We do good acts because we can’t accept that we were born in the right zip code, that luck plays more of a role in life than we think, or that we sit by while injustices happen. It is not acceptable that we development professionals are smarter and better looking than everyone around us. Life is unfair. We’re the salespeople of a better world. We’re those who understand how justice and goodness can be brought into the world via shameless exploitation of the public’s money. You are a crusader in a strange land. It’s best you start learning how to survive here.

CHAPTER 1

FUNDRAISING IS IMPOSSIBLE THE DIFFERENCE between a nonprofit organization and a for-profit organization is that the board of directors doesn’t profit — “inure” in the parlance of the Internal Revenue Service — from the activity of the organization. Instead, it is society that should reap the business’s elusive profit. Yes, there are other differences, but this is the primary difference in writing between some scuzzy, cutthroat for-profit enterprise and the angelic 501(c)(3). However, through some mechanism of cosmic horror, the word “nonprofit” has come to take on additional meaning. Nonprofit has become synonymous with words like virtuous, sacrificing, goodness, piety, and humility. Those involved with nonprofit work aren’t doing a job for pay. They are serving 1. I cannot stand for this interpretation. Rather than being (or at least acting) good in this world, nonprofit professionals, board members, volunteers, and other hangers-on have instead co-opted a trashy misunderstanding of the tax code. Those involved with nonprofits seem to believe that they can live with a smug attitude simply by being mission adjacent to a nonprofit enterprise. Who knew a trick of the tax code could turn into a way of life? And because of this self-assurance, the nonprofit takes on a new characteristic not explained in the tax code but fully believed by all involved. The nonprofit corporation starts to believe it is exempt from good business practices. The effects of this misapprehension have destroyed organizations with wonderful, soaring missions. It is the reason that the development officer’s job is impossible. Don’t believe me? Let me provide you with an example of how this

exemption from good business practices plays out by comparing a nonprofit to a real business. When you’re done chuckling, read on. A nonprofit development department should resemble a business development or sales team in the private sector, with clear goals and steady deliverables. In the private sector, a firm selling software can analyze IT trends, gauge the market penetration of competitor products, and spend time on the horn with customers. The team has weekly meetings to review prospective clients, research hot prospects who might want to upgrade their service, and work hand in hand with marketing to create copy appealing to their clientele. The sales department’s job is to sell product. Failing to sell product will result in termination. If the sales department at a SAAS firm identifies a customer (say, a midsize company flush with cash and looking to expand), the sales team is responsible for putting together a response to the target company’s RFP, attempts to meet them at an industry conference, or even cold calls them. Everyone scrambles. The CEO, who has responsibility for revenue, monitors sales team activity at a high level, intervening when needed. The company's board of directors makes sure that the CEO meets their metrics. In the end, the sales team makes a sale. Or it doesn’t. In the latter case, someone often gets fired. Common advice runs that a nonprofit development team is the sales department of its industry (again, please continue reading after you stop laughing.) Development sells message and mission for a price. We are peddlers of philosophy, rarely selling something you can hold in your hand. Donors are asked to feel and give based on feeling. But the sales analogy falls apart quickly. Let’s play out an equivalent scenario that might happen at your nonprofit. The lone development officer at a small nonprofit identifies a midsize donor, flush with cash and looking to get involved with a new charitable cause. The development officer checks the donor database and sees that this person was asked for money ten years ago but never had any further solicitation. The solicitor is listed. Luckily, this solicitor is a current board member! Awesome. The development officer rushes to the executive director, excited to deliver the news. The ED shrugs and says they have no interest in fundraising. The stunned development officer walks away as the ED goes back to drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

Already annoyed, the development officer contacts the board member who did the soliciting, hoping to find some leverage to solicit a gift. There is no good news. The development officer hears back that the donor said something about one of the board member’s female cousins on Facebook several years ago. A flame war erupted over a blurry meme. The midsize donor was called a “see-you-next-Tuesday.” As a result, the midsize donor will not likely give money and should not be solicited at all. The development officer is instructed not to contact the donor under any circumstances, even if the nonprofit headquarters has been occupied by terrorists demanding ransom. Now depressed and frantic, the development officer ignores the order and reaches out to other board members, volunteers, and staff to get a handle on the Facebook-insult sequence of events. Maybe the development officer hopes the donor can be salvaged. Maybe the donor didn’t understand what a “see-you-next-Tuesday” is and thought it was a promise to get lunch next week. A minor email shooting war begins when the organization sniffs out the development officer’s efforts. The development officer begins to feel sick. An emergency meeting of the board is called. The development officer’s honor, intelligence, and work ethic are challenged in the minutes, and they are dressed down for their attitude. The development officer asks the board, “What should I do, then? How should I raise money if I’m not going to try and contact donors?” “Fundraising is your job,” everyone says. The board then discusses how the budget has a hole in it the size of Texas, caused by the purchase of twelve thousand cases of custom t-shirts so hideous that people wouldn’t use them to dress their dog. Guess who needs to raise some money? The development officer is cowed. Sitting at their desk, they contemplate quitting. But this is their life now. If you’re at all familiar with the fundraising life in a modern nonprofit, this scenario won’t be unusual to you. Notice that at no point is the idea ever entertained that bygones are bygones, social media drama isn’t worth destroying relationships over, and that if the nonprofit continues to ignore customers, also known as donors 2, it will go out of business. Once a nonprofit has embraced the idea that the organization is exempt from normal business practices, all sorts of incredibly stupid conclusions

begin to bloom. Here are a few of them:

A NONPROFIT DOES NOT NEED RESERVES OR SAVINGS Contrary to popular belief, a fundraiser does not create wine out of water. I have been told too many times, as a sort of perverse compliment, to “work your fundraising magic.” I am not Midas. I have no magic touch. The money gained through fundraising operations is the result of laborious effort. Checks coming in should be cherished and hailed by a castrati choir. Successful events should end with the prostration of board, staff, and volunteers at the feet of the development officer responsible. This never happens. Never has. However, the least the organization could do is save the money. For most small nonprofit organizations, a surplus should be spent. The less time it’s in the bank, the better. Why? “We aren’t in this to profit,” says the self-assured board member. “The rainy day is today.” Flights of fancy strike the executive director and the board like arrows borne from Cupid’s bow. Stabbed through the heart, they fall in love with the idea of a new building with depreciation equal to the annual fund. Or they fall to their knees in awe of a competitor’s fancy annual report that costs five times as much as your annual mailing. Cash sitting around is seen as wasted unless it “does something.” What they do not understand is that checks should be hearkened by a choir of castrati is because donations are never guaranteed. Every donation is a negotiation with a hostile party. And according to the tax code, there is no reason a dollar in the door needs to leave as ashes out the chimney. Harvard University, for instance, sits on roughly $34 billion in the bank as of the time of writing. That is equivalent to the annual Gross Domestic Product of Cameroon, a country of twenty-six million people. And I would argue that we get much more bang for our buck out of Cameroon than we do out of Harvard. Nonprofits that believe themselves to be exempt from good business practices don’t understand a “rainy day fund.” In fact, many small organizations shrug their shoulders at the weather forecast. It’s always sunny

in their insipid minds. Little do they know that the Sahara is always sunny as well.

A NONPROFIT DOES NOT NEED STAFF Did you know that the staff at the small nonprofit organization are fortunate? Their job is easy because the board knows exactly how to run things. A board of directors at a small nonprofit comes into the job already understanding best practices. They know your job better than you do. Sure, their presumably successful career had nothing to do with your nonprofit’s enterprise, but that doesn’t stop them. They are enlightened and prepared to share that enlightenment with you. We’ll go into great detail on board members and their personalities in a few chapters from now. But one of the more fantastic phenomena of the nonprofit organization is the extent to which the staff is seen as secondary to just about anyone else. The smaller the nonprofit, the truer this maxim. Rather than lean on the staff for their expertise, the board of directors will often take the directive portion of their name seriously. The end run around the institution’s executive officer, whether they’re executive director, president, or CEO, happens so frequently in some organizations that it could be an easy method for reducing the power bill. Simply coil copper wire around the executive director until they cannot breathe. Then run your nonprofit as usual. The rotation of the executive director between staff and board becomes so rapid that they can create an independent electromagnetic field. You may be able to sell power back to the electric company with this method, thus creating a revenue stream. I bet you the board hasn’t thought of that. Not only is fundraising not spared the board’s expertise, but it is also the special purview of board committees, the source of the desperate treasurer’s next heart attack, and everyone else’s business. The content of every sentence written becomes the subject of scrutiny and debate. The meaning of words twists in the wind. Those who know no better can’t contain the void of their knowledge. The compulsion to share ignorance is too great. You, the development officer, apparently do not know what you’re talking about.

A NONPROFIT DOES NOT NEED TO LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY Second only to disdain for staff is disdain for the public. Schools hate their students. Social service agencies detest their clients. Museums hate the people squinting at the sculptures. The public does not know what’s good for them. A nonprofit organization undertakes its mission not to benefit the ignorant public but to correct them in their wicked ways. Without the nonprofit, the public would drown in their own drool. “Pick up those dragging knuckles!” the nonprofit declares. “Without us, you would fade back into your hovels to die of bat-borne disease.” It is critical that the public understand their subordinate position to the nonprofit’s leadership. This is done through two methods that run in opposite directions. When combined, the two methods synthesize in a social reaction that resembles a science fair baking soda/vinegar volcano. First, the nonprofit exudes unearned competence. Anything that makes the nonprofit look less than confident in its own activity is curtailed. As the priest stands elevated on his altar dictating the Word, so the nonprofit issues its decrees. As soon as the 501(c)(3) designation comes in, the nonprofit dusts off the wig, dons the toga, checks the laurels in the mirror, and walks into the public arena, spewing polemics without a hint of self-doubt. The second method for creating an aloofness from the public is strengthening internal coherence. The board, staff, and volunteers are drawn from the public, yes. But they must be educated. The method for doing this is tried and true. New members of the nonprofit are anointed through ritual hazing. That ceremonial torture runs from social shaming all the way up to the bejeweled paddle kept next to last year’s audit. Those new to the nonprofit soon learn that whatever previous expertise they gained must be unlearned, or face a vigorous beating. “We don’t do things that way around here” is the refrain when suggestions are raised. Cold, chilling emails will follow. Upon induction into the nonprofit secret society, either through suppression of outside knowledge and doubt or total acceptance of the power of the nonprofit’s mission, one receives their hood, dagger, and volunteer manual. The gnostic life is not easy, but it pays dividends if you think the most of yourself.

THE GUILTY AND THE DAMNED These three contentions (eschewing of staff, community, and savings) and their foundational concept (that a nonprofit doesn’t need to act like a business) pour forth from the nonprofit community in a deluge of counterproductive stupidity, the Storm of the Century of awful management and operations. Unlike you, the cunning development officer, the rest of the personnel resemble whirling dervishes, spinning themselves into a frenzy amidst the storm. Where does the rejection of business practices come from? How can the nonprofit professional, the board member, and the volunteer all boast of moralism while making destructive business decisions? The explanation is penitence. Repentance. Contrition. People are seeking moral repair. Your work will be impossible because penitence is an inefficient way to do good. It’s impossible to succeed in fundraising because it is based on coerced behavior from those threatened with cosmic retribution. There’s nothing more pathetic than the sinner who tries to right their wrongs immediately after sinning. Yet, that’s precisely the energy the nonprofit uses to fuel its operations. A mason does not build a concrete wall upon a foundation of sand. The janitor does not neglect to add soap before mopping. An auto mechanic would be a fool to eschew grease where metal meets metal. But a nonprofit hates its staff, hates the public, and hates saving money because it doesn’t think it needs the tools of business. Nonprofit personnel engage in activities anathema to a well-functioning organization to fight against the darkness. The abstract hatred of good business practices comes from a deep, dark, and very personal place. It’s the site of profound guilt and existential dread. The people who work and play in nonprofits live in that mental space every day of their lives. The nonprofit’s momentum flows from the site of spiritual energy that mystics tap into when mumbling for mercy to ancestors thousands of years passed. It’s the place where your raw and frightening dreams take place. That guilt and dread stem from many

root causes: an ill-gotten fortune, Nazi ancestry, things parents said to them in their formative years, how they got rejected for the field hockey team during tryouts in high school, or the roofies they put into people’s drinks back when they could get away with it. Catharsis motivates. Like the married man who has drunken, unprotected sex with multiple prostitutes each night Preparatory sketch for The Ibaraki rushing to the confessional, the nonprofit Demon (by Shibata Zeshin) - Public Domain organization is filled with people seeking penitence. The nonprofit organization subsists on people suffering the interplay of guilt and redemption. Therefore, it can never run well. Instead of running a business, those who run nonprofits have an ulterior motive of righting their wretched, personal wrongs. By providing penitence, nonprofits attract the guilty. In doing so, nonprofits also gain a workforce. Not a good one, but a workforce nonetheless. Some place the nonprofit in “The Third Sector,” differentiating it from the for-profit and the public sectors. Books written about the subject talk about the special nature of the nonprofit, the value-driven corporation, the NGO. They avoid the subject of penitence, though. Perhaps because it’s not something to talk about in polite company. They’ll talk about service, but they’ll never talk about soul. The penitence angle explains why nonprofit staff, board, and volunteers possess a deep disgust for money. Not their money, of course. Their money is fine. If a board member, say, got their fortune from their parents, they deserved it. If that board member built their company from the ground up, they earned every dollar. If the same board member stole that money, the other person should have taken better care. Many nonprofit staff aren’t making dough. So if their household ledger is solvent, it’s for some other reason. Maybe they inherited money like a board member. Perhaps it’s a second career after they made the big bucks on Wall Street or in DC. Or their spouse is the breadwinner, taking on a serious job while the other chases a quixotic dream of “helping.” Many nonprofit staff

collect various forms of financial assistance from the government, or raid the food bank when they’ve done their shift at the NPO. Others spend recklessly and live in perpetual indebtedness. In nonprofits, I have met individuals with spending habits that would make a mobbed-up CPA blush. Point being, the board members sitting on a dragon’s hoard of riches, the executive director working eighty-hour weeks, the program director’s embarrassing salary, the minimum wage administrative personnel, and the donors waiting to donate only when the Rapture arrives all feel uncomfortable around money. This explains why nobody other than your development office is willing to raise funds. Raising funds is an admission that money is real and that the business, at its heart, is about money. Admitting that money matters does not repair spiritual damage. But you’d never guess that working in a nonprofit. Other staff will moan about not having enough money, sure, but never stoop so low as to do anything about it. You’ve probably heard many fellow nonprofit do-gooders lament the reality of cash flow, saying that the nonprofit “should not have to worry about money.” What does that even mean? Finding money for a nonprofit is a necessary evil cornered into a suburb of the organization. That part of the organization belongs to people who aren’t deluded about the nature of money — the development office. Collecting that disgusting congealed purchasing power, money, is the development office’s job. You might do it as part of a team. You might do it by yourself. But it ultimately falls to you, and nobody else is going to help. Isn’t making payroll in the next month important to these people? It is important, but not as important as penitence. And penitence is an inefficient way to do good. The development office’s job is to engage in the forbidden arts of money, using a sort of black magic alchemy to fund the nonprofit machine. Fundraising often seems to rely on moon phase, the patterning of fallen bones, and the picture painted by a mug-bound sludge of cheap coffee. The dirty pages from a donor list at an event twenty years ago are a grimoire whispering undead secrets. Meanwhile, as you toil in a defiled understory crypt, performing fundraising necromancy and subsisting on fried roaches and stewed rats, the rest of the nonprofit does their penitent work. But penitence is not an efficient way to do good.

Contrast this penitential attitude with other motivations for doing things in the world — for instance, the profit motive. Often seen as vicious and unempathetic by the nonprofit sphere, the profit motive is nonetheless pure. It has no regrets. The profit motive, I do the things that will bring me gain, or, our work increases shareholder value, never has to obfuscate. It does not beg. Penitence is an inefficient way to do good. This religious attitude also explains the imminent failure of so many nonprofit organizations. While you, the development officer, attempt to have a career, you are in the minority. Many of those working in the nonprofit sector have a death wish. They want to see it fail. For those seeking penitence, the failure of a nonprofit fulfills a twisted eschatology. While devastating for your career as a development officer, failure is a positive for the penitent. Failure means martyrdom. The penitent can move on with their meager lives, secure in the knowledge of the riches of the afterlife. They tried. They failed. But it was a good try. They might go back to the for-profit sector afterwards, feeling that their soul was cleansed by their service to a cause. Penitence is an inefficient way to do good. Meanwhile, in the dank dungeon of the building, development officers torture the same tired phrasings to summon some primal capital force, anything worth putting into the bank account. Sometimes they come up with surprising donations: a shack on the other side of the country, old East India Company stock certificates, a souped-up pickup truck with cocaine in the fabric of the seats, a warehouse full of crude oil owned by a child molester. You take what you can get in this business. The CFO or the treasurer comes down the stairs to check on the development officer occasionally, sees a set of bloodshot eyes in the gloom, and goes back upstairs to tinker with QuickBooks. The executive director doesn’t go downstairs at all. They ask you to provide a report that they will savage until it no longer looks like what you gave them. In your version of the report, you explain how there is no money to be had. The ED massages the report until it says the opposite. The board, in turn, makes suggestions on how sharp a knife must be to sacrifice a goat to whichever secret deity judges giving. If the nonprofit ran itself like a business, it would mean accepting the

occult nature of the fundraising exercise. Everyone would train on the dark art of fundraising. Instead, the development office remains in the subbasement of sub-basements, the catacombs of the nonprofit world, doing what needs to be done while suggestions roll down the stairs like severed heads. Penitence is an inefficient way to do good. Back when I made the mistake of taking physics, the professor would stand at the whiteboard and begin scrawling. The “proofs” used letters and numbers familiar to me but in a manner that supposedly unlocked the universe. I rarely left class with any new knowledge other than a renewed dissatisfaction with my own intellect. But I do remember something from my torture sessions. All proofs started with e=mc 2. The equation was the basis for wonderful things. In these proofs, you had to start with what you knew was true. If you began from an incorrect theorem, you arrived at ludicrous conclusions. Central to the nonprofit is the truth that penitence is an inefficient way to do good. That leaves it to us, the occult fundraiser, to make the possible out of the impossible. Let’s start trying to survive by learning more about the object of many passions, the man or woman of the hour — the donor.

CHAPTER 2

THOSE WHO GIVE TO BEGIN TALKING ABOUT PHILANTHROPISTS, I first want to focus on a rare individual. This person may not even exist. Meet the almost mythic anonymous donor. I don’t just mean someone that gives you a gift and asks to remain anonymous. I mean that they are unknown from the moment of donation to the stewardship phase. I mean that this donor gives to their choice of nonprofit in a dirty, unmarked envelope. They evade security cameras, dropping donations in the giving box at 2 AM on a starless night. Or perhaps they slip it unnoticed into the pocket of the development officer at an event, like a benevolent reverse pickpocket. This is the quiet local janitor who dies, is buried in a pine box, and leaves his oil arbitrage fortune to the local public library without mentioning his intent to anyone during his lifetime. If such a person exists, how incredible their life must be! Does the mythical anonymous donor’s home smell like honey and baking bread? Does an apple pie sit on the windowsill each Sunday afternoon? What kind of pets does the mythical anonymous owner keep? Some critters live in this mythical donor’s home, certainly, all of which are well-behaved and manicured. Every night, the anonymous donor massages their wizened face and genitals with the rarest of essential oils, says a brief but profound prayer to a benevolent deity, and slips nude into a velvet-lined coffin. The mythical donor only disrupts their angelic routine when some development officer is tearing their hair out and prepared to hail Satan if that’s what it takes to raise some damn money around here. How these unicorns of the nonprofit fundraising world made their money is anyone’s guess. Likely they worked the edges of capitalism, never

inflicting usury or sketchy deals on anyone, always playing fair, and settling all debts promptly. Those people are rarer than the Hope Diamond and, like the Hope Diamond, deadly to pursue. You can be certain that as soon as you solicit the mythical anonymous donor, they’ll disappear into the night, never to be found. Besides, only the most heartless development professional would solicit this saint. You and your organization don’t deserve their money. Cryptozoology is the study of animals out of folklore. You know, Bigfoot and the Chupacabra and the Loch Ness Monster. I propose that we form a similar discipline of intellectual deviants to learn more about the perfect donor, the donor of legend, The One Who Wishes Never to Be Acknowledged. Cryptozoologists hike blasted tundras, scorching deserts, and livid jungles to study creatures of legend. We fundraisers would be parsing lists of that mysterious lump of donors marked “anonymous,” the palimpsest of every nonprofit organization’s database 1. Instead, we deal daily with the rest of the giving rabble. The affinity groups. Alumni. Former board members. Whichever of your friends you duped into giving to your nonprofit. I have no qualms with counting myself as one of these imperfect, giving souls. I give to charities every year. And I have shamelessly used my giving as a rhetorical device. “I’ll have you know, as someone who donates to environmental causes, that I think this new Pizza Hut construction has to be stopped!” Or, “I donate to the local food bank. Though it’s not much, I still want families to eat, but I won’t bother to contribute to helping them navigate the twisted political and economic systems we live under!” Or, “I give to the local fire department, but only because I’m afraid they won’t send a fire truck when my house is on fire!” When I’ve given, I’ve given for acknowledgment and ego assuagement. I want that free mug. I want the invite to the gala. I’ve given to secure favors and ingratiate myself with players in the community. Besides the mythical donor (who may or may not exist), do we ever give of our wealth and fortune for entirely unselfish ends? Does altruism exist? Of course not.

LOVE OF HUMANITY If you’ve studied ancient Greek like other losers 2, you know that the word philanthropy means “love of humanity.” The Greek philosopher Plutarch used the concept of a philanthropist, someone who acted out of love of humanity, to also speak of politeness, grandiosity, and charity. The entire concept of democracy, he argued, was borne out of a love for human beings. Plutarch never lived in the 21 st century. Get a load of our breed of philanthropist, Plootes. Around the time of writing this chapter, Mackenzie Scott, the profoundly single 3, divorced wife of billionaire Jeff Bezos, made a “gift” of $1.7 billion to various charities, apparently following up on a pledge to give away the majority of her wealth during her lifetime. She talked in high-falutin’ terms about how inspirational figures working in nonprofits inspired her to action. This all happened during the year 2020, an utter disaster of a year that included a plague, fighting and flame in the streets, and a depressing election between two septuagenarians. Yet, if Scott thought she could impress me, she failed. During that dumpster fire of a year, she gave away 2.8% of her fortune ($1.7B out of roughly $60B). Astounding, right? An amount of $1.7 billion is not even conceivable to me. It is an amount of money I will never experience. In fact, if given that amount of money, I would probably burst into flames. But anyone with half a brain knows that an endowment can pull 4–5% every year. Even if she had the entire fortune in safe investments, Scott had given the skim off her milk 4. This is because the 21 st-century philanthropist possesses a dearth of courage. I have listened to incredible stories of organizations back in the day that had volunteers — not board members, but volunteers — who donated personal fortunes to support their cause. I have heard histories of sacrifice and heartache, of sit-ins and shut-outs. I’ve heard of board members mortgaging their own homes to help finance a new headquarters for the nonprofit. In the annals of giving of many organizations are gifts from decades past that, should a lucky development officer pull in the inflationadjusted equivalent, would provide them with job security for life.

People used to give more. Plain and simple. Going further back in history, we can find the greatest donation of all. According to Michael Hudson 5, the word for sin and the word for debt are identical in many languages. Jesus Christ, in Hudson’s account, died for the sins of humanity, a concept which at the time would have been associated with the clearing of debts, a gift from the creditor class. If you take this at face value, it means that Jesus donated his life to save us all. Can you imagine a 21 st-century philanthropist dying for their cause? I can’t. “Hungry” is the word I use to describe 21 st-century philanthropists. They prepare daily for the feasting. Their flab chafes. Days old sweat makes them reek. The 21 st-century philanthropists have been fed over and over again, but they still salivate at the table of the ego, breath stinking of the recognition they’ve received over the years. As you’ll recall from Freud, the ego plays the go-between role of the id (the center of primitive instinct) and the superego (the center of morality). It needs constant reinforcement in weak individuals, lest they fall into indescribable primitivism, or worse, into acting like a moral person. Without support (an ego jock strap, so to say), the weak individual starts to sag. If the banquet table of the ego is empty, the philanthropist’s fatty rolls begin to jiggle. Convulsions take them. Their transformation either into a base creature or a saint has begun. I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess which way most go. Philanthropists give to receive a feast to soothe the hunger pangs of ego. Their weak hold over their soul requires that interaction with charity. And who delivers the feast to them? Who soothes the ego of the philanthropist bellying up to the banquet? You, of course. The development officer whisks into the dining room with the platter, announces the course, and lays it out for the donor. You, as a development officer, provide the ego-boosting feast for the donor. Countless times during the giving process, I have wrestled with donors over the nature and scope of their gifts. Giving is not an event; it is a process. A dialectic develops 6 between donor and development. The dialectic takes the form of a push and pull: I push on them until they cry uncle, and they make demands on me until I lose my mind. The worst type of donor (standing in stark contrast to our mythological

saintly donor) asks you to grovel. Groveling takes many forms. It can be begging, of course, or kissing the ring. It could be recognition in a magazine or on a website or gratitude spoken aloud during the annual gala. The philanthropist often pushes the limits of what’s appropriate. You got the gift, but at what cost? The answer, of course, is your own ego. The philanthropist drank away energy and time from you, rendering you into a husk of a person, while the donor got fatter and slovenlier with each interaction. This exercise of exerting power through the dangling of a gift is an art and an ego exercise. You know the drill. The donor makes demands on time and energy and pulls away when the organization doesn’t do what they want. If the disgusting, immature slob we call a philanthropist could fix their own ego, they wouldn’t have to talk to a development officer at all. They rely on you to feed their weak character. Is this how it has always worked? Did those seeking funds to pay for, say, an orphanage, always have to visit a narcissistic prick to find money for dispossessed children? Did development officers of yore also pull kids’ fingers out of their noses to take marginally acceptable Instagram shots so that the donor who gave you a measly $5,000 last year will respond to your next appeal? How did we arrive at such a mutually toxic and abusive relationship between development officer and donor?

WHAT’S BEEN MISSED Once upon a time, in the olden days, when a household only needed one income to live on, polio was in the water, and everything tasted better, there were no “development officers.” If you told someone you were a development officer, they’d probably ask whether you were “some kinda pinko.” There were no development officers, just people working for the cause. They might have had titles, or they might not. Development as a discipline, a vocation, and a science did not exist. Don’t believe me? Go ahead, look up the history of development. It’s difficult to pin down, but it’s not one of those ancient professions like the law

or prostitution. And it’s unfortunate that development doesn’t have a history. If development remains unexamined, fundraisers like you and I and others will continue to flounder, not knowing our role in this world. Seek knowledge. Know thyself. Get a grip. Fundraising as such existed in the domain of an institution far older than the nonprofit corporation. Fundraising was born in faith. Back when you believed in a just and benevolent God, you probably had some inkling of faith. Since then, the only thing you believe in is that one can never have a fully stocked liquor cabinet. You’ve started to believe in riding the white horse or the power of a risky sex life for one’s good mood. I don’t have to explain God to you, do I? Our Father? The Big Cheese? Okay, good. In Jewish traditions, ma’aser kesafim edicts told the believer that they had to give up 10% of their wealth to a charity of some kind. Jesus later taught that justice, mercy, and faithfulness were required from all, and Corinthians made loose recommendations to give at pace with earnings. Muslims made the zakat, or almsgiving, one of the five pillars of the faith. Outside the Abrahamic faiths, the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors of China made tithing part of the tax code. Eternity was on the line, either your soul or the souls of others. Fulfilling the charitable giving side of your affairs with more than an acceptable amount of sloth wouldn’t be bringing you much luck in the hereafter. It seems to me, from my intense Wikipedia research, that a 10% figure has turned out to be a nice place to land for many religious traditions. Cough up ten percent of your income or enjoy dipping your toes in hot lava for all eternity. For some, the beginning of modern fundraising is traced back to Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. This treatise put responsibility on the donor troubled by the state of the world to give back. I also traced another thread to the later creation of the “fundraising campaign” at the YMCA by two men, Pierce and Ward, whose work now gives you night sweats and indigestion. There are other figures circulating that created the fundraising machine we see today. Still, I pick two American figures because I’m American and two east coasters because I’m from the east coast. I will choose whomever I want for this short history of fundraising because I don’t care what anyone else thinks 7. Let’s tell these two stories here to explain what we can observe about the

beginning of the relationship between development and the donor. First, we’ll start with an excerpt from Carnegie’s Wealth: This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial result for the community-the man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer-doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review, 148, no. 391 (June 1889): 653, 65762. Does this sound like any donors you know? Me neither. But what you do find is at least some appeal to the ideal. Carnegie really does buy into his own marketing because, over a century later, a lot of my part of the country is named after him. According to Andy, those who have wealth, in their benevolence, are to manage that wealth for the greater good, for those of us who are too stupid to have gotten rich. We can at least hope that those waltzing around in evening gowns, hydrating themselves with dry champagne and dusting their noses with cocaine, are at least trying to live up to Carnegie’s Platonic ideal. What you see in Carnegie’s essay is a philanthropist in the autumn of his life (he’d die in 1919) beginning to feel wise enough to preach to other rich folks about what they should be doing with their dollars. But just as important was that he created a standard that existed independently of religion. I’d argue that his essay, and the general thrust of the movement, came out of the industrial revolution that blew up his fortune. The industrial revolution, as you probably know, created the modern world. It may have also knocked God off His throne because we didn’t need God anymore. We could manage our own affairs and live by the standards We created. The

benefits of the industrial revolution flowed right into Carnegie’s bank account. The philanthropist became God. Tithing 10%? Hell no. How about becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren? That’s more like it. It was 20 years after Carnegie’s missive when Frank L. Pierce and his buddy Charles Sumner Ward changed the face of fundraising. Pierce and Ward were responsible for finding money for the YMCA 8, to do what all nonprofits do when they’re bored: erect a building. To give you an idea of the job titles at play, Ward was “general secretary.” Not “development officer” or “advancement The Campaign Clock, Pierce and director” or “fundraiser.” Ward Pierce and Ward had failed so far. Out of a $350,000 goal, they still had $80,000 to go, even with a gift from a Rockefeller in the bank 9. Like most fundraisers, they probably went home to their tired spouses and complained about the utter depravity and greed of mankind. We all know that the last tenth of a fundraising campaign is the hardest. But, in a fit of inspiration, they combined their ask with a rising method of communication — marketing. In its infancy, marketing would hit its stride on Madison Avenue, but Pierce and Ward seized it just before it became ubiquitous. They cast about for enticements. How could they get people to drop dollars? In a brilliant move, they identified TIME as a catalyst for gifts. Their 27-day campaign became one of the first of its kind. By setting donors against each other in a race against a “campaign clock,” they secured corporate underwriting from the local department store. They used this and other corporate donations to pay for advertising. This was the first time the bloodsucking campaign consultant appeared in the flesh. The “YMCA School” of fundraising was born, as well as the timed campaign. Having been involved in a few timed campaigns, and with the acid reflux to prove it, I know that the YMCA School successfully made its way into the fundraising zeitgeist as a legitimate fundraising model. But you’re saying to me, Bro, the YMCA is at its core a Christian

organization, right? You said this was all secular. It’s in the name, you idiot. Well, shut up a second. Because you need to follow Charles Sumner Ward’s career. He left the YMCA for the Red Cross, that modest medical organization you might have heard of. Bro, you say, the Red CROSS is a CROSS because it’s— Stop interrupting. I’m trying to tell a story. Red Cross founder Clara Barton got kicked to the curb soon after the arrival of the proto-fundraisers, as all founders eventually do 10. The later leadership of the Red Cross turned it into a Progressive-era institution, emphasizing scientific reform and efficiency through good regulation. Gone was the little Lutheran chapel in Dansville, New York, where Clara Barton started it. The Red Cross now had Charles Sumner Ward out there fundraising for them. He promised to double the Red Cross’s $50 million campaign. And he did it. What is the fundraising clock doing that’s so damn effective? I’d argue it’s the foil to the narcissistic, patronizing Carnegie model of philanthropy. Much like tithing, which creates pangs of panic about the world to be, the clock creates panic for the ego. The ego, the “I” of every sentence you’ve uttered about yourself, comes under attack when presented with time. This is because, in a world without the fear of God, there exists an immense fear of Death. Youth, while celebrated, dances out of reach as time passes. Fatality spins with the hands of the clock. An unfulfilled ego starts to gnaw at the bellies of the fat philanthropists as the campaign clock counts down. They get worried. The food runs out when the music stops. Recall that a midnight visit by the phantasm of a business partner didn’t get Ebenezer Scrooge to give. It finally took seeing the “Spirit of Christmas Future,” namely Death personified, to consider giving to the poor. By appealing to the donor’s sense of fatality and death, the development officer mines the depths of human psychology. It’s why planned giving is such a pain in the rear end. Who wants to think about their demise? This is the Pierce and Ward legacy. We thus discover the origins of the development discipline. Development came about in a Godless time when philanthropists needed others to soothe their egos for them. The rewritten rules of the Carnegie era came into the dangerous and often cloudy world of psychology, a discipline as reliable as meteorology. I have always suspected, but have no real evidence to support it

and never will, that psychological interventions like talk therapy have not become more successful over time. People are not getting any less manic nor more serene. Plain old vanilla fear of death is a neat and effective replacement for religion’s certainty about the afterlife. Applied psychology functions to help people deal with their inevitable demise. Weaponized, we find fundraising. 11 Use it.

BUT IT’S GOTTEN WORSE Anyone running a 27-day campaign with a circular clock hoping to double their money will be laughed out of board meetings. In fact, the campaign clock seems quaint. It was a good idea, like the wheel, but now we need to make it out of steel, not a circular block of granite chipped into shape by a neanderthal with a stone axe. Today, when I plan a campaign, I plan it years ahead of time. A sizable capital campaign should have one to two years of ramp up, with a department usually supplemented by any number of consultant bandits there to help 12. There are campaigns running right now that will last seven to ten years. Wild. Fundraising as a discipline has gone from a buffet meal at the ego table to a grand banquet. It has gone from resembling an Olive Garden with unlimited breadsticks to the Manchu-Han Imperial Feast of historical Imperial China, with its 108 dishes served in six meals over three days. Complexity has increased, and the development officer must keep up. The world has changed after a century of modern fundraising. The old ways don’t work anymore. As I alluded to before, Madison Avenue arose around the same time as Ward doubled his money at the Red Cross. Advertising began its reign over human consciousness. As society’s complexity increased, so did the means of outreach. Many have written about “Peak Attention.” This is the idea that the individual is now exposed to media every hour of every day, meaning that all forms of attention-grabbing now have diminishing returns. In other words, some believe that the amount of “touches” it takes you to buy a product has increased. That must include fundraising. Next to most forms of advertising, though, fundraising looks pathetic. In

fact, it’s demanded that we do marketing in a humble way, lest we appear too eager for money. Don’t make the mailing too flashy. Don’t wear too nice of a jacket to the donor visit. Keep driving that Toyota Camry. And so on.

Freud's diagrams (from 'The Ego and the Id', 1923) - Public Domain

A lack of sophistication bites us in the ass, though. That last 10% of income once dedicated to Good Works, if it even continued into today (it doesn’t 13), now has to compete with any number of ego-fulfillment schemes. Disney Plus, TikTok, Instagram, Pornhub. None of these remind the average person of what they owe others in society. We can no longer simply put up a picture of a clock, kick up the heels, and take a nap at our desks. The reason for this is simple. Donors are hungrier than ever. We now need to provide them with societies and galas with their names on them, grovel, and brownnose in new and creative ways. Donors demand more and more ways to have their love of humanity recognized by others. As you try harder and harder to flaunt all the benefits of giving to your organization, others in your industry work just as hard. Peak Attention has reached fundraising. The modern development officer is thus trapped in an arm’s race as deadly as that between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is an arm’s race of ego maintenance. Development officers race against one another to give the elusive donor the mental relief they seek. The kitchen bringing plates to the table has

increased in size. Cooks good and bad run around, spilling ingredients all over the floor, burning themselves, and sweating into the broth. In so many ways, we are the secular therapists of the monied classes, whitewashing the sins of their wealth, petting their egos, and trying our hardest to fund payroll for the next two weeks. At the start of this chapter, we mentioned the mythic anonymous donor. That phantom, the warlock of giving. The reason that this person is so rare is because of the ego maintenance function of the nonprofit. Without a sea change, donors will expect more. In the future, they will want more than naming rights on buildings. They will want to name your firstborn, your hometown, or even real estate in your brain. They’ll want access to your consciousness, your bloodstream, your gonads, your gametes. Two hundred years from Carnegie, philanthropists’ love for humanity will be manifest in entire legions of development officers chewing each other’s fingers off for pennies dropped from the fickle philanthropist as they gorge off a table overflowing with your work. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why so many philanthropists start foundations with their names on them. They could have dropped a fortune off at a nonprofit that knew what it was doing. Too many actors, sports superstars, and politicians start nonprofits that have overlapping missions with local community organizations. Do we really need yet another nonprofit that’s going to teach personal responsibility through sports? Or another nonprofit that’s going to encourage our fat kids to get into shape? I’m coining the term vanity foundations for this, though someone smarter probably thought of it first. Philanthropists give not out of love of humanity but a need to be recognized. However, you shouldn’t feel great enmity toward the philanthropist. They are tortured as well. Their hunger is an addiction. At the time of writing, the Ms. Formerly-Bezos’s Giving Pledge page has the names of some hundreds of obscenely wealthy people who have promised to give away half their wealth in their lifetime. Most have submitted black and white photos of themselves with statements about why they made the pledge. These people need recognition. They live every day looking for affirmation from others. It won’t be enough. They’ll continue to chase recognition from someone, anyone, who can tell them that they are worthwhile in life. Case in point: do the Giving Pledge pledgers need their picture on the site? No. Some, like Mackenzie Scott, could simply give away their money

and keep quiet. That doesn’t happen. Not only does the philanthropist feel the need to tell you about their philanthropy, but in a pleasantly audacious move, they give each other awards! I would hazard a guess that in the last fifty years, as America has declined in virtually every measure of economic and social success, more awards have been given out to philanthropists than in any other fifty-year period. Pity the philanthropist and their frantic pursuit of acceptance.

THE IRON LAW As an aside, philanthropists not only seek ego boosts but also seek to preserve status. Nonprofits as an industry live off the skim of the milk, as I’ve just explained. The reason the skim is all you can taste as a development officer is because of a little rule I call the “Iron Law of Development.” It goes like this: No donation to a nonprofit will ever threaten the social class of the giver. Donations never threaten the economic standing of the giver. The uppermiddle-class giver (the type that, as of the time of writing, might gift over $1,000 a year to various charities) will not give so much money that they would miss their next mortgage payment. They’d scoff at the idea. They might reply with something like, “Well, I’m not going to be able to donate if I can’t keep a roof over my head!” The rich man, in turn, will not give so much that he’d find himself needing a mortgage for the first time in his life. He’ll find every excuse in the book to continue to live as a rich man while skimming off the top. Even that 10% religious tithe we talked about earlier was, in effect, a flat taxation system. But neither a rich person nor a poor person gifting 10% is giving so much as to destroy their economic standing in society. In fact, the poor are often excused from giving altogether, lest they wreck their personal finances. Religions also did not expect charitable contributions to encompass most of a person’s net worth. The development officer internalizes the Iron Law and dances around it

every day. The reasonable gift standard defines conversations with donors. It’s said that whatever you do, don’t ask for too much, and don’t ask for too little. The development professional works within the bounds of the Iron Law 14. But if you were like me throughout my career, you never really considered the hard truth propping up the Iron Law — charities aren’t meant to solve problems but to soothe fat egos. Society won’t ever change. Haves will have and nots will not. That is, unless you can break the Iron Law. You must put the donor out of their misery. Do this by taking as much of their money as possible. Let’s talk about how.

CHAPTER 3

HUNTING THOSE WHO GIVE GIVEN the psychology of the donor I just laid out, I want you to know that breaking the Iron Law is possible, but it requires you to reimagine your role as a development officer. The mindset I’ve developed in this chapter, making the possible out of the impossible, comes from a solitary blood sport I enjoy more than is appropriate. Hunting big game, like deer, is responsible for me still maintaining my sanity. It’s also the source of guiding inspiration in the field of fundraising. Popular culture abounds with portrayals of hunters and the hunted. Elmer Fudd perpetually hunts Bugs Bunny, usually shooting himself in the foot or the face. Robert De Niro played a deer hunter who played Russian Roulette. Bambi’s mother dies on opening day. The common portrayal of hunting features raucous gatherings of drunken louts with rusty rifles unleashing high-powered rounds into women out hanging the wash. It’s not an unfair description. That does happen. Those men do exist. I’ve met those types. But most hunters, like most development officers, know that the hunt is a lonely venture. Pulling the trigger is a solitary act. Hunting demonstrates my personal skill, willpower, and fortitude. Or exposes my lack of preparation. It’s all up to me when I’m out in the field. Some of those skills have crossed over to development. I persevere in the blasted veldt of a donor database or in the dripping darkness of my major gift ask. The lines blur. I’ve found too many similarities and common methods for pursuing donations and pursuing game to ignore it anymore. And if you can harness the hunting spirit, you too can find plenty to eat. I want to warn you that in no way am I advocating hunting your donors and shooting them. That’s illegal in most states 1. Though, I would submit

that any development officer who has not considered hastening the demise of a donor to activate a planned gift has not been doing their job. I am merely comparing the two practices as closely as possible to be almost crossing the line. Any hunter claiming they do not enjoy killing lies to your face. Loosing an arrow or hammering the primer on a centerfire round is a conscious decision to bring an end to another creature’s existence. Hunters, by law, do this for food. But if I just wanted food, I could go “Indians Disguised As Wolves--no. 13” (George Catlin, date unknown) to the grocery store. As I say, there is Public Domain more to it than just food. The chase, the stalk, and the kill are all a means to an end, but there is an end in the means as well. Similarly, I have been in a development office when an unsolicited, unexpected check arrives. Once, the unsolicited check was enough to close out my effort for the fiscal year. I could have spent the rest of the summer dawdling, figuring out where I could scrounge around for money come fall. But the surprise gift wasn’t satisfying. The unexpected check had none of the thrill of the chase. If it was all transactional, I could just become a bank teller: money goes in, money goes out. Or a butcher. Meat comes in, I chop it up, and meat goes out. That’s a comfortable life, but it’s not for me. It’s missing something fundamentally exciting. I think what I want most of all is to see the surprise on the donor’s face when the end comes. One of the best shots I have ever taken put a bullet through the heart of an animal. The groundhog had been on the lookout for me stalking through the yard. The little bastard had been eating our kale. My wife had tried every other method for exclusion, only to find the canny rodent had eluded her clever barriers and destroyed yet another crop. We tried blood meal. I tried pissing on the edges of the garden. I chased after the groundhog a few times like a maniac. Finally, my wife urged lethal means. The groundhogs lived under the garden shed, I knew. If I could just sneak through the yard, I could

set up a perfect shot. The moment arrived. The groundhog sunned himself on the shed’s wooden ramp, picture-perfect, full of hand-grown kale. My .22LR round put a hole in his heart. He dropped off the wooden ramp, twitched, and was no more. We ate a stringy chili that week. In development, I seek the heart shot for the same reason: I want my quarry utterly surprised. I want them unaware of what’s happening, ignorant of the consequences of their actions, and most of all, I want an easy drag back to my truck. Let me set out a few hunting principles that will help you take that deadeye shot.

THE AERIAL VIEW The cold-blooded fundraiser on the prowl has to start somewhere. But a blank landscape is intimidating. When I go cold prospecting, I need to look for patterns and places that my next large donor might hide. When choosing a site to hunt deer, I begin at the 10,000-foot level. I examine satellite images for places where deer congregate, which includes the thick woody patches and river bottoms. Getting good at this type of exercise requires an intimate knowledge of landscape: topographical mapping, seeking out gullies, hollows, and cricks. You must understand how your prey moves across that landscape. The landscape of a philanthropically-inclined individual takes the same form every time. My state of Pennsylvania is littered with second-class cities, those post-industrial hellholes that opportunity seems to skirt. When looking for donors in the second-class city, I employ the same methods I’d employ anywhere else. In any society, in any gathering of people, some have more than others. There are rich and poor. Socialists, go ahead and get yourself a box of tissues. It’s hard to read when you’re crying about reality. I know from experience that those of means gather in the same types of places every time. One tried-and-true method is to read the newspaper 2. Every community still has an ad-supported paper. Start to figure out the qualities of the community you’re researching. Do churches make donations that make the news? Are banks sponsoring the local 5K? What about Rotary clubs, Lion’s

clubs, Shriners, Masons, Illuminati, New World Order, the KKK, or the many other secret societies that wear funny hats? Or maybe you’ll note that there are some individuals out there making a lot of waves, someone who loves to have a hand in every press release issued in the little ad-supported paper. What’s fortunate for the development officer is that most philanthropists and prey have an ostentatious streak. Whether they’re presenting like an animal in heat or just trying to show off their excess wealth, philanthropists want to be seen by many. If they gave a ton of money to an organization in the year 2000, they are also giving money in the year 2001. The question isn’t whether or if. The question is where. Remember the Iron Law of Development from the last chapter. They aren’t going to blow their load all at once and become homeless. They will continue to skim off the top for their entire lifetimes, because it’s about ego. The hunter knows how to view the terrain from afar and judge the places where the philanthropist might show up to shake their rear end for an ego boost. But the aerial view is only going to get you so far. You need to get your boots dirty.

GROUND LEVEL Putting boots on the ground will give you a remarkably different view. You begin to pick up the trails, seeing how the animal’s procession follows the contours of the land. A dedicated development officer will get in the car and drive through the rich neighborhoods, looking at the names on mailboxes. Who owns the mansion in the rolling hills outside of town? If you find their name, you can then look for aliases or mentions. Facebook and other social media make stalking easy. You study their face and learn to recognize their features, or you look at friends in common to find someone to make an introduction. The 10,000-foot satellite view is useful, but it’s never enough. You must persevere on the ground. Any animal is killable given enough time spent in study. As it is with closing the deal on donors. But sometimes, it’s the other hunters that can help you zero in on prey. Find your nonprofit competitors in the area. Open their annual reports,

magazines, and event programs. A cold-blooded fundraiser will stop at nothing to obtain this intelligence. If you have to, go to the headquarters of your competitor and dive into the dumpster. If you time it right, you can find anything. Often, when money is tight during the summer, organizations will do everything but raise funds. Summertime is desk cleanout time for nonprofits. Put on gloves, or not, and climb into that dumpster and pull the last copy of the program from a gala three years ago. It might have slime on it, but this isn’t something you’re taking home to the kids. This is the hunt. You want names. A note on competitors: how do you know who is a competitor? The answer is everyone else operating a charity. Development, like hunting, is a zero-sum game. A donor poached is one less that you might encounter in the wild. Cruise a competitor’s annual magazine for donors — not always easy. Some bury their donors like a prepper fanatic buries food, gold, ammunition, and an untraceable ghost gun. Why wouldn’t they? They know you’re out there too, boots on the ground, trying to make something happen. Let’s say I find a competitor’s third largest donor is a foundation given to this competitor, perhaps called the Merit Reality Foundation. I completed step one: I used the aerial view to figure out what the donor landscape looked like then put boots on the ground to find a specific mark. Next, I need to start doing the legwork to find out more about the organization. Like so many other foundations, Merit Reality had checked box XV on their IRS Form 990, meaning they don’t give except to preselected organizations. Those bastards. That means I need to find the inside track. I then turn to the board of directors of Merit Reality, ostensibly the people in charge of giving out the money. I find their names and begin to slog through the mud and thickets, getting my boots dirty. There’s an art to slogging through the swamp of individual research. Having Google-fu helps. A lot of your skill is gathered through years of desperation to find new donors. I ask basic questions: what neighborhood do the directors of Merit Reality Foundation live in? What church do they belong to? What parties did they attend? Does Merit Reality have an annual event? Did the foundation ever make the news? Many philanthropists appear in photos with big plastic checks or in the gala’s thumbnail pictures. But some are coy. Many have private firms that scrub their name from the internet like a person about to deliver devastating congressional testimony.

Others lead reclusive lives, acting like mummies sleeping in forgotten pyramids and looking the part, too. Sometimes you can intuit a smell. Us humans aren’t as keen sniffers as the many animals of the wild. But we have our moments. You happen on a spot in the woods, and your olfactory senses light up like Christmas. It’s near. The prey is one letter away from first contact with you. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to strike. Now is the time to study, learn, and choose your moment. Rushing risks failure. Your time will come.

THE STUDY Often, a development officer will find a chain of relationships between a rich local donor or foundation and a board member at their current organization. The tracks are in the soil. You can see where the philanthropists had been feeding, where they’d been sleeping, and where they socialized and congregated. You stalk through the brush. For instance, one of your trustees was the CEO of an industrious construction company. The company’s CFO has a brother who was the head of a foundation that gave out a lot of money. You have the trail. You have the scent. You might have glimpsed a flattened ear or a flicking tail. You ask your trustee to inquire about the brother’s phone number through the company president, opening the door for the conversation about how you need some of his foundation’s dirty construction money. However, the trustee wants more from you. Your trustee wants you to come up with an elevator-pitch approach that pleases them before mucking around in philanthropic affairs at their day job. It’s time to prepare a case statement or a mini-proposal laying out the basics of why you’re not a bunch of worthless vagrants. All that homework you’ve done is now worth its weight in gold. This is why studying your prey is so important. To simply barge into the thicket, gun muzzle waving, firing at random, will send you home emptyhanded, or with a lawsuit on your hands. The third step in the cold-blooded development officer’s method for taking big-donor game is breaking down the prey, understanding their network and movements, and building a profile.

You need to know the color of their hair, the name of their dog, and whether they like long walks on the beach. The largest, most impressive prey are usually the wariest. Hunters will spend weeks out of the year collecting nocturnal footage and taste-testing scat for freshness 3. The “hot” taste indicates a fresh trail. You may think it’s disgusting, but you’ve never had the bloodlust on you. This step takes time. Sometimes, your boss will be on you to get in touch with the donor. Tell your boss to buzz off. It’s vital not to spook the philanthropist. A good donor knows a hunter when they see one. They deal with development professionals on the regular. If you reveal yourself too early, you’ll spoil the moment. Knowledge isn’t power, per se. It creates power. Knowledge of your donor can guide your next moves. You may find, through casual research, multiple connections to a single donor. Pursue leads. Build your case. The shot is coming.

THE KILL There are few things more satisfying than winning a complex, high-level gift agreement. It’s as exciting as gently squeezing the trigger on your cold rifle as you squint through a fogged scope at your mark. A different type of exciting, I guess. All your work leads up to a single moment of explosive triumph. Like an orgasm, except instead of creating life, you’re killing. The kill is exciting, but it’s the final moments after months of preparation that make it that way. You’ve studied the movements of your prey, their daily routine, their likes and dislikes, and what makes them scared or angry. When the moment comes, as a development officer, your weapon is your silver tongue. If an alien came down to earth tomorrow to look at the apex predator of our planetary ecosystem, homo sapiens, they’d see complex and often confusing dramas play out. One of these dramas is the final moves of the development dance. In the final moves, the development officer walks up to the home of the prey. On walking to the portal to their domicile, the development officer manipulates the larynx to create sophisticated

murmuring, croaking, and groaning noises, also known as speech. The prey then will do something remarkable. They will not only let the development officer into their home, but they might also even feed them cookies and coffee. And then later, after more interchange of these strange noises, the development officer will walk out with a symbolic piece of paper etched with ink that forces the prey to hand over a good portion of their fortune to the hunter’s organization. It’s a bizarre ritual. The aliens would ask themselves, Why would the rich human let a predator into its environment and let the predator manipulate its voice box to steal the human’s money — possibly more money than the predator will earn in its career? This makes no sense. But that’s the joy of the non-mortal combat that human society has engineered. Aliens, in fact, would understand the primal hunt much more easily. After much time finding the location of animals, learning their habits, and finding where they feed and mate, the hunter sneaks in, wearing camouflage. Their weapon is a device they’ve trained with for years, plugging bullseyes until convinced that their margin of error is thin. Soaked from rain and shivering from cold, the hunter waits along the path of the prey until the quarry passes by within range. With a quick flick of a trigger or the release of a bowstring, the prey falls dead. The final moves are climactic and brief. Weeks of scouting and stalking is where most of the work happens. The prey has been made to feel at ease in its own environment, oblivious to the death it’s about to experience. The key to the kill, and the key to getting that check, is convincing your mark that you aren’t there to end things. The big game I’ve killed have always been on their way to eat, fornicate, or sleep. They were engaged in the critical activities of life when they died. Up until the moment you strike, the donor must be convinced that you have no intention of asking for a gift. But when the moment comes, instead of loosing a physical projectile, you loose a moral one: you have to convince the donor of their mortality quickly. Your words need to invoke the mortal imagination of the donor. As we discussed in the last chapter, the most compelling argument for a donation is mortality. With whatever word you can muster as a development officer and a hunter of donations, you have to convince the donor of their obligations prior to death. You must convince them that your cause is one of

those obligations. In dealing death, you are also its messenger.

LIFE EATS LIFE Above, I’ve described in great detail how you, a development officer, are a killer. You drain power away from others to feed the mechanism of change, the nonprofit. If you take fifty dollars from a new donor, you aim to siphon more off them in the future. If you take a hundred thousand bucks from a major donor, you are taking it away from their progeny. A development officer kills future opportunities for others. Life eats life 4. That’s the way of things. There is no life on this earth that doesn’t exist at the expense of another life. Money, being the stuff of life (or, as Marx said, “the congealed labor power of the working class”), is life force made into green folding stuff. Some of you reading this are probably saying to yourselves, Not a chance. I’m no killer. But haven’t you wished at 2 AM that one of your donors would give up on their lousy children and make their estate out to you? Haven’t you and your donor both ended the meeting upset, you upset that there wasn’t enough money changing hands, them that they’d given up too much? Haven’t you made plans to take from others? Haven’t you considered breaking down in fake tears to express how badly your nonprofit needs the money? Don’t tell me you haven’t idly imagined one of your donors adopting you, making you a daughter or a son, taking you on as a cause. Don’t lie to me like that. This is the way of things. Life begets life; life consumes life. You are the hunter for your mission, stalking the boreal forests of society to find game worthy of your killing shot. Get yourself a trophy, a head to hang on your wall. When you are old and gray, you can look up at your trophy and rest assured that your youth was not misspent and that you were, in fact, a frightening person at one time. You could summon money from nowhere. But back to the present. Let’s say you get that big check. Let’s say you bag that animal and start dragging it home. There is another person waiting to

feast on your luck. Gird yourself against them.

CHAPTER 4

THOSE WHO GOVERN THE MOST INSIDIOUS form of donor comes in the form of the board member. Unlike the mere donor, the board member is a wholly different creature, less one to be hunted than a disease to be suffered. They are unpredictable and dangerous. If the police put out an All-Points Bulletin on a board member, it would read like this:

APB: NOTIFICATION The Developmentown Police Department Official Publication of the DPD Crime Intelligence Unit The below individual is WANTED AT THIS TIME.

Name: Linus Fellaticat, III, Esquire Race: Caucasian, of course Age: 69 Physical Oddities: Walks with a limp, might be faking it Behavior Peculiarities: Lack of concentration, memory, logic Gang Affiliations: Several bankrupt nonprofits, Freemasons Prior offenses: Tax evasion, larceny Admitted to possession of child porn in a drunken speech at the gala Vehicular manslaughter of his teenage babysitter

Was a politician Was a lawyer Drove several nonprofits into the ground during his tenure on the board Narrative memo: Subject is the worst kind of person, well-meaning but ignorant. Use caution in person and in formal communication. Subject is accustomed to wasting the time of others and has no fear of wasting yours. Assume they are prepared to take time from you. Vampiric in countenance and activity. Self-admittedly disorganized, does nothing about it. Father of two, both despise him and live on the other side of the country. Writes all emails on their phone with the font size turned all the way up, makes no attempt at spelling correctly, and never puts anything in the subject line. Keep far away from junior employees, male and female, will make a pass at them. Record all interactions in writing. Has sued your organization once before yet is still on the board.

I’ M HERE TO WARN YOU THAT THESE DANGEROUS INDIVIDUALS HAVE infiltrated your organization. These people, who should be incarcerated for the good of society, will destroy your nonprofit’s productivity for years to come. I don’t have a great explanation for why these horrific individuals are part of the modern nonprofit. One reason, I’ve found, is that the alleged purpose of a board of directors, or board of trustees, is representation. Representation isn’t a bad idea. In a for-profit organization, the board represents the shareholders. The board is a group of people who have a stake in the company’s success. Why? Because they own a part of it. They bought in. Because they bought into it, they can call the shots. If it’s hard to imagine what this looks like, remember It’s a Wonderful Life. I remember parts of it once the eggnog and whiskey wear off. It’s the Jimmy Stewart movie where he’s afraid of heights and is pursuing a woman who uses hair dye to confuse him. Then he gets over his fear of falling and jumps off a bridge to save a fat angel. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart’s buildings and loans bank is owned by a group of flabby old men. The largest share of the bank is owned by a lumpen man named Jabba the Hutt, or something, who tries to dissolve Jimmy

Stewart’s bank. This, of course, doesn’t happen, and, spoilers, the angel later grants Jimmy Stewart the ability to see through hair dye. In a twisted way, a nonprofit organization’s board of directors does not have a financial stake in the organization. In fact, it’s in the IRS rules: “An organization is not operated exclusively for one or more exempt purposes if its net earnings inure in whole or in part to the benefit of private individuals.” The board, in other words, cannot skim off the ledger for their own benefit. Any activity stinking of inurement can mean sanction. Instead of being involved with the organization for their own profit, the board of directors is supposed to represent, well, everyone. Everyone who might be representative of the community that the nonprofit serves with its mission, programming, and services. So, if you run a homeless shelter for a medium-sized city, the community members involved with your nonprofit likely come from that city. One common misconception is that these board members are supposed to represent the community that is being served by the nonprofit and/or its clientele. For instance, the homeless shelter could have homeless people on the board. Or the local private school could have parents. But come on. We know that’s never the case. No, boards are a much more cynical affair with base motivations for their formation. There are a million insane reasons board members are on the board. Here are a few board member tropes you might have seen in your time:

The Almost Fired: “We’ve been trying to get rid of him for a while.” The Emeriti: “He shows up from time to time.” The Newbie: “Isn’t she sharp for a 17-year-old?” The Stricken: “She hasn’t been the same since the procedure.” The Racial Draftee: “It’s so nice to have someone with a darker complexion!” The Utility: “He does the plumbing.” The Female Representation: “She was asking for it.” The Shareholder: “Because they gave us a lot of money.” The Holy Roller: “When he’s sober, he really does a nice grace over our annual potluck.” The Forgotten: “I don’t remember when he joined the board, but

he’s been here a while.” The Man Who Knew Too Much 1: “If we let him go, he’d go to the paper.” The Reporter: “He publishes our press releases.” The Divorcee: “She has a lot more time on her hands these days.” The Promised One: “She hasn’t given in years, but when she dies, we’re going to be set.” The Impoverished: “He makes up for his required board donation by giving his time.” The Sex Offender: “They never actually charged him with anything.” The G-Man: “She’s never actually won an election but does have a lot of connections.” The Counsel: “He’s in court today. Try again tomorrow.” The Cook: “He whips up a mean souvlaki.” The Cripple: “We put in this ramp for him!” The Cardiologist: “You never know when you need a doctor at the gala.” The Corpse: “Do we have a policy for a board member who dies?” The Stranger: “Who?”

A S YOU CAN SEE FROM THIS SLATE OF LOSERS , THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS isn’t built intentionally. Oh, sure, it might have structure at first. The inaugural board of a nonprofit is usually a powerhouse of intention, full of savvy players, powerful community members, and people excited about shouting “PRESENT!” for the minutes. The reason this board is powerful is because of the founder, a borderline psychotic individual who could put the fear of divine retribution into lost souls. The founder cajoled. The founder bribed. The founder threatened to reveal mistresses and lovers, illicit business dealings, and hidden fortunes to get people onto the board. But the calendar turns over, and people die. Holes get plugged, and I mean that sexually and in the sense of filling board seats. The founder dies or, if they don’t die quickly enough, is dragged behind the proverbial barn to

be shot like the horse that just broke its leg in the last loop of the Preakness 2. The founding board then goes through a wave of resignations. Usually, this is spurred on by disagreement about issues of great importance, like the logo’s colors or the type of paper used for the monthly agenda. Those waiting in the wings jump on, having wanted to “help” for years but never having the mental, physical, or financial means to do so. What they lack in skill or money, they make up for with words spoken per minute. The board starts to reflect on its own efficacy and finds it lacking. Knives slide out of sleeves and into palms. The board fights itself. The weakest board member in the Battle Royale gets cut down. New board members arrive for a single meeting before they disappear, screaming into the night. And the cycle goes on. The downward trend began long ago, a kind of autoimmune disease of the organization’s soul. Inevitably, every board starts to suck. All great empires fall, some harder than others, but they all do it the same way: with a desperate sense of urgency. When the organization started, they had a crystal-clear vision of who was involved: them, their friends, and the programming audience. As the shininess wears off over time, the vision of the constituency becomes murky, like a stream disturbed by stormwater. The board lowers the bucket again and again, producing more and more ridiculous individuals for governance purposes. Rather than recruiting people who would be good at running an organization, a board often attempts to create a simulacrum of the local community. The attempt to build a board that is representative of the community served is one of the great mishaps of the contemporary nonprofit, not because it’s not a good idea, but because representation doesn’t happen from above. It happens from below. Representation happens through popular sovereignty, not the petty sovereignty of a board. New individuals, recruited for any number of reasons, join the board and are put in a governance position with absolutely no skin in the game beyond reputation and no knowledge of how to do the job.

THE PATIENTS RUNNING THE ASYLUM

"Night Thoughts" (by Edward Young, 1798) - Public Domain

I’ve alluded to one bizarre phenomenon that happens in nonprofits. This is the case of a “Board Run Amok,” or BRA 3, where the board skips the executive director, president, or CEO completely and begins giving orders to staff. There are plenty of organizations where the board president/chair holds more sway than the executive director. For instance, when it comes to deciding on the format of a fundraiser (auction, sit-down dinner, etc.), the executive director can’t make an independent decision without risking their job. Tension fills every meeting. The ED needs to “check on things with the board,” which means no decisions are made in meetings. The ED has to get the validation of the board on operational concerns. What results are horrific arguments and significant delays. BRA in action. Or BRA inaction. The ED in a for-profit corporation is meant to be the CEO. By the books, they are an executive in that they have the ability to hire and fire. For that, they’re paid an enormous, ungodly amount of money 4. Much of their time is spent on personnel matters, like whether any work is getting done. The CEO

works at the pleasure of the board of directors, who have the CEO under constant scrutiny from all angles. They represent the shareholders and want to make sure they continue to make money. For reasons we’ve already discussed, nonprofits refuse to operate under the rules of good business practice. One manifestation of this is an irrelevant executive. In too many organizations, large and small, the board of directors simply goes around the ED to give orders. The orders aren’t anything nearly as interesting as “you need to raise more funds this quarter.” No, they’re mundane. “Make sure that the acknowledgment has a PS,” or “Why do we use Calibri when we could use Helvetica?” or “Update the website after a single complaint from the public.” Thus, the ED begins to swivel between the staff and the board as the highest level of management and the lowest level of workers talk scheme and commiserate over the ED’s impotence 5. Everyone hates a middle manager, those above and those below. If you are an executive director reading this, I suggest you buy a decent swiveling office chair. That way, you can spin around and save your neck muscles some trauma. The ED begins to spin, faster and faster, like a top. The speed at which the ED of a nonprofit must pivot becomes inhuman as they become less and less able to do their jobs due to meddling by the board. It’s been proven by research engineers that if you were to wrap the ED in copper wire during the late stages of their competency, you could create an electrical field that would save the nonprofit on its electrical bills. Wait, I already made that joke in Chapter 1. Why does the board feel the need to skip over the ED and go right to the staff? Why not go BRA-less 6? I think there are multiple explanations. There’s the one I’ve already offered, which is that the nonprofit sees itself as above the normal business practices of a corporation. Another is the Dunning-Kreuger effect. David Dunning and Justin Kreuger studied how people with low skill in a task performed, juxtaposed to how well they thought they performed. They started doing the research after a gentleman robbed two banks with his face covered in lemon juice. He believed lemon juice would prevent him from being seen by security cameras. He’d taken his misunderstanding of how invisible ink worked and applied it to his skin. Surprisingly, considering the state of law enforcement lately, the man was caught. He was apprehended and arrested. If the world knew the truth about

nonprofit boards, board members would be arrested too. In any case, board members often have severely overinflated visions of their contribution to the organization. They believe their own skills to be so great that they will skip over the C-Suite and go straight to the people doing the actual work.

THE DEVELOPMENT OFFICER’S DILEMMA Tread carefully when a board member approaches you with an idea. You have entered a minefield, and you’re wearing snowshoes, not moccasins. More competent people than you have lost limbs to this place. A mature executive director or president will understand the inevitable: the wellmeaning board member is a dolt whose estate is the real goal, and their knowledge is meaningless. The board member may have excelled in their industry at one time, but reality has passed them. A good C-level nonprofit executive will dress down the board member when they go too far, or otherwise navigate a safe way to extract that board member from the affairs of the staff. A lousy C-level nonprofit leader, which is most of them, will bend over backwards to accommodate a rogue board member. An executive director often thinks they will be fired for stopping the board from interfering and so lets the board member run rampant, like a dog with rabies released onto a playground. C-level nonprofit executives perform gymnastics that would earn them Olympic alloy if they had the discipline to qualify for one of the Games. They will ignore incidents of board overreach and let meddling happen until the organization becomes so toxic that it could be declared a Superfund site. In this environment, board directors will stalk into offices, shuffling papers, answering phones, sexually harassing and distracting the staff. They play practical jokes. Rubber chickens and fart bags. They try to help fix the copier and make it worse. They ruin everything they touch. There are some nonprofits where the board becomes even more nefarious. Some boards insist on dressing in plainclothes to spy on staff. Others will try and access the backend of the email server. Still, more will circumvent your development office and do the fundraising themselves. There’s no end to the

nefarious plots of these deranged psychopaths.

HOW TO RETAKE THE ASYLUM Forget why. How can you rip off that BRA? What’s a development officer going to do when the most selfish, self-centered people are running amok across the organization? You’re trapped between a rock and a harder rock. And there’s a boulder on the cliff above about to fall and crush you. And the rats. Oh, the rats! Streaming around your feet. Gnawing, biting rats. First, relax. Every development officer worth their salt has had a board full of morons. Find a development officer whose board is a dream. Good luck. Too many board members do not have their heads screwed on right. In fact, the threads are stripped, and there’s major leakage. But, you’ll say to me, The big nonprofits have decent boards. Maybe. But those seem less like governing boards and more like exclusive clubs for major donors. Let’s just start calling them affiliate groups instead of boards. Too often among fundraising colleagues do I hear the following discussion: “My board president just resigned, and nobody else wants to be board president. What do I do?” The answer is simple. Start celebrating! You can get things done now. Second, the executive director is not your friend. They collect a higher salary than you and are among the more useless positions in the organization. They not only are feeble, as I’ve demonstrated, but they are still bound by the C-level curse. They must demonstrate their worth on a regular basis to keep their job. But you can take advantage of their insecurity. By outmaneuvering your impotent ED in board relations, you can make yourself an essential employee of the organization, doing what they call “managing relationships.” This is how old-school fundraising was done, back in those Golden Days I mentioned in an earlier chapter. The development director wasn’t a development director but instead a mysterious employee of the organization who just knew a lot of people. Unless your ED is one of the rare gems I’ve worked with that keeps the board in line and maintains a huge portfolio of donors, you do not need them. Make yourself essential with the board, gather

the donors to yourself, and you will have a modicum of job security. Third, the idea that the board is above reproach needs to end. If a board member walks out because a staff member has scolded them, they’re not committed to the organization in the first place. Now, you’re going to say to me, That sounds like a great way to get fired. And it is! You might be fired for pushing this point. Strike that. You probably will. However, in most states, unemployment will kick in if you are fired for being a bad fit at your organization 7. Now you get to have a free vacation paid for by fellow taxpayers. Now you get to be the charity case! Didn’t you always want to see the other side of your nonprofit? This is your chance. Incumbent upon the modern development director is the responsibility of stopping this madness where it begins. You are the guard at the gate of the asylum. You have the proverbial billy club and the Thorazine (if you haven’t used all of it on yourself first). Stop the scourge now. After all, a board member is just a volunteer who pays to be there. They have no special status other than their willingness to waste other people’s time and money. This brings us to the other type of volunteer: the plain, old, vanilla volunteer who works many hours a week, not for pay, not to pay, but just to belong. They are just as deranged.

CHAPTER 5

THOSE WHO WORK FOR FREE AS AN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR once told me that volunteers are the worst part of the nonprofit industry. I have seen a few good volunteers in my lifetime, so maybe I’ll start this chapter by remembering them rather than immediately catapulting into complaints 1. Their spirit lives on in memory. Gregory: As a landscaper, Gregory was rarely seen. He crept in and slipped out like a ninja, following no schedule but his own. Nobody knew where he lived or what he did for money, except that his work had been done in a foreign land. But damn, could that guy mow lawns. The lawn would be mowed when I arrived in the morning. When the grass started to creep a little too high, Gregory mowed while I nursed my hangover with the first sip of coffee. Some volunteers said that Gregory mowed at night. He allegedly used an electric mower so he could move silently across the green. Some denied that Gregory even existed. Although, I did meet him twice, so I don’t think that rumor was true. But it could have been a spy posing as Gregory. It’s possible that he led a posse of volunteer landscapers who all called themselves Gregory and returned to their crashed alien spacecraft at the end of each night. In any case, his air of mystery obscured the critical fact: Gregory did his job. I protected him like a mother bear protecting her cubs. Whenever a board member started to make comments on Gregory’s work, I slapped the suggestion down with a ferocity that got me into trouble. “Leave Gregory Alone” was my mantra. Belinda: Living her best life, Belinda possessed the profound

innocence you find among saints and children. When she worked the cash register, she methodically counted the money, and if even ten cents went missing, she’d come and tell me. If the key to the back office was on the wrong peg, she’d make sure it was put right. If the dates were wrong on the poster advertising our next event, she’d point it out for us to correct. She had an eye for inaccuracies and set out to let someone know they existed. Belinda was a sort of proofreader for real life. Despite her neurodivergence, she ended up contributing far more to mission than other volunteers, even board and staff. It was lovely to work with her. Francine: Blue-haired and snappy, her ancestors came from money. After some Googling, I believe that her forebears ran the slave labor force that built the ancient Ziggurat of Ur. I’d always been told that when she bit the bullet, Francine would leave behind a fortune that would satisfy our endowment manager better than their spouse ever could. But rather than live off her fortune on cruise ships and at resorts, Francine came in and did clerical work for us. Nothing too complex — copies and the occasional run to the local foundations to drop off grant proposals — but she was dependable, coming in and not making waves. I mean, she did make some waves. She sexually harassed employees and made those old-fashioned statements that are hard to pin down as illnatured, but the more you thought about them, the more you realized they violated the staff handbook. But she also gave out grandmotherly advice, baked cookies, and did her job. When she died, some people celebrated. She was an idol for many and a wretched and bitter crone to others. For me, she was a shining example of what could be: lots of money coming into my portfolio, dirty jokes, and a clear sense of responsibility. What you see from these three profiles in courage is that each person did their work without resorting to the lowest common denominator of volunteer work, namely complaining. Griping. Grumbling. Whining. Volunteers can be some of the most miserable, backbiting, catty people on the planet. They make mealtimes at a maximum-security prison look like occasions of politeness and

understanding. The perennial problem of the volunteer workforce is their escalating complaints about the state of the organization. The complaints do not come from a place of benevolence. Volunteers do not complain to make the organization run more efficiently. They do it because they can. Unfortunately, the selfsame quality that makes volunteers worth the time makes their griping and bad attitude too much trouble to keep around: the pay, or lack thereof. Your board of directors, executive director, and major donors will often talk about volunteers as a kind of glitch in the capitalist system. Labor usually needs to be exchanged for money. Your nonprofit personnel will speak in hushed tones about the incredible amount of work that could be done if we could get a few volunteers in here. Some believe there is a reservoir of talent in the community willing to work for free, if the mission is strong enough. And this is true. They are willing to work for free. But the quality of the work will be akin to Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg: a decent effort, valiant, brave, and thwarted by a hail of gunfire. Both rising volunteerism and Pickett’s charge end in bloodshed. To continue our Confederate analogy, what board members and some ignorant nonprofit professionals think they are getting out of volunteerism is free work. In other words, they have a desire to reinvent slavery. It would never be explained that way, but then, nonprofits are not known for their grasp on reality. Let me give you a few profiles of some volunteers that you might recognize from your own organization: First, there’s Selene. About nine hundred years old, Selene had been there since the beginning. She’d made the nonprofit a bit of a life project in retirement, which made her essential to the operation. Every corpse buried had a headstone etched by Selene. Yet, she refused to consider the sunset of her own efforts. Any attempt to get her to pass on essential information about the organization resulted in frothing at the mouth. She’d behave as if you’d suggested someone molest her daughter in Times Square. Next, let’s talk about Martina. A contemporary of Selene 2, Martina worked hard among the ranks of the unpaid. Her volunteer force was a cantankerous group, prone to fits of anger and rebellion. They organized a no-confidence vote against the nonprofit leadership because they disagreed

with the dress code. If you had read the letters whipping back and forth, you would have thought that the organization had ordered all currency to be taste-tested before accepting it as payment. The board of this nonprofit got so tired of the group that they attempted to disband the volunteers. To say that this caused an organizational schism is an understatement. Martina, one of the most stalwart, was ready to cross the Rubicon. “Let the die be cast,” sayeth Martina. Despite being rebuffed, she continued to volunteer. She came in uninvited and stayed even after being asked to leave. She had to be escorted out multiple times. Staff believed that she also stole anything not tied down. Items filched included staplers, a computer monitor, people’s lunches from the fridge, and eventually (and this is what got her caught) every copy of the bylaws. The arrest and resulting restraining order helped end the escapades. A board member said they habitually slept with a gun in their nightstand, always afraid that a bump in the night was Martina slipping in through the basement window with a shiv clenched in her teeth. Hubert was the third great example of volunteers run amok. He was extremely useful, no doubt, and hardworking. But woe to you if you told him to do something he didn’t want to do. Staff intervention resulted in pouting or angry outbursts and threats to quit. Racist speeches routinely came from his mouth and turned normal conversations into emergencies. The end result of his ranting and raving was the termination of the entire volunteer force, whereupon the nonprofit went fallow for a year. They started the volunteer operation over again with a hand-picked coordinator who rebuilt it using strict standards, a battery of psychological tests that an astronaut would fail, and a security guard at the entrance to the building.

ISN’T THIS WHAT A COORDINATOR IS FOR? The problem in asking whether a dedicated staff position can solve the problem is that we return to the theme at the top of this book: nonprofits are not run like business enterprises. Penitence is a highly inefficient way to do work. Volunteers work less efficiently than employees, introduce the organization to risk, and are a net drain on resources. Ask any volunteer coordinator about their job (if you can reach them

before they kill themselves). They will tell you that any job they get volunteers to do could be done better with a single person paid to do the task. More often, the volunteer coordinator will tell you that they could do the task themselves in less time than it takes to recruit volunteers to do it badly. Volunteers provide just enough manpower to be a source of work but never quite enough to be worth the time of management. Volunteer management is a full-time job by itself. It cannot be a part-time job appended to the normal duties surrounding mailings, major gifts, and grant writing. Good volunteer coordinators understand that their training of volunteers isn’t done to get any work done. It’s to get the volunteers to feel happy about themselves and their lives and send them home with enough good cheer to give $25 at the Annual Fund drive. Yes, I would venture to say that most volunteer coordination is an ill-conceived fundraising device. And as a fundraising device, it fails because it was conceived with the devil. What you’d need in a good volunteer coordinator is the following: Someone unattached, with no dependents and preferably no extended family. You risk collateral damage when the coordinator inevitably melts into a puddle under the volunteer onslaught. A person with a horrific attitude toward their fellow human beings. They should be, in a word, misanthropic. Without such a philosophy, the volunteers will run them down. If possible, someone who lives in another city with a daily commute of at least 3 hours to reduce exposure to the community the volunteers hail from. An apprentice martial artist with competency in unarmed combat, knives, and small arms. Part of the budget should be set aside for crowd control equipment, including shields, helmets, body armor, and batons. The coordinator should have the only key to an equipment locker and latitude to use it.

IT’S NOT THAT BAD, IS IT? However, you might say, Volunteers are not all that bad. This is true. It’s just critical to understand their role and not mistake them for anything other than

what they are. If the volunteer is a donor of time, they should act like the paramilitary to your major donor’s organized army. Any good fascist dictatorship, which is what a development department should be, needs that vanguard in the streets. A paramilitary hits the streets not for the cause but to pillage, crucify, and do all the things they weren’t allowed to do before you empowered them. Ask any dictator about their paramilitary, and they will likely roll their eyes. “A pain in my ass,” says Pinochet. “Overenthusiastic,” says Stalin. Usually, paramilitary leaders are put to death by the causes they supported in the first place because they overdid things in their excitement. Volunteers shouldn’t do any useful work but, instead, serve as hideous ambassadors for your mission. The community should quake in fear when your volunteers walk past. “Don’t talk to So-And-So. They’ll never shut up about that nonprofit they work for.” Volunteers shouldn’t be expected to engage in anything useful in their volunteer capacity. Instead, they should demonstrate that your nonprofit has enough psychological clout to keep these maniacs busy and off the street. Given too much responsibility, though, the volunteers in your development department demand more and more. Management becomes difficult the longer they are around. Of course, there are ego-stroking mechanisms you can use (the same as for use on a major donor, sans actual money changing hands), which work to an extent. However, where a volunteer is particularly insidious is in that operational capacity: they are there, every day, at your job. A major donor, by contrast, doesn’t want to talk to the development director or show up at your office. In fact, most major donors take up witchcraft at one time or another. They do this to weave powerful hexes that keep the development officers off the threshold of their homes. The volunteer, on the other hand, hangs around. They ask dozens of questions and try to relate to you as a fellow employee of the organization. Make no mistake. They are not. Perhaps you have failed to convince your board or your executive director that reinventing slavery just isn’t possible in these times 3. I’m sorry. I apologize to you ahead of time. When the volunteers flood through your doors, touching things, violating policy, and draining your soul away, treat it like a mugging. Just let it happen. Give them your wallet. Minimize damage, but know that your possessions aren’t worth it. Seek therapy. Try to forget.

And remain vigilant. There is a special subset of volunteers that are nextlevel parasites so insidious and so malicious that they will make you question your sanity. From the get-go, they self-identify as competent and dedicated. They’ll perform acts to prove their efficacy. It will appear to be a godsend at first. You will be thrilled that some of your initiatives are beginning to get off the ground. The volunteer will convince you that they had a superb career and, now that they are an empty nester, have sought you out to have a fulfilling “second half.” But beware. The volunteer will worm themselves into the weak points of your armor, finding abandoned roles and tasks, expanding their hold over these areas of your business, and making themselves essential. However, they will do these roles barely to competency, and often below competency. Unlike the good examples above, they will use this role as a springboard for social capital exchange: they will want free food, to be begged to, and to have recognition, prizes, and medals. They will become the embodiment of the sunk cost fallacy. Try getting any grant writing done when the hyenas are waiting for your moment of weakness to strike. This virulent version of the volunteer creates risky situations operationally. For instance, when staff quietly put pressure on a volunteer to quit, they will find themselves in a predicament. A gap in the schedule will need to be filled. Staff can get rid of the hated albatross but will have attached a millstone to the development department’s neck instead.

HOW TO MANAGE VOLUNTEERS The best way to manage volunteers is to fire all of them, effectively immediately. The second-best way to manage volunteers is to convince the organization that you don’t need them before you hire them. If your organization is so strapped for cash that it needs to employ individuals without paying them, your organization is destined for failure. The third-best way, while extreme, is also the most thorough: you should dissolve your nonprofit so that you never entertain the possibility of dealing with volunteers in the first place.

The fourth best option is to never have been born. As we’ve pointed out, the fundraiser is the person who manages the work of modern penitence, deserved or, often, undeserved. Volunteers join up with awful organizations like yours because they will gain some measure of forgiveness for the sins they accumulated over a lifetime. If you insist on giving them the satisfaction of a life well-lived, they will cling to your organization like barnacles on the hull of your sinking boat. This is one of the ways you end up with a garbage organization.

CHAPTER 6

ALL ORGANIZATIONS ARE GARBAGE HONEYBEES’ division of labor has captivated philosophers and poets for thousands of years. Incredible efficiency and clarity of roles in the hive fascinated the ancients. Aristotle mistakes queens for kings, which is easy to do if you are part of a society where pederasty was stylish: In every hive there are more kinds than one; and a hive goes to ruin if there be too few kings, not because of anarchy thereby ensuing, but, as we are told, because these creatures contribute in some way to the generation of the common bees. Mark Twain had a few words too: A bee that has been trained to one of the many and various industries of the concern doesn’t know how to exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take a hand in anything outside of her profession. While these characterizations and outright mistakes appear cute, they mask the true nature of the honeybee society. Bees enforce their strict division of labor using violence. Consider the plight of the Queen. The Queen is born amongst her worker sisters, who watch as royalty struggles, glistening, out of her creche. Threats stalk the vulnerable potential matriarch. You see, Queens are bred a dozen at a time in a healthy hive. She who wishes to rule has to fight the other ascendant Queens. Those ascendant Queens who are still in their cells, not yet emerged, are assassinated by a specialized, retractable stinger that only

the Queen caste possesses. If any opposing Queens have emerged like her, the ascendant Queen must duel. Only one can survive. Upon her crowning, the Queen leaves the hive on sorties to mate then returns to stygian darkness to live out her life of maternal sexual servitude. When our Queen becomes infertile, the hive disposes of her. The hive doesn’t hesitate to create a new run of fertile Queens to begin a new battle for royal supremacy. Organization and fecundity are enforced through the threat of death. The life of the drone, the male bee, is often made light of. He does no work in the hive and instead begs for food from his sisters and waits for his chance to mate. Every day he leaves the hive to attempt copulation with another hive’s Queen, along with thousands of other drones from neighboring hives. If he successfully mates, his penis is torn off by the recipient Queen in an act so violent that the pop is audible to human listeners. Not the worst way to go. However, drones are expendable to the hive. If they hang on too long, they’re done for. The hive will throw out lazy males at the first sign of scarcity, leaving them to die in the cold. But, you might think, the workers seem to enforce organizational division of labor. Surely the worker caste of bees have an easier life? They get stingers, after all, and can regulate the Queen or the lazy drone. Think again. Workers begin their life with labor. After hatching, they must tend to the nursery, clean up trash, and learn the ways of the hive. Once they have learned to fly, workers begin their dangerous job out in the wild world, collecting the food needed to feed new generations. Some workers guard the front entrance against certain attack. Birds eat them. They die in sudden rainstorms and cold snaps. Humanity fears bees and blasts them with any number of poisons. I have seen worker bees with missing legs continuing to haul in pollen. They work until their bodies fall apart. On any given day, a hive of 10,000 loses hundreds of workers to the elements. A worker never collects a pension. Retirement doesn’t enter their vocabulary. While Queens live two or three years, a worker can expect to live six weeks. They are, in some ways, lucky that they are even born. Liberalized abortion policies mean that trained nursery workers eliminate any larvae they deem less than perfect in physique. Oh, and the stinger. The act of stinging kills them. They’re asked to sacrifice

themselves when danger approaches the hive. I bring to light the reality of honeybee society as an example of the perfect organization. Everyone pulls their weight. Decisions are made through chemically emitted consensus. Each bee has its job description handed down at birth. Males are put in their rightful place, and the relationships between females are appropriately toxic. The struggle of existence, for bees, allows no layabouts, slackers, or dweebs. Work or die. Organizational perfection. You have to respect it. Human organizations do not function nearly as well as the bees’. Nonprofits function even less efficiently, for all the reasons we’ve listed so far. If human organizations resembled a classroom of children, nonprofits would be the ailing child in the back row, pale and shuddering. The sickly child, the runt of the litter. The child for whom No Child Left Behind was written. Even if we could fire the nonprofit leadership and start acting like a business — which I’d love to do, by the way — we would still have jaundiced and palsied institutions in need of repair. I’m biased. I believe all organizations are hot garbage, but nonprofits especially. I want to employ three theories of organization that I’ve discovered over the years. These theories have helped my work immensely. I’m going to fill you in on these theories to amuse you and also give you the tools to recognize dysfunction. They apply to all organizations, but nonprofits are particularly prone to these maladies. Like the boulder in the center of the farmer’s neat rows of corn, the adjustments needed to make the organization work are a permanent crutch against the forces of reality and need. But you need to learn to adjust to the chaos of the human workplace.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE I’ve witnessed stellar examples of inept leadership. Radical ignorance and routine nonconformity to systematic thinking has shocked and amazed me. Poor leaders stick out in my memory like marriages, births, and deaths. Fortune favors some nonprofits. Inept leaders are limited in their ability

to harm others. The leaders are isolated, spending their time looking at pornography on the company network or talking loudly to their doctor’s receptionist on the company phone about their incontinence. But other leaders can leave their mark. Their grasp on daily operations can resemble someone attempting to hold water using their hands. Lousy managers rarely understand the work of their subalterns, though have no trouble taking credit for it. Any emergency arising is met with bewilderment, followed by a diffusion of personal responsibility that rivals Nazi testimony during the Nuremberg trials. “I was just following orders.” Toxic workplaces follow. Development staff become so embarrassed by their CEO that they take donors far out of the way to avoid the two meeting. They watch the CEO change their email signature every month: one month is an announcement of their preferred pronouns, the next month is a change of phone number, the next their office hours, and another month is a change in font. All the while, the organization hemorrhages money like an involuntary organ donor whose kidneys have been sold by a cartel. You probably have similar experiences. Talent never seems to rise. Bad leaders always get promoted. Dr. Lawrence J. Peter came up with an explanation — the Peter Principle — for why you’ve never had an effective boss in your life. He wrote an excellent book with Raymond Hull in 1970, which lays out, in great detail, the many nuances of their primary thesis. Their thesis is: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. The corollary is: In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. This powerful thesis explains so much. Organizations, and nature, work on hierarchies. My chickens, as stupid as they are, maintain a pecking order that puts the runt in her place while the largest, most vital hen gets first pass at food. One can empathize with the

runt. But that is her lot. Similarly, organizations seek talent from within and try to create hierarchies to manage their workflow. That’s the theory, anyway. Because in practice, the Peter Principle explains why hierarchies almost always fail to find quality. In the Peter Principle, every employee rises just beyond their point of competency. You get promoted for the last job you did well. But once you reach the point where you no longer do well, you stop advancing. You stay in that rut, doing badly, and advance no further. Maybe a case study is in order. Take Gretchen. Gretchen has been associate director of development for three years and has just turned twenty-eight. Her boyfriend recently proposed to her, and they’ve started looking at houses. If God blesses them, perhaps some children will follow. A happy life awaits. Life has not handed her disappointment. She is chirpy, energetic, and gets along with her coworkers. She impresses people with her ability to work as a team player. Donors visit just to talk to her. Events she organizes have a glow of mirth to them. Her mailings are full of good cheer. Gretchen is doing well. When Steve, her supervisor and director of development, dies of a stroke on business travel, gasping for breath and expiring on the floor of one of his angel donors, the organization begins to consider who can replace him. The director is dead, long live the director. Gretchen throws her resume into the mix. Things are going so well; why not try to advance a little? As an internal hire, she’s a shoo-in. She gets the job. But Gretchen now supervises a department of four. She’s younger than Horace, the assistant director who walks with a limp, and so does not gain his instant respect. Sally, development coordinator, is lazy. Frances, her database coordinator, never comes to work. And the board now wants regular reports from Gretchen. The executive director of the nonprofit makes her armpits sweat. Gretchen finds personnel management difficult, the reporting requirements arcane, and the reason for Steve’s stroke understandable. She spends a year as development director, fails to get her employees motivated or raise the amount Steve raised, and leaves for another organization. There she continues to fail as a director of development. Her employees wonder how she could have risen so far. She finally lands a gig as DD at a nonprofit that tolerates her, never really excelling but never quite failing, either.

Sound familiar? Gretchen has reached her Peter Point, a terminal position in the industry. While Gretchen excelled in her previous role, handling smallfry donors and running events, she did not have the social, emotional, or practical intelligence to do well in the development director job. She will never rise beyond the director role for as long as she lives. She’ll try. Quite hard, in fact. To the point of mental illness. Her misery will cause her fiancé to call off the nuptials. Without a partner, she will never have children. Instead, she will devote her time to working herself to the bone. Gretchen will eventually develop diabetes and then cancer. When she dies, some will politely mourn her. They will also say, in hushed tones, that she tried her best yet was never that great at her job. What’s frightening about the Peter Principle is that it might even explain you. Incompetence takes many forms in the Peter Principle’s framework. Being lousy at one’s job isn’t the only symptom of reaching one’s Peter Point. The Principle also encompasses the many nervous breakdowns, facial tics, substance abuse issues, and sleepless nights of one who has reached the limit of their competence. Dr. Peter believed that when one’s own body begins to betray them and autonomic processes begin to break down, a person has reached their Peter Point. The book taught me that I had reached my Peter Point. I used to have hopes and dreams. Those are gone. I worked 60-hour weeks as a fundraiser, hustled for money as hard as I could, met hundreds if not thousands of people, and still could not succeed. Tom Wolfe recorded that the best test pilots, the ones destined for a rocket to space, had The Right Stuff. I didn’t. I had stuff. I had trace elements of The Right Stuff, but it did not appear in sufficient amounts or in the right proportions where stuff appeared. I blamed others. Oh, did I blame them! Everyone around me was incompetent. Nobody understood me. My family didn’t understand the sacrifices I was making. And wouldn’t you know, I was also just happening to have a run of bad luck at the same time. And the world shrugged off the importance of our work, those bastards. Philistines, all of them, criticizing the art of my deal. But in the end, the problem was me. I did not have The Right Stuff. There is no judgment in reaching your Peter Point, though. Like the curious child who reaches out toward an open flame, a development officer has to learn their limits. The latter half of Peter’s book deals with how to

identify whether you yourself have reached your Peter Point. It also offers advice on how to stop yourself from reaching it. Poor Gretchen, our youthful, energetic fundraiser, should have read the signs. Steve died on the road. In the living room of a former board member, actually. As Steve died, he released his bowels on the carpet. The perfect end to a long career. Gretchen should have asked herself if Steve, aged 55 when he died, was up to the job. As it turns out, Steve, too, did not have The Right Stuff, or he wouldn’t have become a prolific guest of the local Chinese buffet. If Gretchen had seen this, she could have avoided years of toil. She could have identified the flaws in her coworkers: Frances, never present; Sally, glued to her phone; and Horace, ever bitter. Prior to taking the job, Gretchen should have listened and observed. St. Augustine said, “Hear the other side,” which, translated into modern parlance, might read, “Look alive, dummy.” Unfortunately, many development professionals don’t understand the limits of their own talent. “Fake it ‘till you make it” turns into years of waltzing misery with a coda of ischemic heart disease. If you do have The Right Stuff, you may not even have it in development. It may be that your Right Stuff exists in another discipline altogether. Have you considered sculpture? Adolf Hitler was not a bad painter. I think that many nonprofit professionals — particularly development professionals — end up reaching their Peter Point because they belong to inefficient organizations built on penitence. Their already unsustainable motivations cloud their judgment. The Right Stuff requires the development officer to accept that the nonprofit will always be an awful organization. That’s too much for many development professionals to bear. The most important thing a nonprofit professional can do to avoid their Peter Point is to get a hobby. Knit. Give away your knitting to children in need, youths with low standards for symmetry and quality 1. Do something to find validation because you are in mortal danger otherwise. Going back to our earlier chapters about the character of the philanthropist, the Peter Point begs the question of whether there’s a Peter Point for personal wealth. For some, too much money turns them into a revolting monster of a person. We all know the story of the lottery winner who destroys their own life. Or the drug dealer whose newfound wealth is whittled away by their greed. It’s a good idea to ask yourself whether you would ever be good at being

a rich person. I would, I’m sure.

THE GARBAGE-CAN THEORY Nonprofits, as we described previously, seem to make decisions running contrary not only to good business practices but even to common sense. For instance, let’s imagine you are the director of development at a small community center and are considering getting a volunteer corps involved. The board won’t approve another staff member, so you might as well try to find people to work for free 2. You search around for groups that might want to help pick up trash on the property, move chairs and tables, or otherwise do small jobs that are manageable and simple. You find out that the local high school is looking for a place for rising seniors to get service hours as part of their graduation requirements or whatever. Thinking it’s a great way around the problems with recruiting viable volunteers, and also a way to get both the youth and their parents involved, you bring the idea to the board. The board freaks out. The primary concern put forth is “hooliganism” and “hoodlums,” that “they might break something” or “be caught having sex.” The executive director says, “I hear that these kids all use those vapes to smoke dope.” Just minutes prior to the meeting, the ED had been fully on board. You’ve been betrayed! Never mind that your community Billboards and Advertising Clutter Roadside (By The U.S. National center has security cameras everywhere Archives, 06/1972) - Public Domain to stop the sex and drugs. Never mind that a central part of your job is to raise the profile of the organization. Never mind that you have been having so much trouble with membership that you fear for your job. To this board, children should not be heard and only seen through a glass

darkly. You put the palm of your hand to your forehead as you listen to board members imply that all children have a speck of the devil in them. Everyone knows that when children enter a public venue, their eyes glaze over, and foam appears at the edges of their mouths. To the ears of these fearful board members, youthful chatter is the roaring at the gates by invading barbarian hordes. You go home from the board meeting furious. Your spouse greets you at the door with a smile, which quickly turns upside down as you vent your frustrations. You just cannot understand why the problem of vandalism seemed to catch on so fast. At any point, a drunk driver could plow through the front door of the community center and destroy everything. Or the old electrical system could send a spark out that torches the place to the ground 3. Are students more or less predictable than a flood or an earthquake? Enter the garbage-can theory of organization. Invented by Babson College economists Cohen, March, and Olsen in 1972 4, it explains why choices get saddled with problems. Their description of an organization reads: An organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. Yikes, that was a buffet of words. There’s some digestion required here to understand what the garbage can theory says about the nature of organizations. Let’s start at the beginning. An organization is a collection of choices looking for problems. In other words, as decisions confront an organization, the organization produces problems to be attached to those choices. You can think of examples of this, I’m sure. Today, for instance, corporate America faces agonizing discussions over the environmental impact of its products. Want to release an ad with smiling photos of people using your widget? Make sure to discuss how one one-hundredth of your product comes from green sources (never mind that it’s shipped hundreds of miles using fossil fuels). The decision to release advertising gets caught in a

climate change problem matrix. As the garbage-can theory states, this is not an accident. In an organization, a choice actively looks for problems. It isn’t a matter of the choice running into problems by accident but a deliberate casting around by choices for problems to append. The bigger the choice, the longer one waits for problems to attach to it. Every choice is bait on the fisherman’s line, attempting to bring in the problem-trout to justify its importance in the hierarchy. Going back to our community center example, you have the primary choice you had brought up, phrased as a question: should we let students get involved to help them and help us? A choice for an organization is often a simple question that requires a simple answer: yes or no. This choice about the involvement of high school kids seemed like an easy yes. Yet, the issue left your sphere of decision-making. As you made the choice and began to work on implementing it, other players had to get involved. Everyone had to have their say. And when they did, they began to bring up problems and expected you to have explanations for how to deal with these problems they’d thought up. Next, in the parsing out of the garbage-can theory, we see that “issues and feelings” are looking for choice-making situations where they can be aired. This is where the nonprofit organization’s enraging propensity for committee-making really comes into its own. Rather than make decisions, a nonprofit typically forms a committee for discussion. This allows anyone with strong feelings to endlessly comment on decisions until all involved are disgusted with one another. They then break for lunch. When a decision is made, those who were emotional about it usually will remain unhappy. A new committee can then be formed to deal with new decisions about people’s feelings. This is how hell looks. Thus, in the community center example, we step next to the problem raised by your board: high school students, children, are berserker demons who will burn this place to the ground if we give them half a chance. Watch now as the problem (children are awful) gets associated with the choice (should we have kids involved?). The problem seems to arise out of nowhere, like a haunting apparition or a ghastly wraith. Involve kids? Absolutely not; they are demons. The thought had never crossed your mind. That’s because, in discussion of a choice, it seems as if problems arise not because they are

threatening in any way but because finding problems is a pastime. Think of the choice and the problem as two separate entities swimming in the muck. The problem (kids are awful, kids have diseases, kids are impulsive terrorists) attaches to the choice (should we invite kids?), causing the latter to become weighty and unwieldy. This moment of fusion between problem and choice is identifiable. Have you ever sat in a meeting that was going nowhere? That’s most meetings, right? But then something changes. This meeting will plod along until the choice arises, at which time, everyone begins to speak up. Your heart drops. Let’s go back to our earlier example. Before long, not only are the kids going to wreck things, but one of them may get hurt. We aren’t equipped to handle kids. Do we have child abuse clearances? And whose idea was this anyway? You think you hear someone say that it’s about time to find a new development director, too. You’ve seen the garbage-can theory firsthand as a fundraiser. After all, most choices in a nonprofit revolve around raising more funds. But a dance starts to occur when confronted with the decision to undertake fundraising (with questions such as: Should we approach this major giver? Should we approach this foundation? Should we schedule this fundraiser?) Reasons to not raise funds are found. Excuses start to fly like bullets. And time is wasted. The choice of whether to raise money always seems to have a whole set of problems attached to it, with one exception: you are not allowed to raise issues with raising money as a development officer. You can have no excuses. Finally, in the garbage-can theory, decision makers look for work. When considering the meat of the garbage-can theory, that problems attach to solutions, one begins to understand the role of leadership. The decision maker does not make decisions but instead listens to whoever complains the loudest. We know that nonprofits are built upon penitence, and the felt need for posturing manifests strongly. As a result, nonprofits attach more problems to choices than the choice warrants. This makes it doubly difficult for those in a decision-making position, like yourself. My Dad always says nonprofits “are toxic because the stakes are so low.” The stakes, in the end, are people’s consciences. No choice can be made without a dozen problems showing up, clamoring for attention. Cohen, March, and Olsen take their garbage can one step further. They say that problems attach to choices at random. Going back to our original

example of the dangerous, barbarian high school students, we find that the reason for making a choice in the negative about student volunteers isn’t a logical proposition. Not at all. Logic isn’t at play. It was random problems coming out of the garbage can, congealing to the problem, and sinking a possible new initiative before it had a chance to get off the ground. Out of the many players in a development shop, you find that Annual Fund staff are the most neurotic. They eat antacids like candy or develop crippling anxiety. You’ll find that they develop strange, undiagnosable disorders that resemble tuberculosis. With its wide distribution to a large audience, the Annual Fund appears prone to problem-attachment. Problems get attached to every single word in every single mailing. A reminder postcard gets incredible scrutiny from every level of the organization. The choice of whether to write “Dear Friend” or “Dear Neighbor” is a fight to the death. By comparison, a major gift officer has a smaller circle of people who have to pore over every word. Their phone calls are one-on-one, not to a wide audience. The chance for unrelated problems (“Is it okay if we say you people in this letter?” or “Have we considered whether asteroid mining should be mentioned in this letter?”) to accrete to choices is easy in the Annual Fund situation. Annual Fund staff develop bad habits like joining street gangs. The purveyors of the garbage-can theory have some advice for leaders in this scenario. For one, if confronted with a decision, listen. Figure out which problems will get attached to the choice you are bringing up. If the choice is, for instance, to send out a spring mailing, find out what problems constituents will raise, such as the budget, whether anyone opens their mail in the spring, or whether you’re a good fundraiser at all. A leader identifies the problems attached to choices and knows which fights to have and which to skip. Some choices will jettison their problems after some time. A good leader knows that this is the perfect opportunity to step in and resolve that choice quickly. “Choose your battles” is the old adage, and it’s a great way to get out of the garbage can. Ultimately, though, the garbage-can theory damns us all to an existence of a multitude of problems getting attached randomly to the choices we must make. Nonprofits make decisions contrary to common sense because a contrarian view of the application of common sense is considered justified, as we described in Chapter 1. In an organization like a nonprofit, where penitence is the motivating

factor, the garbage-can theory rings particularly true. But think of your book club, your church, or maybe even your household. All organizations live in the garbage can.

PARKINSON’S LAW I left the best for last. If you can get hold of a book called Parkinson’s Law: Or The Pursuit of Progress (1957), you’re in for a treat. Insofar as I’m a student of any scholar, I’m a student of C. Northcote Parkinson. A navy historian, his legacy comes from his writing about organizational culture and the dysfunctions therein. His most lasting edict is the following: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. It’s the ultimate law of the procrastinator. I don’t think there is a single job on the planet that doesn’t apply Parkinson’s Law in some manner. Whether you’re a car mechanic who has to complete a few state inspections before quitting time or the fundraiser who has to make 300 cold calls before the end of the week, you will “work” on the project far more than you will work on it. You’ll waffle. Inveigle. Prevaricate. Eventually, you will get around to it. Only a guy studying the military could come up with such a formulation, where the unofficial motto reads Hurry Up And Wait. This penetrating insight explains many of the problems you find in your development office right now. Say, for instance, that you are tasked with writing the Annual Report for a nonprofit. In this report, you’d detail some accomplishments, large donors, and set up some snazzy graphs that titillate your audience. You’d set up deadlines for your team, including an internal and an external deadline. Reminders would go out to all contributors, explaining the importance of the deadline. What you quickly find is that your nonprofit has a loose interpretation of internal deadlines, by which I mean that anyone who stuck to deadlines got threatened with the dead part of the word. You panic. You can’t sleep at night. Each team member seems to drag their feet. Photos take forever to arrive. And the Annual Report goes out a month and a half late.

In this case, you would think deadlines would constrain the time allotted to do the work. But Parkinson’s Law has a sneaky way of doing an end run around deadlines. Unless the deadline includes social pressure, the work will not get done. It’s almost as if individuals in the bureaucracy have a sixth sense of how time to completion can expand beyond a deadline. Then again, Parkinson’s Law has a corollary, in my opinion, that helps an individual do their work better. This is the Law of Good Enough. Much of the fretting and carrying on that happens when I work on a project and cannot complete it in a timely manner comes from a perverse form of self-doubt, perhaps even perfectionism 5. A project I’m pursuing only needs to be good enough. I haven’t received a grade on a project since I was in middle school, and I don’t plan on going back to the 7 th grade, when I cared. Good Enough is Good Enough for Me. Parkinson observes, also, that one of the side effects of Parkinson’s Law is that administrators will begin making work for one another. You see, when Parkinson’s Law is in effect in a hierarchy, those up the ladder, like the board of trustees, can spend all day editing a memo that you’ve produced. The Law of Good Enough no longer applies because the person up the ladder is looking at ways to fill their time, and it often means editing your work. The cycles of make-work that Parkinson’s Law identifies can frustrate even the most accomplished development professional. Donor research takes forever to get back to you. Foundations will take their sweet time returning a proposal to you, to the point where the project doesn’t apply anymore. Boards get involved in minutiae that aren’t their responsibility. And philanthropists refuse to return your calls. Some say that you should calm your horses when work isn’t getting done. “Your first priority isn’t their first priority,” the wise man says. What needs to be learned from Parkinson is this: no priority is anyone’s priority. Work will take as long as it needs to take, no more, no less. Speeding anything up is impossible, and you should stop trying and accept that your work will forever be mediocre. Free yourself by understanding that everything in nonprofits will take as long as possible, especially anything involving money.

YOU DON’T NEED TO FEAR

At this point, you may be feeling overwhelmed by these cynical theories of bureaucratic structures. That’s natural. Understanding that the organizations you inhabit are terrible is a shaky first step to take on the path to certain alcoholism. But you must take it. As we’ve said, nonprofit organizations always begin their work from the wrong place, bumble through their organizational structure, and, if they’re lucky, impart some good work in the world. Take a deep breath, friend. Because you now know how to do an end run around your organization. Successes can be had. It just requires a stalwart, red-blooded heart, disciplined by rigorous and often brutal training. You cannot flinch in your task because failure means gnawing hunger, failing your ancestors, and a disappointing life story. You have to get that money, even if people don’t deserve your best work.

CHAPTER 7

FINDING MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT NOW THAT WE’VE trashed everyone in your organization, and the organization itself, I think it’s time we write the book on how development is all that stands between the nonprofit and bankruptcy. Nonprofits are lucky to have us development officers around because, let’s be honest, a lot of organizations crumble without development. They simply cannot keep up with the demands of the modern fundraising landscape the way a trained, crafty, and borderline deranged development officer can. Most organizations don’t know the first thing about fundraising. A consultant told me about an organization he met with one time, a small nonprofit, where the board’s position was the following: We are running out of money, we want to raise more, but we don’t want to ask people for it. The next question to my consultant friend was, “How can we make money under these conditions?” Outsiders might think I’m joking or exaggerating, but experienced nonprofit development professionals nod their heads as they read this. The aversion to fundraising is real. Let’s say you succeed. Congratulations! Money begins to roll in. You’re not hailed as a genius, but your presence begins to brook toleration. You feel good. You go out and celebrate. Have a few drinks, snort a few lines. Maybe you go home and have that intimate time with your spouse you’ve ignored for a few years because of the Shredded solid waste (GST HBK, capital campaign. Own work 2009) - Public Domain

When you return to work, though, you immediately notice that all the money you earned is gone. The problem with too many organizations is that they spend their money. They shouldn’t. Cash-strapped organizations insist on sticking to the most absurd operating structures out of habit. They pay their executive director far above the market rate for a bankrupt organization, or the board’s favorite CFO gets that honor. Everyone gets free lunches on Fridays, despite the budget bleeding. This propensity to waste money hearkens back to the ignoring of sound business practices we’ve mentioned elsewhere. I think it has to do with a related phenomenon in nonprofits, which is that nonprofit workers are generally awful with the green folding stuff. One large but cash-strapped nonprofit I consulted for had at least a dozen supply cabinets scattered throughout the halls of the organization’s headquarters. Yet, office supplies constantly arrived at the door via Amazon or Walmart or Office Max. They knew the name of their UPS guy. What was happening? The two assistant directors had no clue how to do inventory or otherwise figure out whether they needed another set of twelve thousand emblazoned ballpoint pens. Day after day, the delivery boxes piled up. Meanwhile, when I needed office supplies to run Dungeons & Dragons games for my friends, I’d just creep around the darkest depths of the office building, cracking open supply cabinets like dry mummy tombs. The mildew smell came off the supplies after a while, especially if I just let the stuff lay in the sun for a while. I once interviewed at a nonprofit whose conference room consisted of a large table besieged by piles of old office supplies. You couldn’t lean back in the chair because you would knock over one or another stack of boxes. They had a case of staplers because, I quote, “we might need them for a mail drive or something.” I’ve learned that supply chain management is a career in itself. I’d love to see an experienced supply chain expert stumble into one of these nonprofits to audit the office supply purchases. They’d have a stroke. But I digress. Let’s talk about:

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT

This discussion of wasted office supplies reminds me of some research I read about higher education and the enormous amount of money wasted there. Higher ed, like I said at the beginning of the book, is barely a nonprofit, right? It’s an insidious kind of nonprofit in that it actually takes money from participants in the form of student loans. Imagine Habitat for Humanity making its clients pull out non-dischargeable debt and high-interest mortgages to get Jimmy Carter working on their house. Hey, wait a minute, that might be an idea for my next nonprofit startup. Why not get in on the action? Let’s start a nonprofit where we take people’s future earnings and the best years of their life. We can give them a piece of paper afterwards, written in Latin, and tell them it’s valuable. Anyway, the research. What you find with higher education is that top executive salary can be pretty damn high. The average is pulled down by people who don’t seem to take executive salaries at all, like many nonprofits where the president doesn’t take a salary at all. But as we all know, many of those executives have great perks. They have charge cards, expense accounts, and so on. As I understand it, this is the perk that many executive-level professionals at nonprofits get: they don’t get the pay, but they expense out the rest of their consumption. I’m sure they toss and turn at night, but it’s less likely to be from guilt than from indigestion. Some of these expense reports have to be embarrassing. Booze, $200 steak dinners, carriage rides in Central Park. One university president at Westfield University just threw all caution to the wind and bought $200,000 of nonsense for his family, including vacations and gifts. I’d love to know what he was thinking. Some of these benevolent dictators give up their entire salary during hard times as a gesture. But they also get the Executive Director Office Suite with the Presidential Bathroom, a credit card with a $25,000 credit limit, plus a secretary to handle administrative affairs and relieve sexual urges. As a supposed upshot, these executives possess critical skills needed to run a modern nonprofit enterprise. Gotta hire talent, I’m told. Say, do you know anyone with talent? Anyway, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Which is:

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT Imagine you nailed a highly competitive, unrestricted operating grant. You know how rare that kind of grant can be. About as likely as getting struck by lighting or living through pancreatic cancer. When you get one of these, it’s like Christmas, and it could be any day of the year. However, your joy at landing the grant is short-lived. The board chair says, “Yeah, that’s nice, but that just covers a month of operating. We need more.” Of course, you sulk, as you usually do when there’s too much reality in the vicinity. You then start to take stock of the burn rate at your nonprofit. What you realize is astounding. A development officer had to not only raise their own salary back but also everyone else’s salary. As you wander the building, you pass line items in the hallway. By that, I mean people. Nonprofits spend a tremendous amount of money on salaries. In fact, many nonprofits spend over 50% of their operating budget on salaries alone. In any other business, this proportion would get the CEO axed by the board and likely blackballed by the industry. But it’s okay in nonprofits. It’s perfectly acceptable because there’s a perverse incentive called “spending on programs.” Charity Navigator, which grades nonprofits they feel like grading and ignores those they don’t 1, says that the most trustworthy organizations spend 75% of their operating budget on programming. By that, they mean: you spend it on things that are worthwhile and not on things that aren’t. This means that nonprofits who want a decent rating on Charity Navigator or some other rating site either need to bribe someone, lie, or scale back anyone that isn’t contributing directly to the nonprofit's programs. Yes, you, as a development officer, aren’t in programming. No, you never have anything to do with programming at all. You didn’t babysit those toddlers, sweating as the program staff went to 7/11 for a sandwich. You never help. You don’t design the programs from the grant proposal stage, keep it on track, and then report out afterwards. No, you’re not a help in programming at all. You didn’t get into a screaming match with the overzealous cops. You didn’t set up the multimedia system for the lecture series. You aren’t in programming.

It's infuriating that measures like “proportion of operating budget spent on programming” become a metric abused in order to boost a nonprofit’s standing. This phenomenon is explained by Campbell’s Law, an adage developed by a social scientist named Donald T. Campbell. He stated that: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. In other words, as soon as you create a number to measure someone by, they immediately start to game the system for that number. It’s like staring into the abyss while the abyss stares into you, to quote one syphilis-addled German. If you start making decisions based on a number produced by the organizations you watch, the organizations will start to change their numbers to boost themselves in your eyes. This kind of perverse incentive is endemic to nonprofits. Since all the decisions nonprofits make, as we’ve said, are social in nature (because penitence is social, if only a conversation between a person and their deity), they have nothing to do with the hard logic of the universe. Coat charities will hand out as many coats as they can, including to people who don’t need them, just to boost their coat number. Museums will lie about the number of people passing through their doors. Colleges and universities constantly play with their acceptance rate, their retention rate, and other similar admissions figures to seem competitive with others. Smaller nonprofits constantly seek to prove themselves through ridiculous measures, too. We’ve mentioned the figures provided by Charity Navigator. But scrutinize even the most mundane measures and you’ll begin to find corruption. For instance: volunteer hours logged. This garbage heap! What nonprofits do is keep a log of hours spent by volunteers on various projects. Often, nobody logs their hours correctly. So, large adjustments are made based on rounded-up estimates that start to resemble the number of man-hours it took to construct the Titanic. Then nonprofit leadership applies the average wage of their county to that number of volunteer hours and comes up with an amount that is supposed to represent the dollar figure of work put in by volunteers. As we pointed out in our earlier chapter, Those Who Work for

Free, volunteers are largely useless, meaning the number is about as useful and accurate as a government economist’s inflation statistic. Yet, granting agencies will ask for figures like volunteer hours to help them decide whether to fund one nonprofit over another. Supposedly, anyway, because I have never heard of an institutional giver throwing down the gauntlet on a proposal, saying, “We were going to fund you, but you didn’t have enough volunteer hours.” The beat goes on. Nonprofits report nonsense numbers about operating salaries, figures that don’t at all represent reality on the ground, and continue to hoodwink the public about their activities. After you were told that your unrestricted grant was barely scratching the surface of the organization’s problems, you walked the halls of the nonprofit headquarters, watching people stand at the water cooler, chat at each other’s desks, and take long bathroom breaks 2. Every one of your colleagues seemed to have a blinking dollar figure over their head. It was their hourly rate, burning through the budget you were asked to bail out through fundraising. But hey, they’re in the business of programming. Development? Development just isn’t necessary.

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT Right, I was trying to tell you about raising money. Sorry, I got distracted. Distraction is more commonplace than periods of calm in which the job can be accomplished. My expertise as a fundraiser has been called upon to do the following: Empty trash cans. Act as the administrative assistant, including scheduling meetings, fixing the copier, booking rooms, getting coffee, and setting up Zoom for those who are able but unwilling. Do immediate crisis communications with the press. Lift boxes, put out chairs and tables, and erect tents. Clean up a child’s vomit. Clean up dead rats. Coordinate the installation of a new front door.

Talk down a stoned donor over the phone. You see, development often comes to mean General External Relations. Development officers aren’t merely fundraisers. They are also the individual solely responsible for any externally-facing activity. Or any internal-facing activity. Let’s just call it “any activity at all.” Resisting the calls to jump into work unrelated to development can result in termination. But you also have to wonder whether development actually makes money. Imagine, for a moment, that you were skinny. Yes, just imagine. Wouldn’t that be nice? Now, imagine that you have developed a rather large tumor on your neck. When you step onto the bathroom scale, you will notice that you have gained weight. But the weight is malignant. It’s concentrated on one part of your body. It isn’t serving a specific purpose but instead siphoning off material to itself. That’s what development officers often are to an organization. Tumors. We bring in money, but the money disappears immediately. The money you raise creates programs that spend the selfsame money. At the end of the day, the organization has grown, yet nobody knows why or how. The board, other employees, and the ED start to wonder why they have a development department at all. Maybe they’re right It’s almost impossible to raise sufficient funds in a nonprofit. Yet often, development officers aren’t fired. They simply follow a straight line to crashing and burning, like a flaming locomotive coasting through the night. Or a tumor that grows too fast, gets noticed, and gets sliced off. I suppose we’re made of a different breed. We’re the ones who can see those dollar signs floating over everyone’s heads. We’re the responsible ones. That’s why it’s hard. So, back to our subject at hand.

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT What really grinds the gears of development professionals is never feeling recognized for busting our humps to bring in the dough. We’re not asking for people to kiss our feet, but a little TLC would be nice. And maybe a piece of the action.

Why not work out some kickbacks for your favorite development officer? One argument thrown around by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) is that fundraisers should not engage in commissionseeking. As defined in the AFP code of ethics, our professional organization enjoins you not to engage in commission-seeking activity by saying: Members shall not accept compensation or enter into a contract that is based on a percentage of contributions; nor shall members accept finder’s fees or contingent fees. Members shall be permitted to accept performance-based compensation, such as bonuses, only if such bonuses are in accord with prevailing practices within the members’ own organizations and are not based on a percentage of contributions. 3 In other words, development professionals shouldn’t be looking to get bonuses or a percentage on earnings. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman kills himself at the end of the play, 4 having failed as a salesman and as a father and husband. Willy’s life is a tragedy. His family mourns him with a sense of loss, but also a sense of frustration. Ultimately, Willy could never find peace with himself and felt powerless in the face of age and the rigors of work. What’s ironic is that Willy Loman likely got commissions and bonuses for a job well done. According to the AFP, you should be paid even worse than sad Willy Loman. The AFP will argue that your development salary should remain independent of fundraising successes, but this is a lot of horse manure. As libertarians like to say, the real minimum wage isn’t $7.25 an hour, the real minimum wage is $0 an hour. A fundraiser not raising enough money gets fired. Failure has a definite floor, but according to the AFP, your successes are supposed to have a ceiling. When a fundraiser does exceptionally well, some believe they shouldn’t be given any reward for that combination of luck and skill. Of course, the AFP justifies this supposed ethical conduct this way: Members of AFP are motivated by an inner drive to improve the quality of life through the causes they serve. They serve the ideal of

philanthropy, are committed to the preservation and enhancement of volunteerism; and hold stewardship of these concepts as the overriding direction of their professional life. They recognize their responsibility to ensure that needed resources are vigorously and ethically sought and that the intent of the donor is honestly fulfilled. Yikes. Where do we start with this? I have an inner drive to help a cause, yes. But I also have an inner drive to eat, defecate, and screw. Just because I have an inner drive does not mean that I should not be paid for my services 5. The last sentence, about how needed resources are ethically sought, is truly rich. It leaves out that many of those resources are not ethically sought by the donor themselves. There are hundreds of buildings across the country named after sketchy hedge fund managers or those working in energy extraction who make money destroying the environment. In the for-profit sector, “the customer is always right.” But also in the forprofit sector, I’m supposed to screw the customer out of their money for my company’s gain. In for-profit, you treat the customer well because there’s a tradeoff. But as we covered in Chapter 1, nonprofit work is about penitence, and it’s a bad way to do business. The AFP seems to want development officers to occupy a sort of liminal role as pleasing the customer but never expecting to collect. Never mind that your donor secretly murdered his wife to collect life insurance. You need to honestly fulfill his wishes. As the professional organization for fundraisers, the AFP should be taking action to figure out why development professionals spend their lives burnt out and dejected, not lecturing us underpaid hitmen of the nonprofit sphere about the ethical danger of taking a commission on funds raised. The search for recognition goes on. So I should probably return to the subject at hand, which is…

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT I suppose what I need to do is get over it. Regardless of whether I deserve it, I have a job to do. Maybe the right thing to do is to change the frame of reference. I think I’ve figured out what it takes to stay sane as a development

officer, given the realities of payroll and other expenses. Before you ask, what follows is not a recipe for cooking crack cocaine (though get in touch, and we’ll talk). Instead, I want to detail a change in your frame of reference that will give you the emotional separation needed to do your job well. Here’s the hard truth: you will never fit in the way those programming folks standing around the water cooler eating cookies left over from the lunchtime webinar do. Programming people receive awards and accolades. They get written about in the newspaper. The public knows their names and their faces. This will never happen for you. We’re the expendables of the nonprofit’s mission. If it’s respect you want, transition over to the program side. Program jobs are out there, and they’re not hard. You know they’re not hard because you wrote the report they were supposed to write. You faked your way to show some results for your organization’s complete lack of rigor. You absolutely know you can do those people’s jobs better than they can. Until you’re out of the development department, you’re never truly part of the organization. In my philosophy of fundraising, being a good development officer requires understanding that you’re a mercenary, a moneymaker for hire. Every army eventually turns to third parties to get the dirty work done. Throughout military history, mercenaries have been called many names — unscrupulous, redoubtable, even immoral — because mercenaries fight for whoever pays them the most. The development officer, in turn, is held at arm’s length in a nonprofit because everyone knows that you deal in sketchy, back-alley abortions of the mission. Yet, eventually, everyone hires mercenaries. The United States military employs third-party “defense contractors” to fill the gaps in enlisted military personnel all the time. In 2007, a group of these mercenaries, under the company name Blackwater, massacred Iraqi civilians in Baghdad while escorting US ambassadors. They did it for the money and possibly for the fun, though that was never proven. The Nisour Square Massacre was only of note because most people want their killing done separate from money 6. You don’t have those scruples. This unscrupulousness has to be your standard because, as I pointed out in the last chapter, you will never work for an organization that isn’t garbage.

HOW TO FIND MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT Well, I’ve tried to tell you how to find money for people who don’t deserve it. Failed. Sorry about that. I’ve landed on the idea that you are an unscrupulous person who cares more about money than mission. Maybe it’s best to take a step back and explain this whole mercenary thing.

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 yourself 2. 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 noncommissioned 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 plans 3. 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 talk 4. 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 be 5. 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.

YOUR INTRODUCTION It should be short.

YOUR NARRATIVE The reason the introduction should remain short is that you’re asking for money, not giving your life story. Nobody cares about you. You’re a fundraiser. Think of all the online recipes you’ve seen where the author tells their life story. It was the first blush of my youth, when my cheeks were rosy and my

heart yearned for the companionship of another, that I first discovered how to cook spaghetti. Ditch that nonsense. Get right to the recipe. In the narrative, the proposal blooms. If you stayed brief in the intro and got your thesis across, you’ve done the work of planting the seed of the idea. A proposal writer who finishes a narrative can stand up and crack their knuckles. Go ahead and celebrate, but understand that you’re going to see this part of the proposal — the beginning of the narrative — again, and real soon. Before we continue, let me gripe about the university system for a moment, which I’m allowed to do since I worked in one for years. The proliferation of college degrees, I think we can all agree, has not led to a revolution in coherent thought. It might have done the opposite. People are not smarter than they were a few decades ago. Also, neuroticism has crept into writing. Nobody wants to say anything anymore. By which I mean, nobody wants to take a concrete position. Fear drips off most writers who have graduated from the academy. The writer now believes that saying something of substance requires having credentials like a Ph.D. in Common Sense and a Master’s Degree in Thinking and a Bachelor’s in Understanding with a Concentration in Cogitation. It’s in style to beat around the bush. Let me give you an example. Here’s my first run at producing a paragraph about homelessness and disaster relief for a national nonprofit: At the moment, we are seeing a troubling and often disproportionate victimization of underprivileged Americans through the unequal systems that exist prior to the advent of unforeseen destructive events. It should read: Poor people get hit harder by disasters. I’m not going to produce a book on writing for you. There are people who have done a much better job with that 6. Know, in brief, that writing is embodied thinking. What you put down on the page is congealed thought.

The person with the money has read a lot of terrible congealed thoughts in their time. You must write to the reader. And in fundraising, your reader is the person who has more money than you. Chances are that they came to have more money than you either by being smart or lucky, and if they still have money, they had to continue being smart. Yes, I know that dumb rich people exist. But unless they hire smart people to keep their stupidity in check, idiots don’t stay rich for long. The average major donor or foundation program officer reads hundreds of proposals a year. Strewn across their desks are the dusty carcasses of proposals produced by better writers than you. When they pick up your proposal, they know within moments if they’ll fund it. No amount of flowery language, almost run-ons, desperate thesaurus replacements, or lying will save your proposal. Only a good idea will save your proposal. Skip to your idea. Get right into it. In journalism, doing anything else is called “burying the lead” — the “lead” being the important sliver of information 7. This can be confused for “burying the lead,” since most people would rather shoot at journalists than listen to them, but that’s an aside. By taking the main thrust of your proposal and burying it deep into your narrative, you’re attempting to gradually get the reviewer’s head in the right place to accept your dumb idea. The current style of writing is like a long session of foreplay before the big act. However, let me let you in on a big secret: proposal reviewers know that reading ahead is easy. They don’t like foreplay and want to get straight to the nasty. Reviewers know how to unfocus their eyes and refocus once they’ve gotten to your point. If you read enough, you can find, visually, when someone triumphantly tries to hammer home their point. The paragraphs get more and more bombastic in the lead-up to the big cheese. I bet if you gave me several proposals and asked me to finger where the point of the proposal is, I could find it at least half the time without reading a word. Do not fall into this trap. Do not bury the lead. Instead, use that old journalism standby, the Inverted Pyramid. Resembling twisted Illuminati symbology, the Inverted Pyramid means putting the basics at the front and then getting into details later. Same concept 8. Further supporting my grant-writing philosophy is that you might think you should spend the most time on the narrative. This is not the case. The

narrative is a great artistic undertaking, where the author brings home concepts and themes, tying them together in stellar prose. But if you do not focus on the other sections, you will never be funded in your lifetime.

YOUR BUDGET A grant budget is an exercise in obfuscation. At no point should you imagine that it’s meant to be accurate because, as anyone who has ever run a grant can attest, the budget does not represent reality. No, a grant budget is meant to demonstrate how you already funded the project described in the narrative using internal funds. Let us set out a maxim here to explain what I mean: The closer your budget is to $0, the more likely you are to receive the grant. Grantors have money that they do not wish to give away. But, you’ll tell me, a foundation needs to give away a portion of itself annually in order to continue operating. Lies. I have seen foundations so clearly out of compliance that it boggles the mind. One of them still had its 990 being submitted to GuideStar but had stopped giving out grants decades earlier. Why? How the hell should I know? It seems like they just didn’t feel like it, IRS be damned. And when you have more money than God, you can get away with anything. As much as they like to bray about their purpose and giving philosophy, foundations are simple entities — they want to pay as little as possible for whatever they get. They’re not exempted from business practices, either. Foundations, like corporate sponsors and other nonprofit parasites, want to attach their name to an initiative that smells vaguely of success. But they sure as hell don’t want to slap a lot of dollars on the table to do it. That’s why institutional funding has moved so far away from the old track. Back in the day of my fundraising predecessors, going to a foundation didn’t mean getting restricted funds for a discrete project. It meant getting a lump of operating funds. If you’re a youngster, you might think I’m joking,

but I’m not. You’ve probably worked in organizations stating how grants were out there for the getting. “Back in our day,” they said, which was roughly 10–30 years prior, “we got all kinds of grants! Good ones, too! None of this restricted nonsense. We got operating!” Angry and disbelieving, you start to go through moldering files to find proof that your board and volunteers were full of it. As a matter of fact, you find they weren’t. The nonprofit not only received hundreds of thousands of dollars from local foundations but also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from municipalities that no longer gave you a dime. You sheepishly go to the board and volunteers and explain that this isn’t how it works anymore. You can guess how that goes. How can you harness the stinginess of the modern institutional partner to your advantage? I’ve come up with one solution. You’re not going to like it, but if you’ve read this far through the book, you’re stuck with me to the end. Spend your time in your budget showing how you already paid for everything, and you’ll be much more likely to get the grant. If the foundation doesn’t want to pay for anything, don’t make them pay for anything. Talk about the immense resources of your nonprofit. The length and girth of your bank accounts. Mention how you don’t really care whether you get the grant or not because you’ll get the project done anyway. It’s a little like the old dating advice, “You need to act like you don’t care.” Acting aloof drives a potentially interested mate crazy. In the grant writing context, the advice goes, “You need to act like you don’t care if you get a dime from the foundation.” Foundations swoon at indifference. They want to be treated like trash. If you don’t believe me, consider this: thousands of small nonprofits across the country are all struggling, and many are doing phenomenal work with little resources. Yet, it’s the largest organizations that vacuum up all the money. Why do foundations attach themselves to large organizations where the percentage of the contribution they give to (say, a building project) pales in comparison to the budget impact they’d have given to a tiny organization with a leaky roof and a whiff of desperation? Because, like a parasite, a foundation only wants to attach itself to an organization already reeking of success. If I may say so, that goes for large donors, as well. And corporate sponsors, to boot. You might argue with me that it’s because their development offices are bigger or that they’ve been

around longer. But it seems to me, after years of interacting with these demented organizations, foundations don’t want to be attached to losers. They want to be attached to people accomplishing things. Bring your budget as close to zero as possible, treat the foundation like garbage, and see if you can’t get in the door. Another maxim for understanding the budget section is this: have everything figured out ahead of time. And I do mean everything. You see, a foundation wants to know that you’re a spendthrift who does nothing but stare at the P&L all day. If you need to use grant funds to buy pens, go into great detail about whether they’re ballpoint or rollerball and whether you like the variety of tissues that have that wintergreen menthol stuff impregnated in the weave.

YOUR ATTACHMENTS When looking at raw page count in any proposal, the attachments are the largest part of the document by far. Here’s a list of attachment requests I’ve seen from givers:

Organizational summary. I have never understood this. There’s no narrative in the world that doesn’t talk about an organization’s history. If I thought the sordid history of my awful nonprofit needed additional explanation in the narrative, I would go into gory detail. I’d tell them about the time the drunk auctioneer vomited on the last live auction item. Or I’d add the time a piece of direct mail went out that said, “pull up a seat and shit down,” or, “we’re here to serve the pubic.” Yet, many funders still request a one-page summary of the organization, placed deep in the whirlwind of attachments. I don’t think anyone reads it. Next time this summary is requested, I dare you to write, “The human sacrifices performed during the inauguration of our organization, while not legal, have allowed us to excel in our mission.” See if anyone notices. You might even get a few new donations thrown your way for the effort.

Resumes of team members. Foundations often ask for resumes of people at the organization involved in the project. Project lead, financial contact, and so on. This is a great chance for the development officer to see who is about to leave the organization. The nicer the resume, the more up-to-date, the sooner your colleague will resign. If the resume looks like it was typed out minutes after your final, frustrated request for it, you will be stuck working with that person for a long time. I am not saying to make career decisions based on the resumes you put in the grant, but you should pay attention. Grant timeline. Nostradamus cannot knock my hustle. I can predict the future two to three years out. Never mind that many of the staff in charge of the program will have disappeared by the end of the grant (depending on the quality of their resume, as explained above). Hell, you probably won’t be there, given that most development professionals only last a year. Ignore the possibility of a pandemic, a war, an economic recession, or the likely demise of your nonprofit. Ignore all of that and make up the most ambitious timeline possible. Dazzle with your ability to prognosticate. You won’t stick to it anyway, so impress everyone with your fortune-telling. IRS determination letter. The proof of your nonprofit status comes in the form of a crooked, barely legible, thrice-photocopied facsimile of a letter you received from the federal government in 1975. Sometimes, you get a twice-photocopied version, when you lost the original letter and had to ask the IRS to confirm your status. Financial statements. The funder always asks for the latest financial statement, even though those lag a year. And recently, I have not been able to get financial statements from the year prior until October of the following year. Soon, financial statements will come in the month of November, then December, then January, meaning that funder requests for financials will lag two years. Nobody reads these statements. Your board might comment on the font (Arial, of course), but they will use the audit to clean up spilled bourbon before they read it.

J OKING ASIDE , YOU ’ RE GOING TO BE TEMPTED TO SKIMP ON THE attachments. Do not fall into the trap. In the offices of every institutional giver, a demonic little man awaits your proposal. This little man lives in the attic of the foundation headquarters. Stacked takeout containers surround him like castle walls. Arrayed in chronological order on his desk are this year’s proposals. The lights flicker. In my imagination, the little man wears glasses and sweats a lot. He drinks too much coffee. In his spare time, he takes pictures of trains. When the review committee finishes their analysis of the narrative and the budget, they hand off the proposals to this man. They do not ask for any detailed feedback from him on these proposals. They simply ask him 9 to give a signal about the quality of the attachments. The signal is a small mark scrawled in the margin of page 3 of the proposal. Each foundation has its own unique pass/fail symbol. The little man, over a cup of lukewarm arabica, decides whether your attachments meet his arcane requirements. You’ve always wondered where your proposal goes to die. Now you know. With this information, the review committee can weed out a great number of proposals, getting down to business on the ones approved by the little man in the attic.

A FEW MYTHS ABOUT GRANTS Before we depart from this thrilling subject, I want to dispel a few of the myths out there about grants. One myth is that grants exist. No matter the status of the nonprofit, no matter how desperate or successful, at some point, a brilliant board member or volunteer insists, “There must be grants out there for what we’re doing.” The attitude reminds me of the mentality of those chasing gold in California, the 49ers. Surely, some gold vein will be untapped, they thought. Someone always has the impression that pots of money exist in the universe, unmolested, ready for the taking. I have seen nonprofits send out RFP’s for development help saying similar things: “We want to hire someone to find some grants.” This is a perfect example of the Reverse Tinkerbell Effect, named after

the Peter Pan character. In the Regular Tinkerbell Effect, the more you believe in something, the more likely it is to appear. You’ll recall that Tinkerbell is revived from death because of the belief of others. Nonsense and fantasy. So is the Tinkerbell Effect. This is why I enjoy legal scholar David Post’s Reverse Tinkerbell Effect, which is the idea that something disappears the more we believe in it. He uses the idea of traffic safety: the more people believe traffic is safe, the more risks they take and, therefore, cause unsafe traffic. Similarly, boards and volunteers and other ignorant people think that the more they believe in grant opportunities, the more likely they are to appear. But it’s the opposite. The more you think about a grant, the less likely you are to get it. Every grant writer knows that when you look directly at a grant, it scurries away and hides under the refrigerator. The best way to write a grant is by not looking directly at your computer screen. Don’t talk about it. In fact, you’d better not apply at all. Another myth is that you are writing to an institution when you apply for a grant. You aren’t. You’re appealing to a group of miserable, overworked people who get paid much more than you. You will listen on the phone as they whine about how they must review “all these proposals” and “have to respond to each of them.” This never happens, of course. Grantors rarely give meaningful feedback. Which brings me to the next myth. Many believe that you can learn from grant review feedback, especially from rejections. The basis for this myth goes like this: the review panel for a grant comes up with reasons for discussing, ranking, and rejecting any given proposal. This could not be more wrong. Granted, the review panel begins their work in earnest. They come into the conference room having read their assigned proposals. Then the program officer dumps a load of late submissions, lost submissions, submissions from their cousin’s nonprofit, and a copy of their kid’s homework onto the table. By the third day of grant review, the reviewers are bleary-eyed and throw out proposals based on font 10. That is why, if you have been rejected enough, you too understand that the reviewer comments rarely contain useful information. Therein is hokum, sure, statements like, “We enjoyed the first part,” but thereafter, the information becomes cryptic. “We felt that the proposal, while it had sound basis for funding, was not ready for prime time yet.” What the hell does that mean?

The grant writer and the writing team will pore over these meager comments for weeks, second-guessing. Accusations will start to fly. Fights will break out. Grant reviewers know this, which is why you will often hear nothing at all from them. They know that these comments have no merit and no value. They merely are trying to avoid criticism by speaking in parables, like certain saviors we know. The attitude you can learn from rejections arises from a good place, a Woman with a Migraine desire to learn. Still, there isn’t any (Advertisement for Cérébrine in learning in development, just endless L’Illustration, 1913) - Public Domain cycles of suffering. My favorite myth is that you can run an organization off of grants. This is based on an antiquated notion of grants providing useful funding that can be directed towards your mission. But grants only give out restricted funding anymore, and the more restricted the funding, the easier the grant is to obtain. Grantors will, especially in modern times, bend over backwards to ensure you don’t use the money for your mission and instead use it for any number of work-for-hire schemes that boost their reputation. Organizations that receive many grants do not necessarily find themselves richer for the effort. Given the work going into proposals and reporting, many grants aren’t a net gain for the organization. The safest course to take for your nonprofit is to not apply for any grants.

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE A GRANT The main reason I engage in grant writing is to get everyone off my back for a few hours. It is one of the only fundraising exercises, besides donor visits, where you can tell people to leave you alone. This is a great opportunity to cruise social media, catch up with friends, or take a nap. Sooner or later, you will receive a grant or a donation, and then you will have to make a decision. Do you care enough to thank them for their gift?

CHAPTER 9

THANKS FOR NOTHING THERE’S nothing worse than getting a whole bunch of donations. Sure, it means your nonprofit can make payroll. You’re not getting laid off, as much as you wanted to get laid off so that you could finally pursue your dream career in fingerpainting. The arrival of new money means that your work has just begun. This is when stewardship begins, one of the most frightful exercises in fundraising. Boards and C-suite executives will say without shame that the development office needs to take responsibility for stewardship of donors, every donor, down to the little old lady cutting a $7 check every time her Social Security comes in. They reason that it’s the fundraisers who have the closest relationship with the donor and the best knowledge of the nonprofit's message. Therefore, it should be the selfsame people who respond to the incoming gifts. What a stupid idea. I raised the money. Why would I also be in charge of thanking the donor for their contribution? Why isn’t that the responsibility of the poor bastards who are lucky to have kept their job? Yet, here we are in the 21 st century, with our development departments still engaged in the stewardship pyramid scheme. Some development shops have an entire stewardship wing. Yes, a whole wing. Some have six employees, with support staff in ops and data management all coordinating the rapid deployment of thanks. That doesn’t include the outside firm responsible for managing the output. After all, maintaining the printing presses needed to distribute letters in a timely fashion with minimal errors requires its own division of labor. In its own way, a factory of thanks distribution is impressive. You can count on the donor receiving a piece of media from the nonprofit in a short

time, often less than two weeks. These groups barely ever send these thankyou’s to the wrong person; when they do, they could not care less because they are doing it right most of the time. On the other hand, I’ve met too many development officers at small organizations with no support staff to assist in recognition. Thank you notes weighed on operations like concrete boots applied by a hitman ready to throw them into the river of bankruptcy. Sitting down to produce thank you letters involved putting aside critical tasks, like raising money. Printers jammed. People got the wrong letter. As pressure mounted, more mistakes happened. Donation amounts and dates were incorrect. Phone calls came in, asking why their latest donation of $20 wasn’t represented and how dare you. Meanwhile, due to other good work by the development team, more donations came in that needed recognition. A vicious cycle. The recognition, acknowledgment, and stewardship processes look simple to the outsider. But it is much harder than it looks. For small donors, you need to spend as little time and money as possible while also giving them the satisfaction of having given. For large donors, you need to keep them coming back and make sure they feel recognized. For everyone in between, you need to determine how little you can thank them relative to their gift. Stewardship is a Sisyphean task, heavy and uphill, and does not lead to the satisfaction one gets from nailing a new gift. Let’s try to make it a little easier on you.

SCRAMBLING TO THANKSGIVING The new year brings a lot of promise. You promise to pursue a less interesting existence by exercising more and drinking less. “This year, I’m going to quit using Adderall as a performance-enhancing drug.” The tax year rolls over, meaning you’ll spend another three to four months of the year working for the government. In certain latitudes, you sit amongst feet of white powder snow and think about the warmer months to come, and whether a beach body will ever materialize in your lifetime. In other latitudes, you go along with your day, wasting the sunshine that others would kill to see. It’s also time for you to update your nonprofit’s thank you note. You can’t just recycle last year’s note. Even though nobody reads anything

anymore, you still run the risk of looking like the lazy son of a gun that you are. You can’t take that chance. Instead, you sit down at the keyboard to produce a written piece with the following qualities: Anodyne. The thank you should be inoffensive and forgettable. You don’t want to say anything of substance because, if your nonprofit screws up (embezzlement, ransomware attack, volunteer corps flash mobs), you want the thank you note to be far from controversial. A tax receipt. You should show that the gift is tax-deductible. Your accountant will supply cumbersome language that looks painful. They will insist on it being in there. Get their name right. Mail merge is one of those sticky wickets that ends careers. There’s no slow-burn panic attack like waiting for direct mail to hit mailboxes and fretting about whether your spreadsheet was right. Get the amount right. Do you want to send a thank you note to someone who gave an in-kind gift of a roll of toilet paper? No, and we’ll talk about why in a minute. As a result of these bizarre rituals of thank you note writing, your note ends up looking like this:

(S PARE

LETTERHEAD YOU HAD LAYING AROUND , SO IT ’ S YOUR OLD LOGO , DON ’ T WORRY , KEEP GOING .)

555 Pee Pee Way Your old office address, so hate mail will bounce. Garbagetown, AK 8675309 Dear Mr. and Mrs. Flogbarn III.,, (you forgot to take the commas out of salutation; also, it’s spelled “Flogbern,” and he’s a Jr.)

Thank you for your generous gift of.00035 shares valued at $ 00.$120 of Theranos stock, and.15 shares of Enron stock, valued at $.0002 a share, which will greatly and superbly help us accomplish our amazing and superbly great nonprofit mission. Our mission, to help people in need wherever they are in the entire world, even in Greenland, irrespective of race, color, creed, gender, income level, housing situation, ancestry, waist size, genital

symmetry, and number of sports cars owned (run-on sentence). We like to think of ourselves as the giving type. While we help poor people who are in need, even though they don’t really deserve it, it’s really people like you who have money that make the difference. We are always sorry to have to ignore people that don’t have money, but we wish them well on their quest to become rich enough to give away their surplus to undeserving little operations like our own. In fact, we’d rather not deal with those unsanitary people at all, but that’s life. It’s been an exciting year. We’re proud to have reached new milestones. We managed to end world hunger, promote peace in the Middle East, and figure out the stretches and exercise regime needed to finally perform autofellatio. But there’s more work to be done. Next year, we aim to figure out how, if Galactic Expansion is pushing all matter further apart from itself at so-called “speeds” faster than light, we can travel fast enough to cross space in order to colonize new worlds. If you have any questions, any at all, even about my children’s current medications, how often my spouse and I make love, or my favorite color, please contact me by phone, email, semaphore, or carrier pigeon. Your gift is tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by the law, whether it’s the law of the government, local/state/federal/crown, or whether it’s the law of averages, or the law of the Great Old Ones, whose eldritch terror is indescribable. Sincerely, Alicia Barfendoodler Acting Interim Executive Director

D ID YOUR EYES GLASS OVER AS YOU READ THAT ? G OOD . N OBODY READS A form letter, especially if they already know why they gave. Some clever development folks will include a self-addressed envelope in the thank you note to try and spur an additional donation. This is downright insulting. You should definitely do it. By now, you’re wondering about the value of stewardship. You should. Let’s talk about the central issue in stewardship and acknowledgment, namely, the efficacy and purpose of it all.

PAUSES IN CALAMITY Autumn in New England in 1621 probably resembled autumn in New England today: damp, dreary, and dreading the winter to come 1. With the meager harvest of that day collected, the governor of Plymouth was in the mood for celebrating. He sent four men out “fowling,” that is, shooting birds for the table. I want you to imagine them in their tricorn hats, carrying flintlock blunderbusses, swatting mosquitoes, and wading through the swampy morass areas around Plymouth. On their hunt for turkeys and quail, they likely picked up fallen walnuts and chestnuts or plucked ripe plums from the trees. Others spread out into the countryside for deer, bringing back a total of six for the planned festivities. The settlers at Plymouth had a damn good reason to celebrate: they were still alive. Many had tightened belts because, frankly, the settlers at Plymouth were not in shape to survive in the New World. They also had to celebrate the weakness of their enemies. Not that the native Wampanoags were necessarily enemies. But I suspect Massasoit (their tall, honest, and fearless leader whose image was immortalized in Profile Rock, demonstrating his divine favor) had only signed the peace agreement because of the weakness of the confederation. By 1619, plague, likely smallpox or leptospirosis, had ripped through the Wampanoag confederacy, bringing low a once vibrant and populous society in New England. Massasoit figured they could at least keep peace with the sickly, seafaring whites and their loud steel weapons. The Wampanoag had taught the white man to grow corn and survive in the unforgiving New World. Maybe the white man would look favorably on them. The governor of Plymouth, feeling flushed, sent out an invitation to their new native allies. And Massasoit took him up on the offer. I try to imagine what it looked like to have ninety Wampanoag show up in the colonial settlement. Many have tried to paint this scene. The uncertainty of both sides must have been obvious. But some of the uncertainty faded as the feast began. For three days, they ate and celebrated the harvest together. It was the first Thanksgiving. What did it mean to give thanks? The achingly skinny colonists likely gave thanks for their luck. They had traveled to a strange land, struggled, and yet found an alliance with the natives that had been critical to their survival.

For the natives, the pale monotheists from another world had wondrous technology, but their arrival was coincident with a curse — a great plague that leveled their once strong and vibrant nation. The feast went on, the sources say, with everyone praising God and each other. Given the puritan nature of the early colonials, I don’t imagine a ton of alcohol flowed. Still, there were probably some side parties with some snuck snifters. The first Thanksgiving concluded. Everyone went home. The alliance between the colonists and the Wampanoag continued, though it was pressured by other tribes and the inevitable factors of weather and harvest. And then Massasoit died. Tensions rose. Native sons of Massasoit, incensed by white betrayals, started a war with the The First Thanksgiving (Jean Leon New England colonials that eventually Gerome Ferris 1621) - Public ended the fifty-year alliance. The children Domain of the children of the first Thanksgiving fought with ferocity. Civilians died; towns burned. The Wampanoag tribes, already devastated by disease, lost even more ground. Today, we know the names of many of the settlers at the first Thanksgiving. Hundreds of millions of Americans celebrate the event every year. We do not know the names of the Wampanoag, besides a legendary chieftain who only forestalled the inevitable destruction of his people. If there’s something to learn from the story of the first Thanksgiving, it’s that giving thanks is easy when we need to rely on each other. Six dead deer, some stuffed turkeys, baked walnuts, and your friends all make for a good party. As much as the colonial life, heck, the native life, would be unacceptably primitive to a modern audience, you can recognize the impulse to be grateful. If the colonials had never been shown the cultivation of corn, with the Wampanoag keeping the secret of a golden miracle crop to themselves, there would have been no dinner. The natives, on the other hand, got access to incredible technology and the benefits of centuries of metallurgy. The pooling of resources in a harsh land changed the chemistry. Two factions at

odds with each other joined hands in thankful festivities. Later, when they didn’t need one another, the knives came out. Giving thanks means gathering with your erstwhile adversaries. Anyone who has been to Thanksgiving dinner with hated satellite family members or despised in-laws knows intimately that those people are not your friends. Yet, we gather with them nonetheless. So we find two threads here in Thanksgiving: resource abundance and peace with adversaries. What can we learn about the acknowledgment and stewardship process, given this? First, we should consider the amount of the gift. I want to push a radical opinion out there for you. Many won’t like it. It will be considered controversial, even insensitive. It’s this: in a small nonprofit, or any nonprofit, donors do not need a thank you letter. Yes, pretty radical. And when I say a “letter,” I don’t mean they don’t need to receive a receipt. Although, they probably don’t need a receipt, either. Tax code changes have made itemizing small donations almost pointless. But small donors absolutely do not need to receive a letter in the mail detailing their $23 gift. It’s a waste of postage, a waste of paper, and a waste of staff time. As I said earlier in this book, broad-based giving has been dropping for years. The average donation from small donors gets smaller every year. That has led to tremendous amounts of staff time devoted to chasing the largest donors. There is simply no reason to thank small donors who only support a non-material portion of the operation. Yet, we find that the small donors still believe they deserve recognition. “Everyone should be thanked,” said every overworked nonprofit I’ve ever worked in. We, as development professionals, need to disabuse small donors of this looney reasoning. The $20 gift, if it’s to be used efficiently, cannot involve letter writing, personal emails, personal phone calls, or other use of the development officer’s time. Get added to the mailing list? Sure. Get put into a donor database for solicitation? Absolutely. But get personal thanks? Absolutely not. If someone wants personal thanks, they need to give a major gift. Every organization needs to define its major gift level. It could be $250. It could be in the many thousands. Whatever the major gift level, you begin to have some justification for throwing in a thank you letter. After all, these donors gave of their great treasure. Why not compensate them for their beneficence?

However, I’d caution you to not jump too eagerly into that stewardship enterprise. There’s an old saying about banking. If you owe the bank $10,000, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank $10,000,000, you own the bank 2. The implication here is that someone with a great monetary stake in an organization has immense power over its operations. The donor who gives a major gift grabs a nonprofit organization by the balls and starts to twist. Thank you notes are a minimum level of effort and already considered insufficient. Soon, the thank you note morphs into a letter. The letter starts to detail quantitative statistics about the donor’s contribution and starts to look more like a report. Then the letter gives the donor access to the quarterly report, a costly affair that has at least one staff member pulling their hair out to produce. Stewardship reaches further. Personalized reports get distributed to donors with full-color spreads of the smiling faces of the people helped by their donation. None of this includes the calls and visits and check-ins that go along with good stewardship operations. Of course, if you’ve read elsewhere in this book, you know that I’m referring to the arms race in donor relations that makes up the current development shop. Yet, stewardship has a particularly insidious nature to it. The gift, after all, already arrived. The check is cashed. But the development officer in charge of stewardship must continue to grind out work for the money that likely was spent as soon as the check cleared. This means that the major donor, no matter the giving level, has leverage over the organization to the point where their gift is no longer a net plus to the organization. We need a fundamental shift in this mentality. We are the Wampanoag, giving the secret of corn to the starving colonial. We need to begin thinking like the embattled organizations that we are.

CHAPTER 10

SAVING/SLAYING THE PROFESSION BY NOW, you’ve heard one man’s view on the state of fundraising and how a one-person development office can navigate this dismal era of philanthropy. Hopefully, you’ve laughed. Some part of me also hopes you’ve wept. But I hope more than anything that you’ve learned you’re not alone. This is easily forgotten. While you toil in the dungeons of your nonprofit, sacrificing more of yourself every day, the organizations ask more and more out of you. The nonprofit feast is never satisfied. You begin to wonder when the misery ends. How can you get yourself out of the rut? Will your career ever slow down, and does the pressure cooker of the development lifestyle — raising money while abusing your family and drugs — ever ease up? Not by itself, no. Throughout this book, I’ve demonstrated the dialectic of the development officer: we are both the assassin and the resurrection. The development officer takes the money out of the donor’s pocket to apply to their cause but also gives back the recognition that the donor craves. Penitence is an inefficient start to an organization. However, these sinners desire catharsis. They want to know that everything will be okay, that their gifts are a down payment on passage to heaven, or that they can slip into the great nothingness beyond life’s end without a sliver of guilt in their hearts. Development officers mete out forgiveness. By giving thank you notes, acknowledging donors, and writing reports, we create the circumstances for people to feel better about themselves. We are the float in the July 4 th parade, gifting out candy to those who cheer. More than anything, development and fundraising represent something that the Catholic Church got into trouble for back in the day. No, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter. This: functionaries of the

Church used to hand out forgiveness and place a monetary value on it. Sins could be washed clean with cash. The Catholic Church made a good amount of money from these indulgences. It got to the point where the poor felt incredible existential anxiety. For them, a lack of wealth on earth meant a lack of grace in heaven. The Reformation, where the Catholic Church saw its own shadow after some wise guy wrote a 95-part grant application complaining about the abuse of indulgences, resulted in some of the most vicious wars on the continent. Okay, so we ignore the Thirty Years’ War part. But the point still stands. Sufficient fear meant that the one who’d transgressed felt the need to do some action or pay some money to cleanse themselves of their filthy sins. Cardinals, ordinaries, and priests had the power over the populace to wrench the money out of people through a combination of guilt and fear. It’s time we put the fear back in the donor.

RATIONING In 1820, the American whaling ship Essex launched for its final journey. They didn’t know it yet, but the prey they hunted would soon get the advantage of them. The crew of twenty-one intended to set out for a two-anda-half-year journey, hauling in whales for the harvest. Lamps weren’t going to light themselves. Whale oil was a hot commodity, and these guys intended to harvest this cash crop. While sailing the Pacific Ocean looking for sperm whales, they found one. It attacked the ship, taking multiple passes at the watercraft, appearing, according to a surviving crewmember, “with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.” The Essex sunk. Survivors took smaller boats, all in disrepair, and tried to seek shore. They found themselves adrift and struggling. Crewmembers began to die of thirst. Landing on a small island, they ate crab and switchgrass and soon exhausted the tiny island’s resources. They tried to move on, being knocked around by storms and reunited with dying crewmates. Some they buried at sea. Others, they ate. They drew straws and

shot the loser. Then they ate him. For the remainder of the journey, the survivors gnawed on the bones of the dead. Some of the crew lived, but at a terrible price. Why am I telling you this gruesome story? Well, for one, it inspired Moby Dick. It should also tell you a little bit about desperation. In my gruesome analogy, the problem turns this way: when the hunt for a donor goes bad, development officers turn on each other. We force each other to make terrible choices, like who gets filleted like a fish. I myself have figuratively eaten the Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen corpses of fallen development officers. I (Abraham Storck, 1690), Public Domain have taken over the director of development office from some poor soul. With trepidation, I went about harvesting old call sheets, prospect lists, and grant applications. Yep, I cannibalized my predecessor. My replacements should do the same thing. Cannibalism is not sustainable. When it runs its course, only one person remains. And one person cannot hunt a whale by themselves. That’s why we need to ration. Not each other. We need to ration what the donor wants — forgiveness, indulgence, and a clear conscience. Rather than starve ourselves, we must starve the donor. Such rationing will require immense coordination. We’re going to have to work together as a profession. It might resemble a strike or a work stoppage, but we don’t need to form a union. We merely need to agree on one thing. Call it a new code of ethics for the modern development professional. It’s simple. It’s clean. And it will work.

GIVE NOTHING TO THE DONOR Don’t send them a thank you letter. Don’t send them their requested reports. Do not encourage another donation or read their names off during the gala or learn the name of their dog or any of the other degrading things we do to earn

someone’s money. Don’t compliment the donor on their new haircut. Don’t call them at the hospital when they have terminal cancer. Don’t beg the estate executor to consider you. Don’t put a big red fundraising thermometer in front of your building. Don’t write grant applications, appeals, solicitations, or requests. Don’t do any of it. If enough fundraisers stop giving away the goods, namely, social capital and forgiveness (the fuel that these donors crave in their search for penitence), we will put these donors into a state of withdrawal. Many addicts say that the withdrawal from heroin is the most painful experience of their lives. Some say that nicotine is worse. Meth and alcohol withdrawal will kill a person if done too recklessly. Withdrawal from ritual penitence might be more painful than all of them combined. I’m not saying we should sentence our donors to a painful demise, but I am saying that they should get the shakes, nausea, and vomiting. I want them to suffer the discomfort of social and spiritual neglect. Most desperate fundraisers will balk at my suggestion. I know your fear. I understand how scared you are. Besides, you might ask, Will, even if we could convince all fundraisers to adhere to this plan, wouldn’t the donors just stop giving? I understand that assumption. But it undersells what we do. Fundraisers and development officers plug a hole in the psyche of the guilt-ridden. Our work is essential. Appeasement of ego is as essential as the plumber who repairs the mansion our donor lives in or the sunburnt landscaping crew who mows the lawn. And, as we all know, the donor never knows the name of their plumber or their groundskeeper. Blue-collar workers send the donor the bill, and the donor pays it because it is necessary for their lifestyle. But the donors do know our names. The wealthy, the penitent, the one who supposedly loves humanity, they all know that when the development officer calls, it means existential guilt is knocking at their door. We remind high society of mortality. When you call, you remind the potential philanthropist of their responsibility not just to others but to that nagging worry that sits next to their heart. When they lay their head on their pillow, our work is what keeps them awake.

DEATH OF A FUNDRAISER Think of a civilization as a lumbering pack animal, pouring with sweat, girdled with dozens of saddlebags. Steam pours from its mouth as it staggers down the trails of progress. Who can possibly lighten the load? Our work is necessary because a civilization carries its sins with it. Development lightens the load of a guilty world. The idea of the nonprofit donation is to create an easy method for taking saddlebags off. The fundraiser moves alongside civilization, observing it from a distance, holding a small knife. When we have the chance, we move in, slice off the deadweight, and make useful something that was previously a burden. It’s a necessary activity because, without it, the pack animal can’t help but stumble. The weight of sin cripples a civilization. Those seeking penitence need an outlet. We are that outlet. We are the pressure valve of guilt for an entire society. Should we undertake the drastic action of what I might call the “general strike of recognition,” a period of abstinence from recognition? It would create a backup in the pipes of catharsis. The resulting backup would create a profound explosion. Basements, kitchens, and bathrooms would flood with raw emotion. Donors, who previously expected groveling, would be shocked to find nobody returning their calls. When they go to their other charitable interest, they’d find the same thing. As they start to hyperventilate, their ego would demand reprieve. They would begin to call charities that have no business talking to them. Dangling donations, they’d find the nonprofit shrugging. “We’ll survive without you,” the development coordinator will say. Or the development director will answer, “Look, I don’t have a lot of time for you right now. Can you call later?” In Greek society, the parasite (in Greek, “the one who takes food beside”) was originally a temple figure. This figure was the hanger-on, a person pathetic because they could not feed or care for themselves. Instead, they hoped their wit and servility could get them an invitation to dinner. Later, in Greek comedies, they became a fixture of ridicule. Always groveling, the parasite needed what others had. In so many ways, fundraisers have been the parasites looking for money.

No longer. Those hungry for forgiveness need to be the ones begging for sustenance to calm their grumbling egos. I’d love to tell you that this general work stoppage would result in a magical reawakening for our profession. Development would get easier, right? No longer do we need to have awkward meetings in coffee shops. Nonprofits can go back to their work as the money flows in. Unfortunately, I think this is a fantasy. Because even as the donor is put into the concentration camp of their own emotional fragility — where egos are retrained, teaching the donor through hard labor not to expect too much out of organizations based around charitable missions — the development office will fade away. We simply won’t be needed. Society will realign from ego appeasement to mission and doing good work. Development has no place in that universe. A dialectic requires two parties. Nobody dances the tango by themselves. The fissure we drive between development and donor will ruin both of us. By stabbing the donor in the heart, we find their sword piercing ours as well. That’s okay. Because even after we’ve been laid off, the sticky problems of the world remain. Crises of the 21 st century require solutions of everincreasing complexity. Poverty, health, environment, and education are all there, regardless of whether we raise money or not. We can no longer spend our days in frivolity, bickering over whether “With sincere thanks” or “Gratefully” is better wording for the gala program’s acknowledgment list. Managing raffles and membership giveaways will go the way of the dinosaur. The age of driving cross-country for an hour-long meeting with a donor is over. And it’s a good thing. The new age awakened by the development officer will respect work done in the name of others, not selfish recognition. And the development officer, carrying the wrinkles and gray hairs of a lifetime spent in service, can get on with the real work of mending a broken world.

NOTES INTRODUCTION 1 Don’t forget to put on pants.

1. FUNDRAISING IS IMPOSSIBLE 1 I once had a conversation about my nonprofit work with an elected official, who told me, “Thank you for your service.” This is the same phrase uttered to people serving in the armed forces. Had I, without knowing it, embarked on a tour of duty? Do I now have the responsibility to never leave a man behind? Where is my rifle, and is it like others? We will talk more about the arms of the profession in a later chapter. 2 Donors are psychic customers, in the sense that they receive no material good for their donation. We’ll talk a lot about the psychic and moral value of the donation later on. Donors are also psycho customers, as well.

2. THOSE WHO GIVE 1 If you’re interested in enrolling in my 5 Part Crypto-philanthropy Online Series, email me and we’ll talk. 2 If one made a Venn diagram of the group who studied the Greek language for fun and the lunatics who might devote their lives to seeking out the mythical perfect donor, you would likely find great overlap. 3 She is now married to a high school science teacher. So, surprisingly, there was a chance for you, but you blew it. UPDATE 9/30/22! She has divorced the science teacher, so feel free to send her a DM. 4 Never mind that Amazon has its own set of problems and benefitted greatly from the closure of society in 2020. 5 See “He died for our debt, not our sins,” by Michael Hudson, 2017. https://michael-hudson.com/ 2017/12/he-died-for-our-debt-not-our-sins/ 6 Pun intended. The other thing you will “develop” as you advance as a fundraiser is a set of psychological maladies that will follow you to your grave.

7 This is, incidentally, an East Coast American attitude as well. 8 Where it’s fun to stay. 9 Another “captain of industry” and called the world’s richest man, Rockefeller publicly praised Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” If you believe the conspiracy theorists, the Rockefeller family was also one of the thirteen Illuminati bloodlines, and David used black market organs to keep his failing body functioning. 10 They are lionized, but only after the body has fully decomposed. 11 You might think that this contradicts our first chapter, about how penitence is the motivating factor for involvement with the nonprofit. You are wrong. Penitence is the flip side of the ego coin: penitence is the motivator, but the donor wants to be paid for their time. Ego feeding is the wage. 12 Please get in touch if you are starting a campaign. I will talk you and your board out of it. 13 Charitable giving is falling and continues to fall year after year. Why is this happening? It’s hard to say. Is it because development officers aren’t doing a good job? Or is it because the dollar is losing purchasing power? Depending on the week, I suspect that it’s because people are becoming much bigger assholes than they were before. 14 There is one tacit corollary to the Iron Law, which dovetails nicely with the next chapter: a dead or dying donor will often obliterate their fortune in the last portion of their life, or posthumously. However, at that point, economic class has ceased to matter.

3. HUNTING THOSE WHO GIVE 1 Except for Rhode Island. 2 Note for Gen Z: newspapers are publications designed to give the news, usually printed on cheap wood pulp paper and easily foldable. No apps! People would have these delivered to their house to understand what was happening in the world at the time. Everyone who ever read one is dead. 3 Please try this and report back. 4 Plants have feelings too. The smell of freshly cut grass is a chemical cry of pain, according to the latest science. You vegans need to understand that you also kill to survive. And if you’re a vegan development officer, well, you won’t be for long.

4. THOSE WHO GOVERN 1 Huh, look at that. Another Jimmy Stewart movie. This is the one where Jimmy’s character owns a bar in Morocco during WW2 and has to help his ex-girlfriend’s husband escape the Nazis. 2 This is known in organizational theory as the Founder’s Syndrome, where the founder of a nonprofit, or even a for-profit, clings to disproportionate control over their organization and often drags it down. To fight Founder’s Syndrome, boards can assassinate their leaders (make sure to do this legally) and thus speed up their development into a more independent organization with an enormous number of burned bridges.

3 BRA, because it allegedly provides support but becomes irritating the higher the temperature goes. 4 This is not true in the least. ED’s are paid in company scrip. 5 Given the acronym for ED, impotency is not to be unexpected. 6 I support freedom. 7 Better check your local unemployment ordinances before you test my theory.

5. THOSE WHO WORK FOR FREE 1 None of these people are real, mind you. They’re just the volunteers I wish I’d had. 2 I am not saying that all bad volunteers come from a certain generation, but they are all of a certain age that rhymes with Maybe Bloomers. 3 Try telling them to wait a few years. You never know what will be legal again.

6. ALL ORGANIZATIONS ARE GARBAGE 1 You may have also hit your Peter Point in knitting if the charities ask that you no longer send them your work. 2 Did you skip Chapter 5? 3 Or you might just show up with a can of gas and do it yourself. Does an insurance payout count as a capital campaign contribution? 4 There was a golden age of organizational theory in the Western world in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Since then, most organizational theory has become simpering acceptance of idiotic ideas, but you’ll find that two of the three theories we posit as applicable to nonprofits here (Garbage Can and Peter) are both from the same era. Parkinson’s Law, you’ll find, preceded them a bit. 5 Just because I may have this streak of perfectionism does not mean my work ends up being good. Look at this book, for instance. We’re about two thirds of the way through and you’re a worse person for reading it.

7. FINDING MONEY FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT 1 Look at the Charity Navigator criteria if you don’t believe me. Not everyone gets to be in their exclusive club. It’s a shakedown for nonprofits 2 Hopefully you did not watch them in the bathroom but just watched them go into the bathroom. Leave that kinky stuff to the board; that’s what they’re good at. 3 Find the AFP Code of Ethics here: https://afpglobal.org/ethicsmain/code-ethical-standards

4 Spoiler alert. 5 Let me know if there’s a way to get paid for eating, defecating, and screwing. I’ve heard that this is called “being an executive director,” but I’m not sure the rumor is true. 6 Sound familiar? Everyone wants mission, nobody wants to talk about money.

8. PEN FOR HIRE 1 Though in reality, it is not OF fortune, but instead FOR fortune, since you will be paying everyone’s salaries while making very little for the effort. 2 Marx would call these items the means of production, the owned tools of one’s labor. 3 As soon as they are finished, they throw the strategic plan in the trash. The giant island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean has an entire section comprised only of trashed strategic plans. 4 You, like many, might think that the board’s refusal to engage with fundraising is a terrible thing. I have certainly felt that way. I’ve told myself, But this means that they just don’t care about fundraising. From experience, I now tell you that you are wrong. You do not want the board involved with fundraising, because when the board gets involved with anything at a nonprofit organization, they make it worse. Work in the shadows and be glad for the gross anonymity of the development lifestyle. 5 That’s what a grant writer tells all the girls. 6 Stephen King’s On Writing, for instance, and George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. 7 Do not write me about “burying the lede,” because spelling it that way ruins the joke about shooting someone. 8 On the other hand, government funders often want you to bury the lead. In fact, sometimes, they don’t want you to have a point at all. In fact, having a point makes them nervous. That’s your tax dollars at work. 9 At a distance. They wouldn’t dare go upstairs. 10 If you use any font other than Garamond, you are wrong.

9. THANKS FOR NOTHING 1 First Thanksgiving Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20121224003144/http://www. pilgrimhallmuseum.org/pdf/TG_What_Happened_in_1621.pdf 2 During the 2009 financial crisis, when every bank owed every other bank, this became a huge problem. What do you do when everyone owns everyone else, but nobody has the money to pay? The answer: wait for the government to bail out the rich. The poor can just die.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work of satire was inspired by humorist Dave Barry, whose book Dave Barry's Bad Habits (1985) I more or less memorized when I was in middle school. It was partially the product of a chance meeting with the GarbageCan Theory, which set me off into a journey of reading cynical organizational theory. A big thank you to my editor, Paige Smith, who had a steady hand in making sure the manuscript didn’t fall apart. She is available for hire ([email protected]) and I recommend her for anyone needing a close eye. Any mistakes you see in the final version of this self-published work are my own. Many thanks to the following beta readers and sources of inspiration, who helped me refine what I wanted to do with this book: Abbie C., Kristin M., and Lauren H., fundraisers who have been in the trenches. This book is dedicated to my parents, who supported my bizarre career decisions. Special thanks to goes my family, including my daughter Lucy and my wife Sarah, for putting up with my quixotic journey finding out the best way to do good in the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Will Caverly has never worked in a nonprofit, but he hears good things about them. He is the author of HERE, the BEES STING, a beekeeping thriller, and his other work can be found on his Amazon page, here: https://www.amazon.com/author/willcaverly Will also calls himself a Mercenary Pen, which is also the name of his blog on Substack, found here: https://mercenarypen.substack.com You can find out more about Will’s other work, including podcasts, short form non-fiction, and general troublemaking on his website: www.willcaverly.com. Will wants to hear from both fans and haters, email him at [email protected]. He will respond.