Odious as marketing and branding jargon is, with its hideous bluntness and odd verbing, they do cut it to the quick for you.  The bottom line:  there is a trillion dollar a year art to Making the Ask.   If you are a beggar it is essential to master this art.  Truly, it is the difference between survival and the grim alternative.  90% of new ventures fail, regardless of how bold, interesting, useful or passionately held their animating idea may be.  90% of all new businesses of all kinds go under, for failure to skillfully monetize a dream by attracting enough customers.  In the case of nonprofits, early and immediate death is a direct result of failing to master the art of Making The Ask.

I have to confess, I am among the last to know how to Make the Ask.  Up here on the high road we don’t really make the ask, we hold fast to our ideals and, well, we might as well pray as believe we can make the ask.  Prayer requires a faith not all of us up here possess.  Without faith, is anything more ridiculous than prayer?

“Everything is an exchange of value,” says a well-dressed marketing/branding type who cornered Sekhnet at a party before he was skillfully spatulaed off her and on to me by the adroit, self-preserving Sekhnet.  “It’s not necessarily an exchange of money, but you have to give value to people and they will give it back to you.”  Soon he was rolling, the current verb of choice, “leverage”, was appearing in virtually every clause; you have to leverage the value of the idea you already have to create more leverage for leveraging exchanged value to the people you would have leverage your levers for you.

“It’s a fantastic idea,” he said again brightly, “I think you could really leverage it.” The brainstorming continued, all around us the glittering marketing generalities, platitudes and talking points swirled.  In the background, in huge, ominous letters shimmered one phrase.   

Making The Ask.  An organization needs an idea person, the one who develops the program, and an outside person, the fundraising face of the organization, a business savvy bottom-liner, turning the organization’s profile this way, and then that way, according to the needs of the particular Ask. Confusingly, that second person, the one who drums up business and funding, is called the Director of Development.  The one who has the idea and actually develops the program, the creative person, is called the creative person.  That position, and all hypothetical positions, are eliminated, along with the entire wonderful and needed idea, unless the Director of Development is able to get financial legs under the idea and march it forward, monetized and ready to do business in the real world.

The real world is famously strict.  A person may have half a notion that your idea might be good, and they are writing charitable donation checks anyway this time of year.  If they are a betting person they might feel like wagering a few bucks on your tax-deductible project, but where is the Donate Now button on your website?  Now you are asking them not only to copy down an address but to find an envelope and a stamp, write a check– oh, for fuck’s sake— back to the pile of solicitations with their check boxes and their mailers.  They’ve already sent the “perk”– a page of return address stickers, reproductions of the work of doomed kids, the promise of a mug, a bag, a hand-cranked emergency radio flashlight.

“You should have a Donate Now button on your website!” a chorus will immediately agree.  I agree.  So I make the first call.  Network for Good provides this service for thousands of nonprofits.  I talk to Lisa, she’s bright as the young woman I used to know who made her way into the middle class and beyond selling ad space.  I do the math in my head as she talks, for $600 a year I can have a Donate Now button, provided by this nonprofit who will also process the donations and deposit them into my organization’s account, for an additional 3% administrative fee.  Her follow-up email has additional incentives: she will, to close the deal, waive the $199 set-up fee and front me three months, which I will then pay, along with the fourth month, once my coffers are overflowing.

All the Donate Now buttons in the world are useless without a) a good flow of traffic to your donation page and b) a compellingly made Ask.  Crisp, concise, compelling.

I have lunch with my most active Director.  He describes another nonprofit, in the Bronx, on whose board he sits, an outfit with a budget of $16,000,000– mostly government grants. He balks at the price tag for the donate button, as I did.  He’s going to look into Pay Pal and some other ones that are probably free.  Then he tells me the Bronx nonprofit  just hired a guy, an eccentric old koot with a good track record of raising money for nonprofits.  He knows everyone and he gets face to face meetings with people who can drop large checks into the coffers, or get others to do so.  He also recruits Directors of Development and works closely with those directors.   This is the kind of guy I’m looking for, we both agree.

“How much does he charge?” I ask.

My friend laughs.  “He gets $10,000 a month.”  I laugh too, but it is very much like the laugh he apologizes for later.   

“I wasn’t laughing that your friend is losing a battle with cancer, it’s horrible,” he says, “it was that uncomfortable laugh when you don’t know what to say.”  I understood that, but I also appreciated that he’d said so, it made him even more of a mensch in my eyes.  

“Call him today,” he said, “don’t put it off.”  And he was right again.

Meantime I came to the computer just now to start wrestling again with the Ask I am trying to make crisp, clear, compelling, and as much as any of those, concise.  Everyone I know, virtually, has the money to drop a few hundred bucks for dinner from time to time, and they all do.  It is their delight to savor delicious new foods paired with the perfect wine.  Me, if I never ate in another fancy restaurant again it wouldn’t bother me.  Them, it would bother very much.

“This is what you’re doing now, instead of Making the Ask?” demands one too busy gathering and storing nuts for the winter to focus on anything, in relation to my program, but what I should be doing, instead of what I am.  That said, she’s also right.

I’m going to post the Ask in progress, maybe it will spur me to work on the cute little tart in time to send it around for solicitations during this crucial week for fundraising.

You can also, of course, both of you, go here to donate.