The Money Mustache Community
Around the Internet => Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy => Topic started by: TheGrimSqueaker on April 08, 2015, 06:10:05 PM
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Is it me, or does the not-for-profit sector attract people who have such a hard-on for their ideology that it short circuits their brains?
I have, for your reading pleasure, a multi-part tale of charitable stupidity. Maybe someone can tell me, at the end, whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. Oh, and, a title. This drama needs a title.
Act 1
Several years ago, I volunteered for a local charity that specialized in mentoring at-risk teenagers. This was an extremely structured, year-long program in which the mentors received specialized training and support, and it was small but phenomenally successful. The majority of the kids in the program did indeed improve their grades. A couple gave up drug or tobacco use, and one even learned to speak English. It generally served about fourteen to twenty kids per year, and had an operating budget of about $50,000 per year, which meant that the program cost per kid was about $3,000 a head. (For that, you could hire a private tutor for each kid once or twice a week, but I digress.)
They had trouble raising enough money to fund their program (gee, I wonder why?) but I liked the results the program produced, so I got involved with their volunteer pool and then joined their Board of Directors to see if I could figure out what was not lining up and whether I could fix it.
Once on the Board, I got a peek behind the Shiny Curtain of Oz, and nearly puked because of the grotesque mismanagement. Over a period of a little more than two years, I saw so much catastrophic stupidity that I realized the charity was on a crash vector unless someone with common sense stepped in. For example:
- The Board lived in fear of its Executive Director, who was the only paid employee, and who had founded the organization
- The Board basically rubber stamped everything the Executive Director did
- This Executive Director frequently admitted to being "really bad with math" and hadn't balanced a checkbook in years
- The charity was supposedly set up for the purpose of providing structured community mentoring to at-risk youth. That's what its mission statement said. It did indeed provide such a program, but over 80% of the charity's money went to professional speakers instead.
The volunteer pool was capable of raising about $25k per year, but the charity consumed about $50k per year, on the average. It turned out that the average one-year mentoring program cost about $40k, although the program generally didn't run every year, but every 16 to 18 months. In addition, the Executive Director's salary was $30k a year for a 30-hour work week (which was not totally unreasonable, in my part of the country during the late 1990's and early 2000's). No wonder the volunteer pool was constantly exhausted and the mentor volunteers were plagued with three fund raisers or more, per year. How exactly-- I wondered-- did this come to pass?
Over the next year or so I gradually ferreted out the truth.
First, the people running the charity were chiefly devotees of the same crackpot ideology. For example, there was near-universal acceptance of a concept taught by Landmark, Inc. (formerly known as Est) which dictates that you really can believe and emote your way to success, if you just spend the majority of your time dreaming and fantasizing about what it would be like to have "enough" money, and then act as though that reality already exists. Supposedly, money responds to sufficient belief by being attracted to it, Law Of Attraction style. If for some reason the money doesn't flow in, it's because someone in the room (guess who!) Just Doesn't Get It or Just Doesn't Believe Enough. Therefore, if at any point your organization doesn't have enough money, it's because you've got an unbeliever who's causing dissension, stress, and other big drama because they're either "not really committed", or worse still, "running an agenda" and actively undermining the team's vision of the greater good.
This is why most Board meetings were pie-in-the-sky bullshit sessions instead of serious discussions as to why the organization was tens of thousands of dollars in debt, or discussions as to what to do about it. Because of the program's small size and location, it had a small but dedicated volunteer pool consisting mostly of working and business class people.
The organization's Board and administrative team also subscribed to a similar belief, also taught by Landmark, that all human limitations come from simple lack of awareness of one's own potential. Supposedly, according to this doctrine, the best way to have a "breakthrough" and reach a higher level of operating is to:
(a) set a goal that's substantially beyond what you have any reason to believe you can achieve,
(b) make a public commitment to achieve it despite having no idea how you're going to meet this commitment, and
(c) cause other people to depend on you (such as by signing a contract or scheduling a charitable program)
That's right! These folks were so entrenched in their own lack of self-knowledge, they genuinely believed everyone else suffered from the same cranial-rectal inversion.
I was stunned by the fact they actually believed that you can over-commit your way to success, and "fake it 'til you make it". According to this notion, lying to yourself and the rest of the universe causes the universe to reward you by making your bullshit come true, or at least turn into something besides bullshit if you sling it far and hard enough. The number of other people who get hurt or screwed over in the process when the fakers failed to make it apparently wasn't a significant factor in their decision making.
At no point, by the way, did anyone involved with this charity's fund raising have a "breakthrough". A breakDOWN, possibly: several volunteers burned out, a few of us resigned rather than be involved in further stupidity, and eventually there was a massive lawsuit which the charity did not win. Yet all of this failure was still yet to come.
At the end of the program where I'd been a mentor, when I first joined the Board of Directors, the charity had raised a small amount of money toward operating expenses and the next year's program, but nowhere near the $50,000 it needed to be certain of paying all its program bills on time. For reasons I'll get into in Act 2, the program structure required an up-front expense of about $35,000 to $40,000. When I joined up, the charity was just barely in the black, having raised about one-quarter of what it needed. The monthly burn rate was higher than I liked, for reasons I'll get into later. But, at the moment, the charity had raised about a quarter of what it needed. Yet, despite not having anywhere near enough cash, and with no concrete plans to raise it by the deadline, the Board-- against my recommendation-- signed a contract and committed to running a program.
These guys wanted to be in debt, and in serious trouble, because they believed it would motivate or magically enable them to make the next "breakthrough", and turn into the fabulous leaders they wanted to be. In reality, the debt just chewed up their revenue stream, and they exhausted their volunteer base and alienated much of their social support structure with constant fund raising. But, in their minds, they were always on the verge of a "breakthrough", and the more hopeless they made their situation, and the more self-inflicted misery they created, the closer they were to some kind of success.
That's why they actually agreed to sign a contract and schedule another program and kick-off course without having the money to pay for it, and without knowing where the money would come from.
Now, I'm just as big of a fan of positive thinking as anyone. It's good to be motivated, and happy, and positive, but it's also good to have a firm grasp of reality. It's also vital to connect cause and effect. If financial distress is caused by stupid spending decisions, and stupid spending is caused by a truly imbecilic medieval world-view, correcting the problems with the world-view ought to relieve the financial distress, right?
Wrong! It turns out that my colleagues were far more invested in their pie-in-the-sky ideology than they were in running an effective and sustainable not-for-profit.
If you liked this, I'll continue with Act 2, which deals with how the organization dealt with debt, and how its spending became increasingly more radically out of step with its stated mission. I'll show exactly why and how the organization turned into a life-support system for professional speakers. I will also illustrate how the charity ended up with a single full-time employee whose main concern was raising money to pay their (modest) salary, but who insisted that the money spent on their pay should be categorized as "program" and not "fund raising" or "administration".
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Ohh I would be in for hearing more, having recently exited this world, it is nice to hear other peoples horror stories and know my experience was not in any way unique :)
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Schadenfreude sells. Bring it on.
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We've been involved in a few pet-rescue non-profits (wife is president of one now). I skimmed the details but it mirrors our experiences. A lot of people with the passion but no business sense. A lot of people who don't understand the people side of it and wish to ignore it when that connection is critical for success. Just a lot of baggage and drama. We've had people steal money, hijack social media pages, slander us, threaten us, etc. The worst part is all that takes away from the true mission (of whatever charity / non-profit it is).
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Glad to know I'm not the only one who enjoys watching a good train wreck purely for the entertainment value. Bring it on!
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“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
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I'm definitely interested in The Rest of the Story...
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Act II
Recognizing your insatiable appetite for tales of stupidity, I shall now focus on the more asinine money and resource management aspect of this charity’s situation. But in order to fully appreciate the extent of the stupid, I should probably provide some context.
My family has always been active in volunteer work and non-profit administration (not for pay), so over the years I’ve seen the inner workings of several different kinds of charities. Based on my experiences, I’ve come up with some general rules about how such enterprises should work.
First, your volunteer base is a finite resource that is not easily renewable. Burn these people out, or exhaust their social capital, and you can’t get it back.
Second, fund raising is a process by which people monetize either their social capital or their labor. Both of these are finite but renewable resources. When you exceed the sustainable capacity of the resource, you temporarily exhaust it and get diminishing returns (or no returns) until it replenishes. When you exceed the maximum burst capacity of the resource, you break it permanently and no longer have access to it. It’s like pumping water out of an aquifer.
Third, it’s possible to predict the productivity of any given volunteer pool on a per-hour basis. To do this, you take the mean per-hour income of each volunteer who actually shows up and works (for homemakers, use half the breadwinner’s hourly rate of pay, and for retired persons, divide monthly income by 360 hours per month). Multiply this per-hour income by the number of hours of work they did fund raising for you in the last year. Add this total together, and divide by the total number of person-hours worked over the last year. That will be the per-hour, per-capita income you can sustainably require from a volunteer fund-raising team before it breaks down.
Every year, you can have as many labor-based fund raising events as you have volunteers to staff them, but the sustainable number of solicitation or network based fund raisers you can have is one. Any more, and you start getting diminishing returns because your volunteers are making unreasonable requests on their friends and family. Making unreasonable requests damages the social network of the person doing the asking. It’s like going to a well. The first unreasonable request you make, you might get what you want, but you’ve run the well dry. You might not be aware of this until the next request you make, when you get a “no” or no answer at all. The third time you ask, if you’re dim enough to think you still can, you get bugger-all, because your social connection to that person is now broken.
Fourth, it’s possible to raise money by writing grants (sometimes) or soliciting individual donations, but these should always be for special projects or capital equipment as opposed to administrative or regular program expenses. Grant money is more addictive than heroin, for a non-profit.
Fifth, human “need” expands to consume, and then exceed, all available resources. If you expand your program due to the availability of a windfall such as a large grant, people expect and demand a similar sized program in subsequent years, and will be dissatisfied with less. This is human nature. So it’s a really bad idea to give people an appetite for money they didn’t earn. They come up with all kinds of creative ideas as to how to spend it, but they seldom consider how they’re going to replenish it to keep up with the precedent they’ve set.
Sixth, a properly run charity must scale its program to suit its available volunteer pool and its available funding. IT’S NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. If the community served by a charity can’t raise enough money to run a specific program, IT SHOULDN’T BE DONE. Either the demand for the program isn’t high enough, or the cost is too high. Find a way to get more bang for less buck, or save the bucks until the program becomes affordable. That way, two or three years down the road, you still have a functioning volunteer pool and not a bunch of disillusioned zombies.
Seventh, no charity with an annual income of less than USD$200,000 (in 2015 dollars, including in-kind donations) has any business paying for administration. That includes professional fundraising or grant writing experts. Sure, spend money on hiring experts to handle program related expenses that only an expert can do (like the judo coach for a judo club, the vet for an animal clinic, or a plumber to fix the toilet in your homeless shelter). The second a small charity hires a professional administrator, it becomes a life support system for that person and possibly his or her clique of friends.
So, those are my seven pillars of non-profit management. They’re controversial as hell. I’ve had several professional fundraisers or professional grant writers blow up at me when I tell them that a small non-profit, properly run, has zero need for their services. But, when an organization operates according to my principles, they become both cost effective and sustainable.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled soap opera.
The organization spent the vast majority of its program money on things not related to its primary mission. Recall that this charity was set up to provide adult mentors from the community to at-risk teenagers for a one-year program. This was a one-year program that was run every 16 to 18 months, but only about 10% of their budget was spent on a year’s worth of mentoring.
So, where did the money go?
Each program started with a 3-to-5-day "kick-off course", which was held at a camp site or some similar place during the school year (yes, the children were taken out of school to attend this... and yes, the mentors were required to take time off work). It was set up like a Landmark course room, with a designated course leader, people guarding the doors to physically deter those who might exit early, and lots of yapping. One, possibly two "experts" were flown in specifically to conduct the kick-off course, and the price ranged from $30,000 up, depending on whether the course was three, four, or five days long. The last day was always supposed to be a ropes course designed to help the kids bond with their adult mentors. But how were the other days spent?
The speaker in charge spouted everything from quotations by ancient philosophers to reconstituted New Age malarkey involving mind over matter. Anyone who's taken an introductory psychology or philosophy class has heard all of it before, only better. There were individual and small group activities that varied from having people draw their family trees or list things that worried them. There were large group activities where the speaker explained the significance of what had just happened. Imagine, if you will, an extended Stephen Covey style seminar that lasted twelve hours a day, only instead of discussing business principles the instructor selected a child or adult from the audience and proceeded to deliberately provoke, anger, and humiliate that individual. The individual in question would then be rewarded for submitting and responding “correctly” by kowtowing to the team leader and admitting that he was 100% right no matter what nonsense was coming out of his mouth, even if it was a blatant violation of fact or logic. Over two to three days of course room activity, the goal was to humiliate and then “acknowledge” or reward every person in the room.
People were pressured to reveal their innermost secrets, which were frequently immediately used against them. The lectures were replete with jargon and misused terminology, since the leader re-defined very common words in order to suit his flawed logic whenever he saw fit. His goal was to force everyone to admit that all the problems in their lives came from them acting out a self-destructive "agenda" of some kind, and that they were basically stupid and worthless, except that they weren’t really stupid or worthless, because now they were learning a New Way Of Doing Things.
Course room sessions lasted up to sixteen hours a day, because the goal was to wear people down physically and emotionally. It's called "traumatic bonding". When I experienced it for a few hours, it gave me a migraine severe enough to temporarily blind me. Needless to say, I exited the course room early (much to the annoyance of the highly inadequate door guards) and developed a profound contempt for the people running it.
The next day, during a break (and for my own personal amusement), I trapped the organizer in a “friendly” Socratic dialectic and forced him to admit that he was deliberately breaking people down and building them up in order to create traumatic bonding as a group. The thing is: the kids didn’t NEED to bond as a group. These were not soldiers in boot camp. These kids only really needed to bond with their mentors, and vice versa. They did not need this very expensive mind-fuck.
Anyway, for any given program the biggest expense by far was the tens of thousands of dollars spent on this type of professional speaker. It turns out there's a clique of them who take turns teaching kick-off courses or introductory mentor training courses for grossly inflated rates. Speakers were hired for on the order of $40,000 a pop. Compared to this, the rental of the camp or facility and the food prepared for the mentors and kids was chicken feed.
The second big expense the non-profit had was a full-time Executive Director, who received a little more than $30,000 per year (year 2000 dollars), for 30 hours per week. I had no problem with the rate of pay, except it violated my principle of not paying for management until the non-profit’s revenue was sufficient to require it. In addition, the Executive Director got 10% of all grants or donations. That's right: if you dialed the phone number and made a donation just because you had a bee in your bonnet, or spontaneously wrote out a check to cover some emergency expenses, that individual got 10% of it right off the top. So, if—and this happened late in the game—somebody wrote out a donation check to cover 100% of the payroll and expenses for that month, they were still 10% short because the Executive Director was entitled to the 10% commission off the top. That’s just plain idiotic.
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Act II, continued
Don’t get me wrong: if you’re going to have an employee and you want to create an incentive for him or her to go out, write grants, and solicit major donations, a commission is a good idea. However, there should always be a channel by which a person can donate to the charity without entitling a particular person—who may not have caused the donation to occur—to automatically dip their beak. The IRS has a concept called “inurement”: donations or funds raised should not automatically accrue to any particular individual. In fact donations that are directed to a specific task or a specific project have to be spent on that project, not on any other kind of expense. This particular Executive Director, however, had no problem whatsoever dipping into pre-allocated money to cover unrelated expenses. The fact that such an act violated the rules governing tax exempt conduct wasn’t even a blip on that individual’s radar screen, and the Board was totally oblivious.
Besides fund raising, the Executive Director put together the follow-through courses for the mentors and youth, which were reasonably structured, but which lacked practical application and which were mostly supposed to be the kind of consciousness-expanding exercises attempted in the intensive course. Some of the mentors occasionally volunteered to put on a presentation, but offers made by people who had not been through the Landmark Forum were rejected. So, for the most part, the Executive Director supervised the follow-through meetings even though they didn’t really have to, and put most of their work into fund raising to pay their own salary and that of their professional speaker cronies.
After about a year on the Board, I finally grasped the extent of the corruption (although I was still underestimating the stupidity). So far as I could tell, the charity was breaking at least two out of the eight crash-and-burn, nuke-your-tax-exempt-status rules, in at least five different ways.
1. There was significant private benefit (thanks to the inappropriately high pay for the guest speakers, available only because they were members of the clique)
2. The Executive Director was not recused from decisions in which they had significant personal interest (again an inappropriate private benefit)
3. Donated funds were being misappropriated, because the Executive Director was being paid a 10% commission of all donations, regardless of whether they were intended for a different purpose (which is a form of inurement and which also violates rules concerning the management of donations); this amount was not made up from general revenue because it frequently occurred when there was literally no other money in the bank. Grant money was likewise being spent on purposes other than the purpose for which it had been given
4. Donations were not being appropriately receipted, and
5. The Board was being used like a rubber stamp to retroactively approve the Executive Director’s decisions, including some extremely dangerous deficit spending.
In addition, the organization was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. But nobody seemed to realize that until after I’d joined the Board and done some math for them. I objected to this whole bankruptcy thing, and also the blatantly illegal conduct (as I became aware of it). I became increasingly unpopular because I had a habit of pointing at the offending behavior, indicating that it was illegal or unethical, and insisting that the organization clean up its act. I also made some enemies by voting against anything I decided was fiscally irresponsible. Which ended up being a lot of stuff.
While I’d been a mentor, I was also part of the volunteer pool, and it seemed to me at the time that the fundraising never fucking let up. Over that year, we sold tickets to a local semi-pro sports game and to a circus. We also had a thing-a-thon, a fund raising gala, and an associated silent auction, plus four days’ worth of labor based sales events. Damned if I could figure out why at the time, because we had only one paid employee who obviously wasn’t living high on the hog, but we never seemed to have any money. In fact, we were constantly desperate and barely scraping by. But once I joined the Board, I got to see the books. As I mentioned in Act I, the sight scarred me for life.
Just prior to my Board membership the charity had made a tentative commitment to run another program, hot on the heels of the very successful one in which I’d been a mentor. Naturally, this involved committing to a massive cash outlay to one of these professional speakers, for an extremely expensive on-site course. The only problem was that they didn’t have the money for it.
I ran some numbers to get a seat-of-the-pants estimate of how much the volunteer base was capable of sustainably raising. Then I looked at the previous year’s expenditures and realized the organization was spending more than double the fundraising team’s sustainable capacity. In fact, they were headed into diminishing returns territory, which meant that network based fundraisers weren’t producing the desired results. So we shifted into a labor based approach, which increased revenue but not by enough to justify signing a contract. So far as I could see, we were about to go heavily into debt for no good reason.
What did they do? They had a massive kum-ba-ya session, that's what. Instead of figuring out how they were going to manage their money intelligently, the Board spent hours in a guided imagination and fantasy session, talking about all the things they’d do if they had access to unlimited money. Then, they collectively decided that the limits to money collection were imaginary, and each person made a commitment (which they were never held to) to raise a truly unreasonable amount of cash. I committed only to a regular monthly donation I knew I could afford. (This was the only one of the commitments that actually got kept.)
We had a series of other meetings, in which the Executive Director and various other clique members introduced people who were passing themselves off as folks who raised money for a living. They were basically professional mouth noise makers. One was a minister, well versed in raising money from devotees who believed in the same scorekeeper-in-the-sky that he did. He could turn the water works on at will, bursting into “spontaneous” tears and expressing a desire to use our charity as a means to advance his oh-so-holy mission. This worked less well than expected (the majority of the audience happened to be Jewish) but a few of us got a good laugh out of it. Seldom have I seen bullshit piled that high or deep. They didn't hire the guy, due to a misalignment of interest that even the kum-ba-ya crowd appeared to recognize. I took their skepticism to be a sign that they were improving.
Meanwhile, did I mention that the executive team signed the fucking contract for the overpriced rah-rah artist and his cult-like kick-off session to start another program? Yes! They did! The Board didn’t get a say.
The Executive knew they didn’t have the money, but remember how I mentioned earlier that they truly believed that they could vibrate, visualize, mentally masturbate, and Law-of-Attraction their way into a higher level of competency just by making a commitment they had no idea how to keep? Yes. So, instead of doing the sensible thing and postponing the program, they got together and decided to give themselves a massive “breakthrough”. That’s right: they signed the contract with absolutely no idea how they were going to pay that bill. Everyone congratulated themselves on their new level of commitment and their spiritual superiority in recognizing and taking an opportunity to become better people.
What. The. Flaming. Fuck?
Fully half the individuals on that Board did not personally experience the months of hell that came next. We busted rump with massive amounts of labor based fundraising, because that produced a reliable return on investment and I for one refused to exploit my social network to benefit an organization that had proven itself utterly incapable of proper money management. Volunteers were dropping out from fatigue or work conflicts. Gradually, we lost ALL our casual volunteers, and were left only with the core group of Board members, program volunteers, and their families (this becomes important later in Act III)
We delayed the start (and paid a penalty), but still ended up owing the duckspeaker half our annual budget—HALF—which we borrowed from his company at something like a 14% APR. That’s right: the majority of sustainable fund raising dollars were now going to debt service and debt reduction. There was literally nothing left to cover payroll with, except for checks written by Board members who occasionally put in enough money to keep the boat afloat. The organization had no savings and no negotiable assets. All it had was debt amounting to half its usual annual budget (and 100% of what I calculated as our maximum sustainable fund raising capacity).
Around this time, the Executive Director left town. I mentally breathed a sigh of relief, because that was one less monthly expense. Unfortunately, despite aggressive fund raising, we did not meet our fundraising goal for the next program. The charity was in jeopardy. I volunteered to serve as Treasurer for one year, provided I could execute a viable budget and get the organization running in a fiscally responsible way. THIS OFFER WAS ACCEPTED.
Sadly, the organization didn't follow through on the promise. They never gave me signatory authority on the checking account; instead that remained with the outgoing Executive Director and with that person’s buddy, who was not a member of the Board and whom I’d met only in passing. They were always “gonna” make an appointment to have me put on the account, but found reasons not to do it. This was because they were (rightly) concerned that I would declare a moratorium on spending until such time as we’d paid off our debt. I also had a fetish for operating within the law, and they just weren’t good, giving, and game for that. But it took me a few months to figure out that they LIKED operating that way.
As my first action item, I immediately came up with alternatives to utter financial ruin and presented those ideas to the group. They included delaying the hire of a replacement Executive Director until the organization was solvent, delaying any future programs until there was money in the bank to support them (I calculated the dates at which each of these things would be possible), and scaling the program down to something the charity could actually afford to do every year. This involved skipping the kick-off course and focusing solely on the community mentoring, which is the aspect of the program that was producing tangible, quantifiable results that donors like so much.
You know the story about how, in parts of India, cows are said to be so revered that cows are allowed to roam around everywhere, including inside people's stores or homes, and shit all over everything, and it’s supposedly illegal to keep them from doing it, or to bump a few of them off when they get too aggressive? I don't know if the story is true or not. But what is true is that the crude brainwashing attempt that occurred during the kick-off course, and the perceived necessity of spending tens of thousands of dollars on what was essentially a mandatory circle jerk, was this group’s sacred cow. No matter what, the majority of the Board had an irrational devotion to the concept of the kick-off course, and to paying ridiculous amounts of money to hire a professional manipulator to conduct it.
We needed to do more than kill that particular sacred cow. We needed to barbecue the fucker and sell the burgers to raise operating capital.
You’d have thought I committed heresy. In fact, the new President took me out to the parking lot and yelled at me for a while, accusing me of trying to derail or break up the charity. He told me that the charity was going to run “the kind of program it knew how to run”, and that my job was to keep my mouth shut and write checks to cover operating expenses, and that if I didn’t like that, I could either resign from the Board, or get with the program. I responded by telling him that, as a businessman himself, he ought to have better sense than to engage in deficit spending. I told him his volunteer fundraising base was exhausted, that he was so deeply in the red it might actually be more ethical to go bankrupt, and that if he wanted to stay open I supported that, but it was vital to stay within the bounds of what we could intelligently raise.
Dude, I thought, keep your Kool-Aid. I’ll stick with vodka. I told him I’d fix his financial problems as long as he didn’t come up with anything even more stupid or self-destructive than what had already happened, and provided the organization learned from its experience. But I was definitely not going to do it by writing a check and buying their way out of the hole they were in just so that they could immediately jump into another one. I think the phrase I used was “codependent bullshit”.
My mistake, apparently, was in not declaring that there WAS pie in the sky, dogdammit, and it would be ours bye and bye. Kum-ba-yah, kum-ba-yah, and sign me up for the Landmark Forum and all its associated leadership academies! (Yeah, right…)
What followed was one final attempt at The Big Payoff: they decided to bring in a real, live, professional fundraiser. This was a company that specialized in a special kind of thing-a-thon. In exchange for signing up for three years or three of these special thing-a-thons, this organization was saying they could generate returns on the order of $100k per event.
I was late arriving to the special Board meeting where the fund raiser was giving the presentation. Praise Baphomet, I was sideswiped by a hit-and-run driver and it took a while for the police to arrive. This cost me a fair bit of money (a witness got the plate, but the owner was uninsured). Yet it saved me from the usual happy horseshit that constituted a Board meeting, and it also protected me from whatever it was that the presenter did to a room full of people at the start of his presentation to shut down the critical thinking faculties of all present.
The thing-a-thon in question was supposed to have about a dozen participants raise about $10k apiece, which after the organizers took their slice and deducted the expenses, would net a profit of about $100k to the charity. Each of the golfers would not only solicit pledges on their own behalf, but have a small pyramid of other pledge seekers who, together, would make up an average of $10k per golfer by raising about $2,000 apiece.
Exactly how were we to accomplish this goal?
Cue the brimstone…
Each volunteer was to call people he or she knew, and say: “I’m in trouble, and I need a hundred dollars. Would you mind sending me that amount of money to help me out?” Apparently, there are people who say yes to that. Admittedly, I have friends I’d gladly give money to if they were that badly up the creek. It’s imaginably possible that there are other humans who would help me out the same way, except it would cost me an unacceptable amount of social capital to admit that I’d fucked up so badly that $100 from them would make the difference between success and failure.
The volunteer was further instructed to say: ”I got myself signed up for this (thing-a-thon) where we’re each committed to do 100 (units). I shouldn’t have given in and agreed to it, but I did, so I’m trying to get twenty people to pledge just one dollar per (unit). Is there any chance you could help me out by giving me just one dollar per (unit)? If I don’t raise enough, I’ll have to pay two thousand dollars myself.”
I don’t know about you guys, but I’d rather wax my pubes than let such horseshit come out of my mouth. The speaker in question was instructed to admit that the request was unreasonable BUT MAKE IT ANYWAY, and trust to the strength of that person’s emotional attachment to you.
This is an example of going to the well and taking way, way too much. I said so.
“Don’t you have anyone in your life who loves you?” Asked the presenter. “Or are your parents so poor that they couldn’t afford a hundred bucks?”
My parents were (and still are) independently wealthy, and were about to go FIRE despite some decidedly anti-Mustachian tendencies. I admitted that they had more than enough cash on hand, and that it would not be a major hardship for them.
“Well, wouldn’t your mother give you a hundred dollars if you needed it?” He asked.
“For this? No, of course not.” For whatever reason, this must have been an unexpected response. He asked me why.
Clearly this guy had never been a lawyer, and hadn’t heard the rule about asking a question you don’t want publicly answered, or you don’t know the answer to. All eyes were on me, and I found myself doing that jaw-clicking thing I so often do before I really unload on someone. Then I explained, slowly, as if speaking to a young and math-challenged child, that I’m expected to not be that big of a screw-up.
If I were sick, or lost my job, or was in a more serious accident than the one I’d just experienced an hour before, of course my parents would help me out. But self-inflicted drama due to my own stupidity? No. Even if by some freakish fluke I got away with it the first time, nobody would believe the same story, coming from me, ever again. Particularly not the following year. Or the year after that. In fact, after the first offense, I’d pretty much lose my adult card. After the second offense, they'd likely have me committed to an institution for the criminally stupid, and rightly so.
After the presentation, when we debated whether or not to sign the contract, I said not just “no” but “hell, no”. I explained why making a request like that was unethical as fuck, and why it put such a strain on the social network of the people who did it (unless they were part of a social circle where people exchanged $100 donations like party favors—none of us fit that description). I explained that bit I told you earlier about the well, and how everyone present was being instructed to overtax their personal network and basically burn their credibility for a short-term gain.
I don’t know whether the entire Board had been Mickey Finned before I arrived, or whether the presenter had hypnotized them with PowerPoint, or whether they’d been drinking more than their usual Kool-Aid. Maybe they were just that desperate, like a group of gamblers badly in debt to the Mob and anxious to roll the dice just one more time for the big payoff. I do know that everyone there had dollar signs in their eyes. They were also desperate to pay off the last of the debt and commit to a new program.
Not only was I the only person who voted against signing the contract, I resigned rather than be associated with the initiative. The Prez accepted my resignation with obvious relief, and I rather suspect the rest of the Executive appreciated the fact I was gone. For my part, I felt a huge and smelly load being lifted from my shoulders, and went off in search of a more sustainable venture.
A few years later, I had another run-in with the same President, in—as Lord Baphomet is my witness—in another parking lot. No, nobody got shanked and there were no fisticuffs. One of us was walking into a grocery store, as the other was walking out, and he related the events in Act III of this drama.
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Have to say, I love your writing style. My jaw kept dropping while I was reading. I do really like your seven points. I wish someone had told me those when we started getting involved with non-profits. I might just copy and paste them (with your permission) and send then to a few bored folks I know. Looking forward to hearing the conclusion. DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
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Dear Baby Jebus, I have to know! Act III!
I 100% agree with your rules of non-profit. I used to work at a nonprofit that was much more fiscally functional, but perhaps not as much on the volunteer capital end. We lost numerous volunteers to exhaustive requests that were clearly too much for the individual.
That said, the org. was very savvy $$ wise and did a great job of balancing books. So I'm just beside myself with your story. (It's like a train wreck--I should look away, but it's just so fascinating!)
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Act III
Feed me, Seymour!
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Wow. I'm looking forward to Act III.
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This is awesome.
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This sounds like a lot of churches. I don't love everything Dave Ramsey has to say, but at least he tries to teach churches the basics about debt and how to avoid it. Ridiculous!
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daaaang. I knew these places were out there, but having worked for 7 different nonprofits who all managed their money well, I wouldn't have expected one person to have worked with (at least) 3 of the bad'uns. One of us has an abnormal degree of luck in choosing where to serve.
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As my 1-year-old says when she likes dinner:
MORE, MORE, MORE!
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So good but hard to read as we are in the midst of a similar drama. Church world, though.
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We needed to do more than kill that particular sacred cow. We needed to barbecue the fucker and sell the burgers to raise operating capital.
This was fucking amazing. I need more!
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Easily one of the best threads I have ever read on this forum. 10/10 would read again.
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I'm enjoying the story!
I have been on the board of a few non-profits, and your story rings so true. Nothing so extreme took place on my boards, but you can always tell the other board members who were clueless and would have followed that line if someone else pulled them down the path. So often I would have to bite my tongue when someone spoke up and I just wanted to point out how absolutely ridiculous they were, but you need volunteers so you try and gently guide them instead. I'm not sure I would have made it as long as you on the board, but I've been there and it's really hard to just walk away...
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Wow. Just wow.
Obviously, no one could make this kind of stuff up. WOW. But definitely write a book, about something, anything, made-up or not - because your writing style ROCKS!!
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Wow. I'm on the edge of my seat. I served a year on the board of a non-profit that was actually quite well-managed, but I resigned because I was expected to do too much fundraising. There aren't many things I hate more than asking people for money.
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Wow. Just wow.
Obviously, no one could make this kind of stuff up. WOW. But definitely write a book, about something, anything, made-up or not - because your writing style ROCKS!!
+1, would love to read anything additional you wish to write.
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I was the Board Chair for a non profit for five years......thankfully the President and Founder was a tightwad who watched over every dollar like a hawk. She was good and that made it easy.
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Act III
Perhaps I ought to make it clear that this is Act III of an extended drama involving just one charity. Not three different charities, mind you: even I am capable of screaming and fleeing from happy hippie crap now that I’ve seen it in its full torofecundian glory. Astoundingly all this stupidity came from the same source, like overripe fruit from one defective tree, or the meadow leavings of a single large and fiber-loving ruminant.
As you recall, in the first two acts of this drama, I made myself extremely unpopular by trying to force a very unwelcome policy of fiscal responsibility on a youth charity administrative team that didn’t want it. For whatever reason, they were all convinced that they could solve a small charity’s self-induced cash flow problem by making it bigger. By “it”, I mean not just the charity, but the cash flow problem. For whatever reason (I think I know why but I’d have to X-ray their heads to be sure), they were convinced that amplifying the problem would make it go away. That’s right: their train was wobbling back and forth as it went down the track due to a basic stability problem in its design, but instead of putting on the brakes and tuning the engine, they decided that the way to get the stability they wanted was to increase both the speed and the lateral motion.
I’ve always believed that people in your community really do give a rat’s ass about your charitable venture, but when you gather all those hairy hindquarters up, the pile it makes represents the community’s total interest and investment in what you have to offer. Sometimes, it’s less than you hope for. If so, the responsible thing to do is to ensure more people know and care enough about what you do, so that they toss you the occasional north end of their southbound vermin. In the meantime, you have to make do with the amount of rodent rectum available. You do not go out and hire the Pied Piper of fucking Hamelin, unless you want that flute to end up somewhere it shouldn’t be.
Now, this youth charity I’ve been bitching about in Acts I and II didn’t actually have anyone with their hand in the cookie jar, which makes them luckier than some. They were just spending far too much given what their fundraising team could provide, and most of it was being spent on utterly stupid and unnecessary shit that was unrelated to the part of their program that produced quantitative results. They were further invested in denial than Cleopatra (and look what happened to her.) So that’s what made them willing to sign off on a bad contract.
Now, when I say “a bad contract”, I don’t mean to imply that the company offering professional thing-a-thon services was in any way dishonest in how they structured the contract. Far from it: it was a basic agreement in which they agreed to teach the charity how to run a thing-a-thon, and in exchange the charity promised to use their services for the first three thing-a-thons, paying them either a percentage of the total or a fixed minimum, which I vaguely recall was on the order of $20k. The strategy they suggested was unethical, because it put such a strain on each volunteer’s social network. But the thing that made the contract really bad was the fact the charity was about to knowingly exhaust an already weakened resource that could not be easily rebuilt. They were about to slice open the goose that laid the golden eggs, sell their best whore to another pimp, and otherwise sacrifice their only proven long-term asset in order to make a quick buck. That’s what made the contract “bad”.
At the time I tendered my resignation, not only were they about to sign the thing-a-thon contract, but they were hiring a new Executive Director despite the fact they were in serious debt, had no assets and no revenue beyond what volunteers could provide. Oh, and did I mention they wanted to commit to another program as well?
I don't think anybody in the world possesses a pimp hand strong enough to correct the root cause of this problem.
It took a couple months before I was deleted from the E-mail list, so I got bits and pieces of news. For example, I got the mass mailing from that new Executive Director, who after a whopping month on the payroll had been officially diagnosed with an incurable, debilitating disease that affected their ability to work. Also, the first of the thing-a-thons was scheduled. I suppose it had to be: they had no other way to make payroll and also cover the debt service. I twitched a bit, but recited a Polish proverb: “This is not my circus; these are not my monkeys. But… this IS my vodka.” That improved my mood quite a lot, so I gave absolutely zero fucks for the next few years, until my run-in with The Prez in the grocery store.
I didn’t recognize him he looked like he’d aged about twenty years and put on a lot of weight. He even had to reintroduce himself as he shook my hand. The first words out of his mouth were an apology. Also, he blurted out a very important phrase: three little words that I never expected in a million years to hear from him, particularly not in front of his wife. I was just as shocked as if I’d been hit in the back of the head with a board.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a somewhat lazy version of evil incarnate. Yet the body I occupy is biologically female. So I’ve got a not-so-secret weakness. There are three little words that really get my panties wet. These three words, by the way, will magically allow a man to command the attention of any woman he speaks them to, and cause her to listen with an open mind whether she plans to or not, even if she’s in the middle of a sentence. I therefore accepted his apology and listened to the whole story as though I’d been hypnotized by a grocery-toting Ancient Mariner.
(These words, in case you ever need to make a woman preemptively shut up, are: “You were right”.)
(Not “I love you”, or even “here’s your check”, although the latter phrase is one we also enjoy. We’ve figured out that the bit about love is generally manipulative bullshit.)
“You warned us,” he said, “and it happened exactly like you said it would, only worse.” He continued to say that the first thing-a-thon went as planned, but ended up with only half they’d been led to expect from the number of volunteers they were able to field. None of the thing-a-thonners reached their $10k goal, but it was still their biggest and most successful fundraiser to date. After they brought in enough to cover the fee to the company that set up the thing-a-thon, they were able to settle that large outstanding debt and cover payroll for a month or two. But they weren’t entirely in the black, and went right back to labor-based fund raisers. They never did replace their casual volunteers, and were now saddled with a sick Executive Director.
For their second thing-a-thon, they were unable to raise much more than the organizing company’s minimum supervising fee. Too many people refused to participate, or refused to donate. So they ended up making enough to pay for the organizing company to take home their check, but had nothing left over to run their charity with. At this point, they started to feel ripped off: a five-figure bill to tell them how to put on a thing-a-thon that they were now fully capable of setting up for themselves? The money, if they hadn’t had to turn it over to the thing-a-thon company to fulfil their part of the contract, would have covered several months’ worth of operating expenses.
At some point, someone—El Presidente used the word “we”—decided to fuck over the Pied Piper. The charity executive team members broke their contract with the thing-a-thon company and tiptoed off to do their next big thing-a-thon fundraiser without them. For whatever reason, a something-else-a-thon (which would not have been covered by the contract) wasn’t an option for them. They scheduled and operated their thing-a-thon, which brought in a relatively sustainable amount of money that (at the time) appeared to still be more than worth their while since they didn’t have to pay the promoter.
Just because there are forks in the road doesn’t mean you have to drive over every single fucking one. One of the regular volunteers and Board members was married to a prominent member of the legal community, and could have gotten some decent free legal advice. The Prez himself had recently fought (and won) a breach of contract lawsuit related to a pay-to-play government construction scam in which he rightly refused to participate. This was a basically ethical, honorable person who was working with a bunch of generally honest, good-intentioned people in the service of the greater good. But for whatever reason, they all had one last communal sip of the Kook-Aid.
(That started out as “Kool-Aid”, but a typo happened, and I like the Freudian slip version better).
Somehow, the thing-a-thon organizers figured out they’d been had, and discovered that the cheeky little monkeys had gone ahead and had the party without them. No problem, they said: just write us a check for our fee, and that’s the third thing-a-thon, so we’ll go our separate ways. Well… there was a problem. You see, not enough money had been raised to cover even that minimum fee.
In most US states, including ours, charities buy a type of liability insurance commonly called “E&O” or “Errors and Omissions” insurance. It protects the charity from being held accountable if they accidentally make an accounting mistake or give somebody bad advice that causes them to lose money. Also, because of the kind of charity it was, this youth charity bought the kind of insurance that protects the charity if one of the background-screened mentors or volunteers is accused of doing something inappropriate with one of the kids. What they didn’t have is an insurance product that would protect them from the very predictable consequences of breaching a contract it had not only signed, but followed and upheld. You can’t get the kind of insurance that protects you from a breach of contract suit. The way to avoid a breach of contract suit is to not break the fucking contract. It isn’t that difficult, for a contract like this. If they decided to stop paying these guys to help them put on thing-a-thons, the way to do that and not have a lawsuit is to delay the next thing-a-thon until the fifteenth day of Never-ever-ember, and find some other way to raise money.
So, yes, the company they screwed over filed a lawsuit. The law was very much on the thing-a-thon company’s side, because they’d provided the services they’d promised to provide, and the first thing-a-thon fundraiser had worked for the youth charity more or less as planned. There were also several charities that, after following the company’s instructions but with access to a wealthier community, more volunteers, and a social network that hadn’t been exhausted, were able to raise $80k to $100k per year indefinitely, even after completing the three-year commitment to the satisfaction of all concerned. The thing-a-thon company also, supposedly, had no reason to suspect that the youth charity’s collective social capital was so badly overdrawn that it simply wasn’t capable of exploiting its volunteers’ social networks any more than it already had. (Although, the advice about faking an emergency to get help from relatives sounds, to me, as though the thing-a-thon company had run into the problem of insufficient social capital before.)
In most US states including the one where I live—although I spent the later part of my childhood in Alberta and picked up a fair bit of my non-profit experience there—it’s perfectly legal and customary to sue not only a not-for-profit, but the individual members of the executive team. Anyone whose signature is on the contract, or who was an officer of the company at the time the deal was broken, or who was an officer of the company at the time the deal was signed, is routinely named in a lawsuit. Through the court system, they can be held individually liable for what they do through the charity. This applies to both criminal and civil judgements. So it’s possible to get stuck with a slice of your charity’s debts or commitments if for some reason they exceed the charity’s assets or if the charity enters bankruptcy. That rule is not usually enforced without an actual lawsuit, but here they were with an actual suit. So there were legal fees for both sides in addition to the missing thing-a-thon fee. It was eventually settled out of court, but that’s why El Presidente looked rather war-weary. In addition to the usual stresses of running a sizable company, and dealing with non-profit drama, he’d been financially sodomized. Yet, miraculously, this introduction of the Pied Piper’s righteous flute, with its associated sharp springs and keys, had loosened his nether sphincter enough to allow him to extract his own head. Hence the very sincere, spontaneous public apology.
Thus, the youth charity faded into obscurity. It lost its tax exempt status automatically after nobody filed its tax paperwork for three years in a row. Its Web site, having not been updated since after the first thing-a-thon, still exists but the Landmark Forum has justifiably fallen out of fashion. The individual Board members went their separate ways and many of them, including me, are still active in charitable ventures. I therefore leave you with that touching and heart-warming scene: two people shaking hands in a parking lot, and wishing each other well. I lived happily ever after.
THE END
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Can I buy your book?
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Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things. They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality. I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up. Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water. How sad. It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.
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Can I buy your book?
Wait until it's free on Amazon, that's the mustachian way. ;)
Also, great read OP! Thanks for sharing.
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Have to say, I love your writing style. My jaw kept dropping while I was reading. I do really like your seven points. I wish someone had told me those when we started getting involved with non-profits. I might just copy and paste them (with your permission) and send then to a few bored folks I know. Looking forward to hearing the conclusion. DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
You may indeed quote me, but please attribute the invective to R.A. Williams which is my full legal name.
The laws State-side differ somewhat in the way they're implemented, but appear to serve the same general purpose. They vary a bit from one state to the next. Generally speaking, Board members are not on the hook for a charity's debts, unless it can be proven somehow that they breached their duty, such as by participating in or approving the kind of breach of contract that occured in my little 3-act drama. By being Treasurer (or even just on the Board) at the time the deal was signed, or by doing so much as bringing people bottled water at the first thing-a-thon, I'd have basically bought shares in the drama.
That's why I had to resign. After trying my absolute best to steer the train onto a safer track and slow it down to make the necessary repairs, I knew I wasn't going to be able to save it since they were all determined to charge right off the rails and over the cliff. Then, when the inevitable happened, I'd have to find and present proof that I tried to stop the train wreck and didn't participate in the breach of contract. Finding proof like that after the fact still isn't easy especially since these folks weren't fans of accurate record keeping. Nor is legal self defense cheap. So instead of going down in flames with them, I jumped while I could still save myself, and encouraged as many people as possible to come with me. Nobody did.
Most likely, I stayed longer than I should have and enabled the situation more than I intended.
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Great memoir. Your communication skills are especially competent, and the topic is greatly interesting.
I hope the charities I have named in my will are a lot better run than the one where you worked.
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Thanks everyone.
Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?
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Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things. They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality. I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up. Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water. How sad. It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.
Well, everyone at Landmark survived, so they just set up shop somewhere else.
If what I had to endure in the youth charity's courseroom is any reflection of the rest of the Landmark product, a person could get better value in less time by going to the public library, skimming a book of famous quotations, and leafing through a copy of a Stephen Covey book.
If there's still a chance Landmark can continue making a profit off intellectual property it didn't actually create, I suppose they're still running their marathon yap sessions, packaging up centuries' worth of philosophy, psychology, and mysticism that's been in the public domain for ages, tossing in a couple Venn diagrams, and marketing it as their new, whizbang "technology". Not one bit of original material was added to justify any extra expense, so far as I could tell, and a substantial amount was being deliberately misquoted or misinterpreted.
I also saw no point in the deliberate public humiliation of non-consenting children whose parents thought they were signing them up for a summer camp followed by a year of something out of Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
But apparently there are otherwise honest and intelligent people who truly believe that they benefit by being given the necessary confidence to lie to donors and contractors, spend themselves into bankruptcy, break contracts, and get their butts sued off looking for that big "breakthrough". Because "self esteem".
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Thanks everyone.
Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?
In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote. He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade. After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use. Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept). By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.
The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster. They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.
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It was a fun ride but you broke my suspension of disbelief when you claimed he admitted he was wrong.
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Oh. My. God. I actually attended a few Landmark Forum events back in the early 90's and got some value out of them before I went on to other things. They had some new agey bits but were still solidly grounded in reality. I heard the main office was destroyed in the 911 attacks and wondered how the organization held up. Now I know: they went to smoking crack and drinking their own bath water. How sad. It's like Detroit: only amusing if you never saw it up close during its glory days.
Well, everyone at Landmark survived, so they just set up shop somewhere else.
If what I had to endure in the youth charity's courseroom is any reflection of the rest of the Landmark product, a person could get better value in less time by going to the public library, skimming a book of famous quotations, and leafing through a copy of a Stephen Covey book.
If there's still a chance Landmark can continue making a profit off intellectual property it didn't actually create, I suppose they're still running their marathon yap sessions, packaging up centuries' worth of philosophy, psychology, and mysticism that's been in the public domain for ages, tossing in a couple Venn diagrams, and marketing it as their new, whizbang "technology". Not one bit of original material was added to justify any extra expense, so far as I could tell, and a substantial amount was being deliberately misquoted or misinterpreted.
I also saw no point in the deliberate public humiliation of non-consenting children whose parents thought they were signing them up for a summer camp followed by a year of something out of Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
But apparently there are otherwise honest and intelligent people who truly believe that they benefit by being given the necessary confidence to lie to donors and contractors, spend themselves into bankruptcy, break contracts, and get their butts sued off looking for that big "breakthrough". Because "self esteem".
Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to. The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there. The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes. I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.
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It was a fun ride but you broke my suspension of disbelief when you claimed he admitted he was wrong.
It broke mine too, because I never expected to see him again unless it was in the newspaper. Apologizing is also an extremely un-American behavior, because the custom here is to escalate instead. It came out of nowhere and that's why it was such a shock.
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Thanks everyone.
Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?
In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote. He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade. After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use. Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept). By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.
The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster. They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.
The Combined Federal Campaign vetting process isn't what's great about it. Lots of crummy charities get in. What's great about the CFC is they post the % of each contribution that goes to fundraising and admin. Many CFC listed charities have 20-30%+ donations go there - WTF? This % posting is a big help encouraging smart contribution decisions among snot nosed privates and officers. Ironically there's a TED talk where a guy encourages high fundraising costs. Then there are charities like Direct Relief International that spent a whopping 1% of each dollar received on admin and fund raising. Now just Direct Relief since Hurricane Katrina, they are my favorite. But recently admin and fundraising costs went to 2.5% so I'm keeping an eye on them. Landmark isn't the only organization to go to hell over time.
BTW, there are charity monitoring websites that really go into the weeds with details on director pay, transparency, efficiency, and other metrics.
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Thanks everyone.
Does anybody else have a tale or two of charity comedy to share?
In college one of my political science professors was discussing political communications and brought up a personal ancedote. He donated to a wildlife charity every year for at least a decade. After a while he felt they were heading in a direction he didn't like and sent them one final donation with a letter explaining why they wouldn't receive anymore from him and they should put that money to good use. Over the next year he continued to receive donation requests from them (which he kept). By the end of a calendar year he added it all up and they spent more on solicitations to him than he sent them in that final donation.
The only charities I deal with are the ones that appear each year on the Combined Federal Campaign roster. They have to go through a fairly rigorous vetting process to qualify for a spot in the book each year.
The Combined Federal Campaign vetting process isn't what's great about it. Lots of crummy charities get in. What's great about the CFC is they post the % of each contribution that goes to fundraising and admin. Many CFC listed charities have 20-30%+ donations go there - WTF? This % posting is a big help encouraging smart contribution decisions among snot nosed privates and officers. Ironically there's a TED talk where a guy encourages high fundraising costs. Then there are charities like Direct Relief International that spent a whopping 1% of each dollar received on admin and fund raising. Now just Direct Relief since Hurricane Katrina, they are my favorite. But recently admin and fundraising costs went to 2.5% so I'm keeping an eye on them. Landmark isn't the only organization to go to hell over time.
BTW, there are charity monitoring websites that really go into the weeds with details on director pay, transparency, efficiency, and other metrics.
How do they compare to such sites as CharityNavigator.com? I am always wary of non-profits and charities as some don't do a good job of implementing their vision, and for some their vision is to line the pockets of the founder.
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charitynavigator.com is one such website. I figure if people are interested they'll google them.
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Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to. The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there. The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes. I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.
I got the Cleopatra reference from a country and western song sometime back in the 90's. :)
To be fair to Landmark, I never attended any of its courses myself. At the time, I blamed it for the severely deranged behavior I was seeing from its graduates I'd met through the charity, so I decided to not check in at the Hotel California.
Although I blamed Landmark at the time, there was at least one other common factor: the people doing the weird decision making that was radically out of line with their values and track record were also in a charity environment that, at first, appeared to act like a little bubble in which the normal rules of reality didn't necessarily apply. I'm thinking that it might have felt like an opportunity to experiment with magical thinking, and it would explain why most of them had such functional lives otherwise. Removed from the charity environment, the Prez did indeed display the kind of magnanimity and integrity he was generally known for.
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Crack and Bathwater. The Landmark Forum I knew wasn't about that. The events I attended had audience members determined to out them as a cult or a fraud. They failed. Indeed, nobody even walked out as they threatened to. The first time I ever heard the joke "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" was there. The behavior you describe would have emptied those events in ten minutes. I just wish such behavior was limited to organizations like Landmark. I had a relative work as an accountant at a successful charity once and she described it as a nest of vipers.
I got the Cleopatra reference from a country and western song sometime back in the 90's. :)
To be fair to Landmark, I never attended any of its courses myself. At the time, I blamed it for the severely deranged behavior I was seeing from its graduates I'd met through the charity, so I decided to not check in at the Hotel California.
Although I blamed Landmark at the time, there was at least one other common factor: the people doing the weird decision making that was radically out of line with their values and track record were also in a charity environment that, at first, appeared to act like a little bubble in which the normal rules of reality didn't necessarily apply. I'm thinking that it might have felt like an opportunity to experiment with magical thinking, and it would explain why most of them had such functional lives otherwise. Removed from the charity environment, the Prez did indeed display the kind of magnanimity and integrity he was generally known for.
The last paragraph - man - so applicable to our situation. I won't go into details, but it's become cultish and just weird, and I know these people and love them, and it's hard to believe that it's gotten to this point.
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I love a broad who knows how to wield the full force of the English language.
Well done, and thank you for the story.
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Loved this narrative, too!
My only criticism with regard to the "you were right" aspect is that I'm not sure it's so much a woman-thing as it is a human-thing. I remember once saying those words to a male boss about something I'd initially disagreed with, and he asked me to please repeat it because it was music to his ears. Those are three powerful words for many people, of any gender, to hear.
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DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
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I personally won't serve on a board if the organization doesn't have D&O insurance (Directors & Officers). This protects individual board members from having their personal assets seized if the organization is being sued by someone (or the IRS or other gov't agencies). I'm in the US
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Loved this narrative, too!
My only criticism with regard to the "you were right" aspect is that I'm not sure it's so much a woman-thing as it is a human-thing. I remember once saying those words to a male boss about something I'd initially disagreed with, and he asked me to please repeat it because it was music to his ears. Those are three powerful words for many people, of any gender, to hear.
I agree. Someone once told me that the most beautiful thing for the average person to hear is their name. I believe that was from Dale Carnegie's, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," but I think the second most beautiful thing to hear are those three words.
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DO you have different laws where you are? In Canada the board members would be personally on the hook for debts incurred that could not be paid.
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I personally won't serve on a board if the organization doesn't have D&O insurance (Directors & Officers). This protects individual board members from having their personal assets seized if the organization is being sued by someone (or the IRS or other gov't agencies). I'm in the US
That's a very wise decision on your part. If you're in a well run organization, the D&O coverage is sufficient to protect against the legal threats that actually exist: frivolous suits, accidents, oversights, mistakes and the like.
Of course, like any other insurance product D&O policies have all kinds of exclusions down in the fine print that prevent it from being abused. If there's undisclosed conflict of interest, corporate malfeasance, illegal activity, or a variety of other dishonest behavior, the policy won't cover the people engaging in it. In a poorly run organization, where the abuses are bad enough to venture into the D&O exclusion areas, or routine enough to be part of the standard business practice, or even premeditated, the protection just isn't effective.
I think of D&O as a raincoat, not a condom: great for keeping you from getting soaked in a downpour you didn't cause, but not effective protection if you're actively screwing someone.
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I think of D&O as a raincoat, not a condom: great for keeping you from getting soaked in a downpour you didn't cause, but not effective protection if you're actively screwing someone.
BAHAHAHA <3
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Act II
This is pretty amazing. I haven't gotten to Act III yet, but I really enjoyed the first part of Act II.
Because I'm on the PTA board at the school, and this is so chilling.
So you mentioned the volunteer capital for a homemaker and a retiree, do you have a value for a full time employee? I'm just wondering, because many of our board members have full time jobs.
We are exhausted. We have too many fundraisers, with the same people doing all of that.
Now, in general, I think the *right* thing that we do is that we fundraise this year for next year, so we know what we can do going in.
But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it. Why the fuck am I raising money to pay some guy's salary? (Yes, he is a hard working, useful individual. No, the school would not be able to do ANY of the electronic-based testing, etc., without him. But I shouldn't be raising money for this!!)
Also, what we need to be honest about (with the teachers and the Principal), is that we don't have enough volunteers to do the fundraising AND 75% of the students are on free lunch, so we just don't have a pool of money.
Seriously this Act II was eye opening, and mind blowing and I'm going to re-read it.
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If I was getting paid from donations instead of by my employer (the school), two things would be true:
One, my boss would then be the people donating the money, not the school. Awkward.
Two, I'd be out of there as soon as I found a new job.
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But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it.
You'd think there would be a by-law or some state regulation that a charity shouldn't be the source of income for a school employee. Is he a contractor and not covered by the same rules that govern teachers salaries? How far in advance are you fundraising to pay him?
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Act II
So you mentioned the volunteer capital for a homemaker and a retiree, do you have a value for a full time employee? I'm just wondering, because many of our board members have full time jobs.
We are exhausted. We have too many fundraisers, with the same people doing all of that.
Now, in general, I think the *right* thing that we do is that we fundraise this year for next year, so we know what we can do going in.
But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it. Why the fuck am I raising money to pay some guy's salary? (Yes, he is a hard working, useful individual. No, the school would not be able to do ANY of the electronic-based testing, etc., without him. But I shouldn't be raising money for this!!)
Also, what we need to be honest about (with the teachers and the Principal), is that we don't have enough volunteers to do the fundraising AND 75% of the students are on free lunch, so we just don't have a pool of money.
Snipped your posting for brevity. I feel your pain.
The value for a full-time employee? Just estimate that person's hourly take-home pay as their per-hour effectiveness; that will give you the approximate per-hour fundraising impact for that individual. If you're talking about a full-time employee *of* the charity, you do NOT count his or her paid hours as volunteer hours under any circumstances. Work he or she does for your charity off the clock (such as fundraising, or work related to a different domain from the one she or he is paid for) can be counted as volunteer labor.
You're exhausted because you've pushed your volunteers past their limits for two long. I agree with your philosophy of fundraising this year to create the budget for next year, IF your charity can be made to stick to the budget and not over-spend.
Here are my recommendations for your particular case. I recommend you call an emergency meeting of the PTA and do the following:
1) Boost volunteer morale by canceling the next two fundraisers immediately. This will give them a much needed break because right now they're at the point of diminishing returns. You simply cannot draw any more water from this well. The school has taken all that there is. It wasn't due to malice on their part (they're there to educate, not to think), but simple ignorance and inflated expectations. If the school administration pitches a fit (and they will), tell them it's not open for discussion. You're scaling back to a sustainable level of fundraising based on your income calculations, before you literally give someone a heart attack. If they have a problem with that (and they will), tell them they can find another set of parents to milk. (Hint: if it's a Title I school where 75% of the kids are on the school lunch program, there aren't any more parents to milk, because the ones who give a rat's ass are already doing all they can).
2) Run those income calculations like I set up in Act II to give them an idea of what a group your size "should" be able to do under normal circumstances, using only one network-based fundraiser per year (I recommend a thing-a-thon sponsored by local businesses, instead of a sales based event where your margin is usually less than 50%). Also put in the constraints on the labor-based fundraising as I illustrated. Take the number of hours people have been putting into fundraising, and-- this is a seat of my pants estimate-- cut it in half. That's going to be a lot fewer person-hours than they've been getting. Set up a spreadsheet, or a graph, or some kind of visual representation. These folks are going to need to have their noses rubbed into how out of line their expectations have been.
3) You (PTA) got into this situation because you allowed yourself to give more of a fuck about the school's IT problem than the school did. You adopted the monkeys from someone else's circus. Naturally the monkeys are out of control: they don't answer to you and they know it. So, take a shot of vodka, and cut the monkeys loose. (Done properly, this will NOT result in unemployment for the IT person, but talk to her/him first and let him know about the budget disaster. This is a professional courtesy, because you're about to use that individual as a pawn in your negotiations with the school... actually it's not going to be a negotiation but you don't need to reveal that fact just yet). Around this time the school should be getting wind of what you're up to, but it doesn't matter, because Step 4.
4) After you've done 1, 2, and 3, tell the principal that you can't afford to pay school employees anymore. As much as you want to carry the load for them, the camel's back is severely sprained, and they'll have to walk for a bit. If they break the camel's back, their income will go to zero (and they know it).
The shit will hit the fan for a few minutes, there will be a lot of hand-wringing, but in reality the school board (and/or the state) will HAVE to step in the minute someone realizes they can't do all their mandatory No Student Left Behind computer based testing without an IT guy. Believe me, the money will be found somewhere. You might not even have to wait that long: the second the principal finds himself unable to download his favorite porn (one firewall tweak from the "outbound" IT guy should do it), they'll find the funding.
5) Work up a budget that fits the numbers you crunched back in step 2. This is the pool of available money and person hours you have. There's no more rodent rectum in the pile at present. Someone's going to suggest calling the Pied Piper. See to it that they don't.
6) Call the local newspaper and give a heartfelt interview about how everyone is So Exhausted And Disappointed. Have them take pictures of a sad child or a mother with aching feet. The press loves that shit.
7) Give the story a couple days to percolate and then start hitting up the local businesses that rely on the school or its students as consumers.
8) In the meantime, hit up the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation (they're hot for computer related education) and see if they can't cut you some cash, one charity to another. Also, make some postings on donorschoose.org or some similar school based Web site to cover any equipment costs you might have. This will expand your reach substantially beyond your admittedly stressed community, because you'll be reaching prospective donors on a national basis.
This is how you're going to save your sanity, the rest of the PTA, the IT guy, and your school. In that order (because you tried doing it with the priorities ordered the other way around, and it didn't work).
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But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it.
You'd think there would be a by-law or some state regulation that a charity shouldn't be the source of income for a school employee. Is he a contractor and not covered by the same rules that govern teachers salaries? How far in advance are you fundraising to pay him?
There doesn't have to be a law to keep people from making organizationally codependent decisions, and a charity's bylaws can't be expected to cover everything that comes up. The PTA is a separate organizational entity from the school; they can't be forced to cover the school's spending. Overall, the situation resulted from some bad decision making on the part of the PTA. It's fixable, as soon as the PTA realizes it's the dog and the school is the tail. The money they raise is the money the school has available to spend. If they want to spend it all on an IT guy, that's OK and more power to them.
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Holy shit, grim, you know how to run things.
Also, on the topic of fundraising money by soliciting gifts vs soliciting sales - I don't know if others share my opinion, but it's this: I may be happy to donate $x, but I would never want to spend $x to buy the useless shit being peddled as a fundraiser. This has very, very few exceptions. Donations are donations, donations via purchases are purchases and I evaluate them on a do-I-buy-this basis (no, I don't want your useless crap.)
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Holy shit, grim, you know how to run things.
Also, on the topic of fundraising money by soliciting gifts vs soliciting sales - I don't know if others share my opinion, but it's this: I may be happy to donate $x, but I would never want to spend $x to buy the useless shit being peddled as a fundraiser. This has very, very few exceptions. Donations are donations, donations via purchases are purchases and I evaluate them on a do-I-buy-this basis (no, I don't want your useless crap.)
More people believe the way you do, than otherwise. Thing-a-thons gross far more than sales on a per hour basis, and you get to keep nearly all of what you earn instead of the up-to-50% you get from charity chocolate and similar crap.
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But one serious problem we have is this - due to budget cuts in the school budget, fully 50% of the money we raised last year ($42,000) is going to pay the fucking salary of the IT guy at the school, because the district doesn't cover it.
You'd think there would be a by-law or some state regulation that a charity shouldn't be the source of income for a school employee. Is he a contractor and not covered by the same rules that govern teachers salaries? How far in advance are you fundraising to pay him?
We fundraise a year in advance. So the money we allocate this year was raised last year. We had originally set aside that $42k for four specialists (PE, art, music, computers). The computer guy is a part time employee, and a small amount would go to give him more hours (so that he doesn't quit). The specialists work at several different schools. So the kids get 90 mins, approximately of PE, art, music every 2 weeks.
This year, the district gave a grant for art and music. I think they found the budget for PE. That meant the principal decided to allocate more of the specialist money to the computer guy for getting the school ready for the new testing this year, that is all computer based and is in each classroom instead of the computer lab.
Our budget meeting is next week. We have only raised $59k this year (our budget this past year was $90k). I expect we'll be at $70k or $75k by the end of the year (one more fundraiser).
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Holy shit, grim, you know how to run things.
Also, on the topic of fundraising money by soliciting gifts vs soliciting sales - I don't know if others share my opinion, but it's this: I may be happy to donate $x, but I would never want to spend $x to buy the useless shit being peddled as a fundraiser. This has very, very few exceptions. Donations are donations, donations via purchases are purchases and I evaluate them on a do-I-buy-this basis (no, I don't want your useless crap.)
More people believe the way you do, than otherwise. Thing-a-thons gross far more than sales on a per hour basis, and you get to keep nearly all of what you earn instead of the up-to-50% you get from charity chocolate and similar crap.
This is why I am so misplaced as the CO-VP of fundraising. The restaurant nights where the school gets 15%? Eff that, why don't just give you $10?
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1) Boost volunteer morale by canceling the next two fundraisers immediately. This will give them a much needed break because right now they're at the point of diminishing returns. You simply cannot draw any more water from this well. The school has taken all that there is. It wasn't due to malice on their part (they're there to educate, not to think), but simple ignorance and inflated expectations. If the school administration pitches a fit (and they will), tell them it's not open for discussion. You're scaling back to a sustainable level of fundraising based on your income calculations, before you literally give someone a heart attack. If they have a problem with that (and they will), tell them they can find another set of parents to milk. (Hint: if it's a Title I school where 75% of the kids are on the school lunch program, there aren't any more parents to milk, because the ones who give a rat's ass are already doing all they can).
2) Run those income calculations like I set up in Act II to give them an idea of what a group your size "should" be able to do under normal circumstances, using only one network-based fundraiser per year (I recommend a thing-a-thon sponsored by local businesses, instead of a sales based event where your margin is usually less than 50%). Also put in the constraints on the labor-based fundraising as I illustrated. Take the number of hours people have been putting into fundraising, and-- this is a seat of my pants estimate-- cut it in half. That's going to be a lot fewer person-hours than they've been getting. Set up a spreadsheet, or a graph, or some kind of visual representation. These folks are going to need to have their noses rubbed into how out of line their expectations have been.
Also edited for brevity. I am going to bring this up at our budget meeting next week.
Our next fundraiser is in 3 weeks, and we've already solicited and received about $15,000 of donations to auction, so I can't exactly cancel it. However, we have discussed (briefly) NOT doing an auction next year (which means by the next time we have one, I'll not be in this position anymore, yay!)
As a board, we have tried to move away from the sales of candy and such because it's so labor intensive for the amount of work. You are right about the "thing-a-thon". We should try to focus more on that next year, because a lot of local businesses are willing to donate there.
On the grants and such, we have a few parents (my neighbor specifically) who are harping on getting them - we have people interested in writing proposals but...we really don't know where to start. So thank you for those links. Even my husband (who has a PhD in engineering and writes a lot of proposals) has offered to write grants.
I think we need to consider what works for the least amount of work. We've found that local banks and businesses will often donate $200-$500. We haven't fully tapped that market. We need to look at grants.
As a Title I school (you nailed that one), we really cannot get blood out of a stone. Our fundraising abilities are severely limited. We would rather spend our time on educational and fun things (science nights, festivals, field trips, etc.)
There's a reason why we don't have much help anymore. There are a lot of parents in the upper grades (5th and 6th) who are so burned out from being on the PTA board that they don't want to do anything anymore. I totally understand that now.
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Also edited for brevity. I am going to bring this up at our budget meeting next week.
Our next fundraiser is in 3 weeks, and we've already solicited and received about $15,000 of donations to auction, so I can't exactly cancel it. However, we have discussed (briefly) NOT doing an auction next year (which means by the next time we have one, I'll not be in this position anymore, yay!)
On the grants and such, we have a few parents (my neighbor specifically) who are harping on getting them - we have people interested in writing proposals but...we really don't know where to start. So thank you for those links. Even my husband (who has a PhD in engineering and writes a lot of proposals) has offered to write grants.
I think we need to consider what works for the least amount of work. We've found that local banks and businesses will often donate $200-$500. We haven't fully tapped that market. We need to look at grants.
As a Title I school (you nailed that one), we really cannot get blood out of a stone. Our fundraising abilities are severely limited. We would rather spend our time on educational and fun things (science nights, festivals, field trips, etc.)
There's a reason why we don't have much help anymore. There are a lot of parents in the upper grades (5th and 6th) who are so burned out from being on the PTA board that they don't want to do anything anymore. I totally understand that now.
The thing about the Title I school wasn't meant as an insult, it's just that the behavior pattern is so similar. I live in a very poor state, and I see the pattern all over.
Heads up on the grants. They are generally for one-shot special projects, and generally can't be used for operating budgets or salaries. It's relatively easy to get people to buy (or give) you capital equipment, but raising money for salaries is like pulling teeth. However, if you can get a bunch of equipment given to the school, it may free up money elsewhere in the budget to afford the specialist teachers. Also, read each company's standards carefully because you might be able to just ask for money.
I should probably teach you how to write grants. Cut and paste the following into a word processor file; it's the entire grant writer body of knowledge for planet Earth.
To get grants requires at least one adult willing to sit on their butt for 2 hours a night, every night, for a month, and type intelligibly in English.
Collect the following information and call it the Super Duper Grant Writer Kit:
* the school's address
* the PTA's address (if it differs from the school's)
* your federal tax ID number that can be used to prove you're a non-profit
* a digital copy of your tax exempt letter from the IRS
* some pictures of your kids
* some statistics about your school and neighborhood: grades served, kids enrolled, etc
* some evidence your school is Title I (use your imagination)
* key dates for football tournaments, art museum tours you'd like to have funded, graduation, band performances, etc
* a copy of last year's budget
* a copy of the last annual report
Make a big deal about giving The Kit and the instructions in this posting to carefully selected volunteers who can communicate well in English. You're going to teach them how to write grants.
Each adult takes on an assignment. Give "computer lab" to your husband, obviously. The remaining assignments are
"athletics department"
"music equipment"
"field trips"
"art supplies"
... and any other you'd care to name. Each adult gets one assignment. This is so that they don't duplicate effort.
The assignment is to sit on your duff for two hours a day, five days a week, doing the following:
1) Type words and phrases into your search engine, featuring the word "grant". For example your husband might use the words "computer grants for schools" (Finding the grant is about 50% of the work)
2) Or, brainstorm companies that are already operating in your community, that sell products or services related to what you're looking for... or that USE that kind of product. Lots of larger corporations have gift programs, you just need to hit up their Web site. After the first month pickings will get slim if you want to avoid companies the other grant writers have already hit up.
3) So, find the Web site of a company that has a grant you can qualify for (some do, some don't). Many companies focus exclusively on academic giving, or athletics, or fine arts. So a grant you don't qualify for MIGHT be useful to the person doing a different assignment: E-mail them the URL so they can follow up. When you've got a grant or donation you qualify for, go through the online application. You will use information or files in your toolkit to answer the questions you are given.
4) Plead creatively about how your poor, at-risk students need what you're asking for. (Use a word processing program with copy and paste, modifying the text as needed to suit the company you're soliciting). Note that if you're hitting up a retail company it's far easier to get products than it is to get money. If you have a couple skilled E-Bayers there may be ways to turn excess product *into* money, but save that for further down the road.
5) Say nice things about the company.
6) WRITE DOWN any names, URLs, E-mail addresses, etc. you visit. If your school doesn't qualify, write that down too so somebody else doesn't waste time barking up that particular tree.
7) Repeat steps 1-6 for a minimum of five (5) solicitations per day. If you expect to take a day off, get more solicitations done the day before. After finishing, E-mail all the other grant writing volunteers about who you hit up. This ensures you won't duplicate your effort.
8) Have someone-- YOU-- set up a Facebook site for your PTA if there isn't one already, and collect E-mail from all the volunteers who are writing grants. The second there's a "yes", blab about it all over social media and give the company a nice e-gasm for their wonderful corporate citizenship. Keep a record of what companies came through for you and write them a thank-you note that's also a receipt for their donation. The PTA Treasurer should sign it.
You now know as much as the $100k per year grant writers. Seriously: this is *all* they do. They keep it a big secret and act like it's voodoo because they know they can bill the living crap out of some poor charity for their "expertise", when in reality they're filling out online forms. Any high school dropout can do it, if they have The Kit and the ability to communicate fluently in writing.
People don't jump into it themselves because of all this fake hype surrounding the idea that it's a specialized skill. It's not. You just have to know enough about what you're raising money for to make an intelligent case about it in writing. Most of the corporate grants are freaking drop-down menus.
Expect a hit rate of about 10%. That's why I'm assigning you five solicitations per day. The yes or no answers usually follow two to four weeks after you submit the request. When the first "yes" comes in, it's a fantastic feeling, and then you get the idea that you're unstoppable as long as you put in five requests a day (and that happens to be true; if you were doing it "full-time" you'd write ten or twelve a day).
Now, go out and get that money.
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Awesome thread! I'm bookmarking this to refer to in the future.
As far as finding charities to give to and work in, I really like the book A Path Appears.
(http://www.amazon.com/Path-Appears-Transforming-Creating-Opportunity/dp/0385349912/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429217749&sr=1-1&keywords=a+path+appears)
The book did an overview of different areas giving, levels of effectiveness, weak spots, etc.
For example, schools (particularly colleges) get a lot more $$$ than early childhood intervention.
Also, the book makes the case that having the lowest overhead isn't necessarily best. 99% overhead is bullshit, but too low will mean less marketing, good employees that will eventually move on to better care for themselves and their families, etc.
I thought the book was good. Has any one else read this and have objections?
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Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a somewhat lazy version of evil incarnate.
I utterly love your writing style. The "behind the curtain" bit of nonprofits can be hair-raising.
My experience doesn't even come close to yours, but definitely hits some impressive points of incompetent management.
Back when I was in college, the national mothership for some college-based volunteer groups had a 2 person staff (a married couple who hadn't been paid in a couple of years so the board leaned towards the rubber stamp side). The directors decided to invite unpaid interns one summer to the mothership in Florida. Instead of their first foray into interns being a manageable 1 or 2, they invited 10 of us from all over the country. Because nothing could ever go wrong making yourself outnumbered by opinionated Millennials who have experience running their own college's programs.
Outside of having housing covered due to the directors owning a couple of rental properties, we quickly found out that the nonprofit was insanely disorganized. Even on the resource side, we had a 3 computers for the interns to get work done. The directors realized about halfway through the summer that, while they loved using the ideas/talents, they hated when the interns challenged any of their ideas.
Instead of just admitting the whole 10 interns for your first shot at interns was a bad idea, the directors came to the double-wide on a Friday night to fire the 5 of us (does it count as firing if it's from an unpaid position?) They decided to justify it by accusing us of drunken driving on the way home from a retreat. Funny thing was that I was the driver for the time period in question and at that point in my life I didn't drink alcohol (something the directors were aware of since we hung out together on the weekends). Before they left, the couple required us to vacate the double-wide by the next afternoon since conveniently they had someone visiting the next day that was interested in renting.
At this point you're looking at an impressively huge failure from an org management side. Even in a normal firing, my grad school management prof pointed out that the most important thing when you fire someone is to always control their access to anything that the company owns. Obviously they're not going to be happy with you. This is why you always walk fired employees out the door. Even worse than a normal firing, you just fired 5 people at their place of residence in an uncontrolled situation for a lie that they take personal offense to. Instead of controlling the situation by escorting said people out of your property, you leave them in control of the residence you rent out and in possession of the keys to the office.
So since we were still in possession of our office key and the 5 of us had personal things at the office, we piled into a car and headed there. They were extremely lucky we were only interested in retrieving what we owned (except that the other 4 took a bit of time to delete every file they worked on that summer). We left the keys on a side table and started the drives back to where we lived the next day.
And that's the story of how DeepEllumStache got canned for something she didn't do from a job she wasn't paid for and also how she decided to avoid a job in the nonprofit world like the plague.
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Instead of their first foray into interns being a manageable 1 or 2, they invited 10 of us from all over the country. Because nothing could ever go wrong making yourself outnumbered by opinionated Millennials who have experience running their own college's programs.
A lovely tale of fail; thank you!
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I will E-mail a free Microsoft Word copy to the first ten volunteer reviewers who PM me their E-mail address and agree to provide me feedback on the content. This will be a text only copy: the cover is not yet ready and it's not for redistribution. If you'd like to comment or provide feedback directly into the text, just make sure that change tracking is on. If you wish, I will name you explicitly as a reviewer in the acknowledgments section of the book.
The book is about 102,000 words long, which would be about 400 pages in a standard paperback. It includes figures, graphs, quantitative steps, and detailed descriptions of some of the processes and principles I've outlined in this thread and elsewhere. Snark is present of course, but I keep the language relatively clean since I plan to sell to the business community.
I am still working on two sections: the acknowledgments and the references. My bibliography still needs to be formatted and organized, and I may add a section discussing other authors that use the water tank analogy to discuss cash flow. Also, the book is presently in page format because that's how I think. I'll convert it into reasonable eBook format before publishing, so you don't need to weigh in on fonts or formatting.
Any takers?
Edited to add: current reviewer list
* lhamo, aka Seaweed Slice
* DeepEllumStache
* Spiffsome
* missbee
* Mews
* Playing With Fire UK
* acepedro45
* meghan88
* farmerj
* vortenjou
All reviewers acconted for!
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Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a somewhat lazy version of evil incarnate. Yet the body I occupy is biologically female. So I’ve got a not-so-secret weakness. There are three little words that really get my panties wet. These three words, by the way, will magically allow a man to command the attention of any woman he speaks them to, and cause her to listen with an open mind whether she plans to or not, even if she’s in the middle of a sentence. I therefore accepted his apology and listened to the whole story as though I’d been hypnotized by a grocery-toting Ancient Mariner.
(These words, in case you ever need to make a woman preemptively shut up, are: “You were right”.)
I've had to say these words to my wife so many times that they no longer have said moistening effect. Price of being wrong so much, I guess.
You should put this on Medium or something. This has greatly increased the sum of things I know about the operation of non-profits.
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I don't know who I pity more the children who didn't get the help they need or the people behind the scenes forced to put up with such foolishness...How did you manage Grim without resorting to substance abuse or catching cases?
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I don't know who I pity more the children who didn't get the help they need or the people behind the scenes forced to put up with such foolishness...How did you manage Grim without resorting to substance abuse or catching cases?
The vodka in question had a very good time and did not consider itself abused in the least. 'Tis an old Slavic standby, I fear.
I've seen other isolated cases of stupidity, but it's generally just one or two people. Most of the groups I've worked with have been reasonably well run although I've seen some mistakes.
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That's pretty exciting! It's interesting to read the necro thread a year later.
- I'm no longer co-VP fundraising, but do volunteer in the role
- We didn't have an auction last year
- We aren't having an auction this year
- Only 1/3 of our budget is "salaries" this year, which is approx. $20k. (Half what it was two years ago.)
Still kind of sucks...but not my circus, not my monkeys! Here's a check, spend it wisely!
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That's pretty exciting! It's interesting to read the necro thread a year later.
- I'm no longer co-VP fundraising, but do volunteer in the role
- We didn't have an auction last year
- We aren't having an auction this year
- Only 1/3 of our budget is "salaries" this year, which is approx. $20k. (Half what it was two years ago.)
Still kind of sucks...but not my circus, not my monkeys! Here's a check, spend it wisely!
It sounds as though you were able to make some improvements, but there was still a greater desire to run unsustainably. Booster clubs can get away with it (kind of) because of the constant turnover in volunteers. However one sign of an unhealthy booster club (or any kind of charity) is that the volunteer turnover rate exceeds the turnover rate of the people who benefit from the charity program.
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That's pretty exciting! It's interesting to read the necro thread a year later.
- I'm no longer co-VP fundraising, but do volunteer in the role
- We didn't have an auction last year
- We aren't having an auction this year
- Only 1/3 of our budget is "salaries" this year, which is approx. $20k. (Half what it was two years ago.)
Still kind of sucks...but not my circus, not my monkeys! Here's a check, spend it wisely!
It sounds as though you were able to make some improvements, but there was still a greater desire to run unsustainably. Booster clubs can get away with it (kind of) because of the constant turnover in volunteers. However one sign of an unhealthy booster club (or any kind of charity) is that the volunteer turnover rate exceeds the turnover rate of the people who benefit from the charity program.
Yes we have quite the volunteer turnover, but probably because we don't have many volunteers. (and it's a lot of work)
Most people don't "disappear", they still volunteer in some role, but they aren't as willing to take on leadership positions. A friend on the board told me she had to defend me at the first board meeting. "Why is she not coming back?" (First, I "aged out" of the fundraising role - 2 year term limits, which they offered to change. Second - and what she told them "she has a four year old, and thus 8 more years as a parent at this school, she needs to pace herself".)
Plus, my husband teaches the math club, which is also a lot of work. Next year, little guy is in kinder. I plan to volunteer in the classroom for a couple of years instead of doing board stuff. Seriously, with the exception of two current and former board members, all of these people will be long gone, and I'll still have a kid in this school.
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This is amazing and yes, you should definitely write a book
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This is amazing and yes, you should definitely write a book
?
The book is finished. Launch is scheduled for mid-December, the contract is placed for the cover design, and I'm collecting feedback from advance copy readers to fold into the final version. Overall it looks like I'm going to hit a niche that's previously unserved: philanthropists and small-scale charity administrators who need more than just financial advice.
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Holy shit, grim, you know how to run things.
Also, on the topic of fundraising money by soliciting gifts vs soliciting sales - I don't know if others share my opinion, but it's this: I may be happy to donate $x, but I would never want to spend $x to buy the useless shit being peddled as a fundraiser. This has very, very few exceptions. Donations are donations, donations via purchases are purchases and I evaluate them on a do-I-buy-this basis (no, I don't want your useless crap.)
More people believe the way you do, than otherwise. Thing-a-thons gross far more than sales on a per hour basis, and you get to keep nearly all of what you earn instead of the up-to-50% you get from charity chocolate and similar crap.
I was willing to buy the wrapping paper, before it became the same crap you can get in the stores. It used to be GOOD. No more. (and sometimes girl scout cookies)
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All ten reviewers have their copies and are busily reading. As offers came in, I sent out the most recent version of the manuscript. So people later in the list have manuscripts that include fixes and improvements caught by earlier readers.
Thanks everyone!
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I am looking forward to reading this book!
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So excited to hear about the book! I'm heavily involved in running a local organisation for arts professionals. We started eighteen months ago and have done a hell of a lot with no money and a lot of everyone's time. We're launching a paid membership scheme right now, and have secured a small grant for a couple of hundred pounds. We've agreed to spend it on a big professional event. Obviously all eight people on the committee have different priorities for the organisation, but I'm really pushing for us to spend a big chunk of the grant on hiring a person to do all the admin associated with the event. Because it's supposed to be a landmark thing for us but if it's all done in our time off from our actual work, it will be shit. And who wants a shit landmark? And we have money now!!! Ugh. Anyway, really looking forward to the book - and I might donate a copy to the organisation if it's suitable and won't seem too passive-aggressive...
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Also, GrimSqueaker, if you ever pitch up in the south east of England, I would be delighted to host you as a thank you for your engaging, informative, entertaining posts on this forum! Srsly.
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Good to see this revived. I remember seeing this posted the day I registered for the forum. Great story, I work in the public sector (gov) and I'm amazed by how many "visualize" type folks make it into management. Not many but just enough to make things difficult.
If you have a cheap e version I may buy the book!
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This was a very interesting thread, but one thing is bothering me. Even after a google search, I still have not found a satisfactory definition of "torofecundian". By the way, this thread came up eighth in my google search for this word.
I love your writing style, Grim, and remember looking up some vocabulary words from other posts you've written.
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This was a very interesting thread, but one thing is bothering me. Even after a google search, I still have not found a satisfactory definition of "torofecundian". By the way, this thread came up eighth in my google search for this word.
I love your writing style, Grim, and remember looking up some vocabulary words from other posts you've written.
Bullshitty.
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I'm thrilled you revived this thread as I missed it the first time. Mega-wow! And I love that you got the apology and acknowledgement, in the end.
When your book is released could you please announce it on this thread so everyone who read your Three Acts will get the announcement? (If I get the news quickly enough I can hopefully get your book under the Christmas tree for me. :)
Your grant-writer's bible post sparked my imagination. My volunteer involvement with my chosen charity is confined to core-business hours (this isn't flexible). I'd love to continue this role but in the next half year or so I'm going to need to seek paid work (and, not being FI, the paid work will get first dibs on my time). I'm wondering if grant writing for them on some kind of contingency/commission basis could help me continue to volunteer in my current role while also earning income.
My first instinct would be to see what information I could find online about volunteer and paid grant writing, try to find some experienced people to speak to about it, find out what's out there that's applicable to this charity and what they do so far in this realm, then put together a proposal to pitch if I think I could add value and be successful at this. Is there a recommended way I should go about looking into this, instead?
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I'm thrilled you revived this thread as I missed it the first time. Mega-wow! And I love that you got the apology and acknowledgement, in the end.
When your book is released could you please announce it on this thread so everyone who read your Three Acts will get the announcement? (If I get the news quickly enough I can hopefully get your book under the Christmas tree for me. :)
Your grant-writer's bible post sparked my imagination. My volunteer involvement with my chosen charity is confined to core-business hours (this isn't flexible). I'd love to continue this role but in the next half year or so I'm going to need to seek paid work (and, not being FI, the paid work will get first dibs on my time). I'm wondering if grant writing for them on some kind of contingency/commission basis could help me continue to volunteer in my current role while also earning income.
My first instinct would be to see what information I could find online about volunteer and paid grant writing, try to find some experienced people to speak to about it, find out what's out there that's applicable to this charity and what they do so far in this realm, then put together a proposal to pitch if I think I could add value and be successful at this. Is there a recommended way I should go about looking into this, instead?
I do a lot of volunteer grant writing if I can help. Similar time constraints now where I used to have a lot more time to give. I can write during work hours though - I work for at public university with a service mission, so, it fits - I just can't get away from campus as much as I used to.
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I'm thrilled you revived this thread as I missed it the first time. Mega-wow! And I love that you got the apology and acknowledgement, in the end.
When your book is released could you please announce it on this thread so everyone who read your Three Acts will get the announcement? (If I get the news quickly enough I can hopefully get your book under the Christmas tree for me. :)
Your grant-writer's bible post sparked my imagination. My volunteer involvement with my chosen charity is confined to core-business hours (this isn't flexible). I'd love to continue this role but in the next half year or so I'm going to need to seek paid work (and, not being FI, the paid work will get first dibs on my time). I'm wondering if grant writing for them on some kind of contingency/commission basis could help me continue to volunteer in my current role while also earning income.
My first instinct would be to see what information I could find online about volunteer and paid grant writing, try to find some experienced people to speak to about it, find out what's out there that's applicable to this charity and what they do so far in this realm, then put together a proposal to pitch if I think I could add value and be successful at this. Is there a recommended way I should go about looking into this, instead?
If you accept a commission for writing grants, make sure it's for a charity with which you don't already have a relationship that involves money. They can't be employing you or a family member in any capacity. Also, you and your immediate family can't be on the Board or in any decision making capacity unless there's a well understood way of recusing them from making any decisions about your compensation. Otherwise you're going to walk into a huge conflict of interest. You don't need the drama.
Try writing some grant applications on a volunteer basis first to establish your credibility. Then you can leverage your success by offering your talents to other organizations.
In fairness, I have to tell you that I don't recommend hiring a professional grant writer to any charity that can't afford to pay their commission out of cash flow. Also, most small and mid-sized charities don't understand that grants are generally for program expansion or special activities as opposed to for ongoing business operations.
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I'm thrilled you revived this thread as I missed it the first time. Mega-wow! And I love that you got the apology and acknowledgement, in the end.
When your book is released could you please announce it on this thread so everyone who read your Three Acts will get the announcement? (If I get the news quickly enough I can hopefully get your book under the Christmas tree for me. :)
Your grant-writer's bible post sparked my imagination. My volunteer involvement with my chosen charity is confined to core-business hours (this isn't flexible). I'd love to continue this role but in the next half year or so I'm going to need to seek paid work (and, not being FI, the paid work will get first dibs on my time). I'm wondering if grant writing for them on some kind of contingency/commission basis could help me continue to volunteer in my current role while also earning income.
My first instinct would be to see what information I could find online about volunteer and paid grant writing, try to find some experienced people to speak to about it, find out what's out there that's applicable to this charity and what they do so far in this realm, then put together a proposal to pitch if I think I could add value and be successful at this. Is there a recommended way I should go about looking into this, instead?
If you accept a commission for writing grants, make sure it's for a charity with which you don't already have a relationship that involves money. They can't be employing you or a family member in any capacity. Also, you and your immediate family can't be on the Board or in any decision making capacity unless there's a well understood way of recusing them from making any decisions about your compensation. Otherwise you're going to walk into a huge conflict of interest. You don't need the drama.
Try writing some grant applications on a volunteer basis first to establish your credibility. Then you can leverage your success by offering your talents to other organizations.
In fairness, I have to tell you that I don't recommend hiring a professional grant writer to any charity that can't afford to pay their commission out of cash flow. Also, most small and mid-sized charities don't understand that grants are generally for program expansion or special activities as opposed to for ongoing business operations.
+1 to all of this, though I'd thought Okits was looking to hire rather than to be hired.
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Sorry to necro a thread, but the book is ready for review. The title is "Sustainable Non-Profit Management". The subtitle is "Build and manage a charity to last a hundred years".
I'm thrilled you revived this thread as I missed it the first time. Mega-wow! And I love that you got the apology and acknowledgement, in the end.
When your book is released could you please announce it on this thread so everyone who read your Three Acts will get the announcement? (If I get the news quickly enough I can hopefully get your book under the Christmas tree for me. :)
Your grant-writer's bible post sparked my imagination. My volunteer involvement with my chosen charity is confined to core-business hours (this isn't flexible). I'd love to continue this role but in the next half year or so I'm going to need to seek paid work (and, not being FI, the paid work will get first dibs on my time). I'm wondering if grant writing for them on some kind of contingency/commission basis could help me continue to volunteer in my current role while also earning income.
My first instinct would be to see what information I could find online about volunteer and paid grant writing, try to find some experienced people to speak to about it, find out what's out there that's applicable to this charity and what they do so far in this realm, then put together a proposal to pitch if I think I could add value and be successful at this. Is there a recommended way I should go about looking into this, instead?
If you accept a commission for writing grants, make sure it's for a charity with which you don't already have a relationship that involves money. They can't be employing you or a family member in any capacity. Also, you and your immediate family can't be on the Board or in any decision making capacity unless there's a well understood way of recusing them from making any decisions about your compensation. Otherwise you're going to walk into a huge conflict of interest. You don't need the drama.
Try writing some grant applications on a volunteer basis first to establish your credibility. Then you can leverage your success by offering your talents to other organizations.
In fairness, I have to tell you that I don't recommend hiring a professional grant writer to any charity that can't afford to pay their commission out of cash flow. Also, most small and mid-sized charities don't understand that grants are generally for program expansion or special activities as opposed to for ongoing business operations.
+1 to all of this, though I'd thought Okits was looking to hire rather than to be hired.
My intention was to show where the ethical paths to that particular type of employment are.
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Thank you Rural and TGS!
I have no financial ties to the charity I'm associated with now. I do a few hours a week of volunteer work for them and a related organization. My family has been a beneficiary of their programs in the past (not direct financial giving, more like "we'll pay for the coffee and doughnuts at your support group" kind of thing). I think there are a few similar charities in my city, so establishing some success on a volunteer basis may be a pathway to being hired elsewhere in the future.
My first hurdle is to carve out a few hours of free time and mental focus to devote to this idea (we have a baby and a toddler, so I may suck because I find free time + mental focus to be hard to achieve right now, but, well, I find it hard right now. :) TGS - I will be sure to emphasize new programming or special activities when I pitch this.
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All right, you hardcore trainwreck-watching tightwads. I've got some special holiday cheer for you. You wanted a book, you bitched and complained about not having one, and so now there's a book. IT'S ALL YOUR FUCKING FAULT.
I meant that in the nicest possible way. The non-profit sector really does need a wake-up call and a few facepunches. Plus, who doesn't like to point and giggle at stupidity?
Those of you who sent me review comments should have a copy of the entire manuscript in your inbox. Everyone else will have to go here:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/691412 (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/691412)
The book is in pre-release and will be available for purchase New Year's Eve. Until then, you can download the first 15% for free and check out all the offensive ways I criticize people for doing stupid things in the non-profit sector. The really juicy bits about social capital, grant proposal writing, and things I think people will actually pay to read are later in the book.
After New Year's Eve the book will be showing up on Barnes and Noble, Indigo, and several other online retailers. Not Amazon, though, because I'm having a bit of a tantrum related to their file upload and conversion process. For those of you who want to buy, I've got a slight preference if you buy it off Smashwords: I get a bigger cut of the sale price.
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As one of the reviewers, I would like to say that this book is freakin' awesome. Grim's writing style is blunt, simple and no-nonsense, very similar to the posts on this forum. The nuts and bolts of running a successful group are explained in clear steps from the ground up.
This book is a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to run or participate in a community group. You will be required to confront the shortcomings of your group's management in a clear-sighted manner, with chapters covering things like 'yes, you do have to follow the law, even if you're doing good' and 'yes, you are required to keep records'.
As a bonus, it made me feel much better about my slightly moribund community group. We're technology-challenged and change-shy but we're not deluded or criminal, and apparently that's enough to put us above average.
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Sweet! Heading over to the link to buy! I had my first adventure with the nonprofit world the last couple of years, and I'm both horrified and thoroughly burned, and yet still fascinated by the potential if it were done right! TGS, you are brilliant and practical and straight up. Thank you, and Happy Freaking New Year!
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Looking forward to purchasing two copies: one for myself and one as a gift for a friend.
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I was honoured to be a reviewer and I can attest that the book is a real tour-de-force.
This book should be required reading for anyone involved in non-profits.
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I'll be getting one for a coworker. Is this an ebook, or physical?
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Thanks, Grim!
My interest in the inner workings jumped up this year, when I was fired last January from a local non-profit organization board, fired for wanting to actually do something to achieve results! Any results other than endless meetings and raising money.
Your book is fabulous! A huge dose of flavour to balance the fat and fluff that goes on in the non-profit sector.
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Wow. Just wow.
Obviously, no one could make this kind of stuff up. WOW. But definitely write a book, about something, anything, made-up or not - because your writing style ROCKS!!
+1, would love to read anything additional you wish to write.
+1, Act 2 was even better than the first! You rock OP
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Thanks, everyone!
This is an eBook, so it's not available in physical format at this point, and might not ever be: I'm told eBooks outsell paper by at least 3 to 1 especially in nonfiction. Smashwords has a mechanism for giving an eBook as a gift to somebody else. (I haven't tested the gift feature yet; if someone does, will they PM me and let me know how it went?)
15% of it the book is free and available for download as a sample at Smashwords and elsewhere. The pricing at Barnes and Noble and elsewhere is about on par with what Smashwords charges. However, you guys are a bunch of hardcore tightwads and I wouldn't be doing right by you if I didn't point out ways for you to get the whole book more cheaply, or even free, while still making sure I get paid myself.
If you subscribe to Scribd, my book is one of many in their catalogue so you should be able to download and read it with no additional charge beyond what you pay for the Scribd service.
Your public library most likely subscribes to one of three eBook services that does business with Smashwords. If you request the eBook there (the ISBN number is 9781370402847) you may view it for free yourself while your library purches a copy that others may use when you're done with it. There will be some kind of Digital Rights Management to enforce a time limit on borrowing a book but so far as I know libraries permit repeated checkouts.
The advantage of buying the Smashwords version is that there's no DRM and you can use it on whatever platforms you wish. If you have difficulty with the images due to conflicts with your reader, the file type, or whatever, you can download a different format and also have access to any updates.
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Oh wow YES. So looking forward to reading this. I'm heavily involved with one non-profit and my husband is with another. Neither are actively mismanaged but both are probably not fulfilling their potential for results/efficiency. Wonder how I can persuade others to read it without offending them...
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If you subscribe to Scribd, my book is one of many in their catalogue so you should be able to download and read it with no additional charge beyond what you pay for the Scribd service.
The first month of Scribd is free. If we sign up, read the book, and de-activate prior to getting charged anything, do you still get paid?
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If you subscribe to Scribd, my book is one of many in their catalogue so you should be able to download and read it with no additional charge beyond what you pay for the Scribd service.
The first month of Scribd is free. If we sign up, read the book, and de-activate prior to getting charged anything, do you still get paid?
Yes. It's reading past a particular threshold (I think it's 35%-ish) that triggers the "buy".
Meanwhile, you win the Internet for figuring out a cool freebie.
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If you subscribe to Scribd, my book is one of many in their catalogue so you should be able to download and read it with no additional charge beyond what you pay for the Scribd service.
The first month of Scribd is free. If we sign up, read the book, and de-activate prior to getting charged anything, do you still get paid?
Yes. It's reading past a particular threshold (I think it's 35%-ish) that triggers the "buy".
Meanwhile, you win the Internet for figuring out a cool freebie.
Ethical tightwad-ery is a skill I'm glad to share. :)
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I finally got the upload utility to work at Amazon's KDP. It turns out the problem was with my browser.
So, Sustainable Non-Profit Management is now available in electronic form on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, and a bunch of other online retailers.
OK, I'm done shilling for now.
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I finally got the upload utility to work at Amazon's KDP. It turns out the problem was with my browser.
So, Sustainable Non-Profit Management is now available in electronic form on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, and a bunch of other online retailers.
OK, I'm done shilling for now.
A shilling that got you a sale, since I'm running out of things to read on my kindle.
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So, here's another tale of non-profit failure that didn't make it into the book. You guys deserve something extra for your patience.
The Great Food Fight
My mother was always involved with various school parent-teacher associations. The PTA in Alberta public and separate schools at the time did more than just raise money for school activities. They used parent labor to subsidize costs of education. For example, they'd host used book sales where kids could get their take-home textbooks at or below cost, and they sold on consignment for only a small percentage to maximize the amount families could get out of the books. The percentage they collected went to subsidize the cost of loaner books so that even the poorest kids had access. It was a useful service that benefited everyone.
Among these labor-based service activities was a cafeteria initiative. Most junior and senior high school students brought a lunch, but the cafeteria included a food preparation and service area. The PTA would buy fruit, carrots, sandwich fixings, and milk and juice boxes in bulk quantities. Every day a different group of parents would get together and slice the cheese, make and wrap the sandwiches, and label everything. It was a clean, easy operation. Everyone wore gloves and the sandwiches were kept in the fridge until they were needed.
These were tasty, well-stuffed sandwiches made with the best ingredients. The parents didn't stint when piling on the corned beef or the turkey breast. The cheese was real cheddar, the bread was rye or good durum wheat, and the condiments were fresh. Nobody was afraid to put on an extra slice of pickle or to slather on the peanut butter and jelly. If there was a kid who had allergies all it took was a word to a parent who could make up a custom sandwich on the spot if needed. The parents knew it was their kids they were feeding, so they made up the food exactly as if they were at home. Sometimes, for special occasions, homemade cookies were available.
The food was bought in bulk and sold at just above cost, so it was possible for a kid to eat very well and have a fresh sandwich, a piece of fruit, some carrot sticks and either milk or juice for about $2 in today's dollars. No candy or junk food was offered. But if a child who had forgotten his or her lunch (or who was in a bad situation at home and wasn't being fed), that child went to the office and got a slip of paper from the school counselor or the office secretary to hand to the cashier. The savings came from two things: the fact the food was bought in bulk, and the fact the labor was free.
When the lunch bell rang, the parents pulled the trays of sandwiches out of the fridge and the teens converged on the lunchroom. Sometimes they had to eat in shifts, because the junior high school and high school shared the same lunchroom. I do believe the parents who were able to work the lunchroom liked having a glimpse of their child during the school day. Most of the parents who volunteered were either of the stay-at-home persuasion or shift workers who came in on a day off. This improved lunchroom discipline overall, and it also helped to feed a group of kids who wouldn't otherwise have had access to lunch. Furthermore, since several parents were making the sandwiches it offered kids a chance to try something different.
Naturally, something that works this well and runs this smoothly will eventually be fucked with by a bureaucrat. I heard the story secondhand from my mother. Actually, I was eavesdropping as she dished the details to one of her best friends. She later shared the story with me, minus the expletives, but I've filled them back in to the extent I am able.
Along came the school board, who insisted that the work be "supervised" by a properly trained union employee with appropriate credentials in cafeteria management. The fact that the volunteer group included a professional cook and a restaurant owner already didn't count: it had to be a member of the union. Or else. Because quality.
"Fine," said the parents. "Go on and send him or her. We might be able to learn something."
Well... there was a problem. You see, the school board wasn't going to pay for that employee to be there. The money to pay his or her wage, plus taxes and benefits, had to come out of the food being sold in the cafeteria. So the PTA called an emergency meeting.
"I have a solution," said the school board administrator, who produced a spreadsheet. "Just start buying basic white bread instead of premium bread, switch to processed cheese instead of cheddar and Swiss, take the jelly out and go easy on the peanut butter, and lay off the pickles, lettuce, and tomato. Swap out the turkey breast and corned beef with bologna. The kids won't know the difference. And, have you considered getting day-old bread?"
The parents conferred. Someone ran the numbers and realized her son wouldn't be able to get the extra protein he needed as a growing student athlete who worked out twice a day. Another woman spoke up and asked whether anyone really knew what went into processed cheese. Nobody did. It was pretty obvious that the kids would indeed notice the difference, if they were suddenly asked to eat a bunch of crap their parents wouldn't consider buying or serving at home.
"We could manage it," said one of the PTA volunteers with an accounting background, "if we raise prices by a factor of two to three. Basically we'd be starting a business."
"A business lots of these kids can't afford to buy from," said another parent. "And what are the kids with no lunches going to do?
"They're asking us to work for free in order to pay the wage of someone who's not going to do anything except sit around. Who do they think they are: the government?" This man got a laugh, but then someone pointed out that the school board technically is government.
When the dust settled, nobody had been run through the cheese slicer or stuffed in a cupboard but one thing was certain. There was absolutely no way to accommodate the bureaucrat's demands without sacrificing quality, price, or both. So the parents voted unanimously to end the school sandwich operation and let the school board do whatever it wanted, without their involvement.
Shortly afterwards, the school boards started to contract out the high school cafeterias out to a catering company that started selling burgers, fries, soft drinks, candy, chips, and not much else at prices comparable with any fast food joint. Not much money can be made that way, so turnover was frequent. The kids got greasy slop to eat and continued to bring their lunches from home so they'd have something edible. A contractor made money at least for a while, the school board got to check a box, the union collected their dues, nutrition took a nose dive, and the poorer kids went hungry again.
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TGS you've delivered again. Thank you for the describing a cluster fuck of epic proportions. Or as I prefer, the 'jerking off the elephant while standing on your dick".
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And why did this not make the book?
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the poorer kids went hungry again.
Oh, fucking awful. Facepunch to the bureaucrat.
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TGS you've delivered again. Thank you for the describing a cluster fuck of epic proportions. Or as I prefer, the 'jerking off the elephant while standing on your dick".
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And why did this not make the book?
There wasn't room.
By the time I finished cutting, the book was still just under 130,000 words plus charts, diagrams, and tables. That's enormous for a nonfiction trade paperback. Those generally max out around 85,000 words and E-books are supposed to be half that. I narrowed the focus of the book as much as I could, while still having a book that can stand on its own merits and appeal to a general audience. Basically, I cloned my perspective and skill set so that anyone who reads the book, assuming they can do 6th or 7th grade math, will be able to do what I do. There's just no way to get all the business and law concepts across, along with basic cash flow, fundraising, and program management, in less space.
I chopped out enough social warfare theory to fill three good-sized eBooks, and all the longer stories and examples got cut. I kept very few personal stories, and only the ones that showed somebody successfully solving a problem or experiencing the predictable consequences of stupid behavior. The parents in the PTA story were doing everything right, they just got caught in an impossible situation because of a stupid decision by a government official.
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Hmmmm....school union thugs fuck over
people children for their own purposes. Check.
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Posting to follow - epic stories, don't want to miss if another one pops up!
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I'm a bilingual person (Spanish/English - working on becoming trilingual by learning Portuguese) and although speaking/reading/writing two languages is extremely rewarding, I would pay a small fortune to have the total control you posses of the English language.
Your writing skills are on par with those of my favorite writers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. (Yes, they are Spanish writers but it translates the same). Their mastery of words and their utilization, which turns them into amazing mental visuals, is phenomenal and so is yours.
I can't thank you enough for being a member of this forum and sharing your anecdotes. After I'm done with my writing I'll be sure to start reading your book. I'll be downloading it from Amazon tomorrow.
Did I see correctly that you have a second book coming out at the end of the month?
Thank you for your kind words.
Yes, you're correct about the upcoming book. Now that I know how to e-publish, I'm combing through my hard drive looking for almost-complete ideas. This next one is about how and why toxic people are so consistently protected and treated well by the people they abuse. Following that will be an introduction to social warfare.
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I'm a bilingual person (Spanish/English - working on becoming trilingual by learning Portuguese) and although speaking/reading/writing two languages is extremely rewarding, I would pay a small fortune to have the total control you posses of the English language.
Your writing skills are on par with those of my favorite writers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. (Yes, they are Spanish writers but it translates the same). Their mastery of words and their utilization, which turns them into amazing mental visuals, is phenomenal and so is yours.
I can't thank you enough for being a member of this forum and sharing your anecdotes. After I'm done with my writing I'll be sure to start reading your book. I'll be downloading it from Amazon tomorrow.
Did I see correctly that you have a second book coming out at the end of the month?
Thank you for your kind words.
Yes, you're correct about the upcoming book. Now that I know how to e-publish, I'm combing through my hard drive looking for almost-complete ideas. This next one is about how and why toxic people are so consistently protected and treated well by the people they abuse. Following that will be an introduction to social warfare.
Yes please. Both please. :D
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Looking forward to the one on social warfare ...
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Enjoyed your writing, as always!
My brother-in-law is a school psychologist for several school districts in one of our poorer states. None of the districts can afford to hire someone like him all by themselves, so he goes from one to another much like the old circuit court judges used to do.
The PTA decided to raise money to buy a riding lawnmower for one of the long-term janitors to use at work. They held car washes, bake sales, etc. for several years to get enough to do this. (Did I mention it's a poor area?)
They had a ceremony and delivered the new riding lawnmower.
The fellow then filed a grievance with the union for more pay because now he was an "Equipment Operator" instead of just a janitor.
The school took the lawnmower away and sold it.
And the ungrateful bastard got to mow the school grounds from then on with the old push mower he had been using for years before this episode.
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After reading the three acts plus food fight, I cannot wait to read a whole book about social warfare from TGS. (Also posting to follow so I'll hear whenever that one comes out.)
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Fourth, it’s possible to raise money by writing grants (sometimes) or soliciting individual donations, but these should always be for special projects or capital equipment as opposed to administrative or regular program expenses. Grant money is more addictive than heroin, for a non-profit.
I used to be on the grantor/funder side of the non-profit world. Non-Profits think that grant money is a free giveaway. OOOOH we got the grant!!! But if you GET a million dollar grant, the non-profit is supposed to do a million dollar's worth of WORK. I can't tell you how many times I have had to hold back funds or get funds back from non-profits who did next to nothing with precious grant resources.
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Fourth, it’s possible to raise money by writing grants (sometimes) or soliciting individual donations, but these should always be for special projects or capital equipment as opposed to administrative or regular program expenses. Grant money is more addictive than heroin, for a non-profit.
I used to be on the grantor/funder side of the non-profit world. Non-Profits think that grant money is a free giveaway. OOOOH we got the grant!!! But if you GET a million dollar grant, the non-profit is supposed to do a million dollar's worth of WORK. I can't tell you how many times I have had to hold back funds or get funds back from non-profits who did next to nothing with precious grant resources.
You were smart to dole out the money in stages and expect the recipients to hit reasonable milestones. Oversight is critical especially with the small non-profits.
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TGS your writing is outstanding! Am off to buy the E-book :)
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Bumping from oblivion since I read this sometime in my long lurkerdom and just rediscovered it. It's great writing which more people should see.
GrimSqueaker, I might give your other book a look as well. I've been on the periphery of some very negative social groups of that sort, I think, though fortunately not targeted in any effective way so far, which I believe is, as much as anything, because my social life was never fully committed to them.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
This says much more concisely what I've known as Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: "In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."