Author Archives: oinsketta

Making The Ask

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. 

Thirty second Drill

I’m doing this one without a clock, because, really, who gives a rat’s ass?

I can see by this freckle on the back of my hand that my time is about up.

I really do have to make that overdue appointment with the dermatologist.

I Live in a Submarine

I was thinking this as I made my way back to the sleeping hatch before.  “This is like a submarine,” I said to myself, with the stirrings of some other possibly clever lines following suit in that funny way they have, tumbling like monkeys.   I was not in the mood to so much as jot down any clever lines, so tired I was, “shoot,” I told myself, and my monkey mind, “I’ll jot that semi-clever jive down tomorrow.”  Then I turned to the compromised Lazy Boy, a sly smile creeping, “maybe….” I said, then went down the narrow hallway starboard toward the sleeping area.

Except, once I got starboard, goddamn, there was very little air in the hatch.  Fresh air, that is.  I’ll be lightheaded e’er long, I thought to myself absently, glad I wasn’t actually there, my heavy head pressing heavily against the many pillows on the pallet.  There was also a hiss, suggesting either that we were taking on water (very unlikely, I reasoned) or that steam heat was sissing up through the tenement pipes (odder still, it seemed to me).

OK, how is like a submarine?  Well, it’s fairly long, front to back, and it’s become narrow, with my dusty possessions piled aft and the length of it made narrow by things also on the other side.  The fore deck and the poop deck, well, let’s not even talk about such disgusting things at this hour,  I can easily move from the front of the U-boat to the back, and  dive and surface, blindly but with little trouble.  It’s mainly the narrowness of it and the damnable lack of a periscope– or gyroscope, for that matter, that make it so submarinelike.

“You do realize how that sounds,” says the sour-mouthed bowsin, indignant that I don’t even bother to google the proper spelling of boatswain. 

“Like the periscope in this Class D- frigate following sub, you, sir, do not even exist.  Forget about spelling your imaginary title correctly.  ‘Woof, woof,’ as a matter of fact.”

“Sure,” says the boatswain, more sourly still, “why don’t we just boat forget the whole thing.”

Seven Minute Drill

Got to keep climbing, despite the negative chant, the chorus of voices who always say you can’t (tip of the mitre to that rapper who wrote Potential back around 1991) I’d be Dr. Seuss, if I had the juice.  Less than six minutes remain to this scattered refrain, so let me, as they say, make the most of those now 300 seconds.

It focuses the brain, they say, being on the scaffold like this, though it distracts the brain too, the thought that it will all be over in, now, less than 260 seconds.

Thomas Jefferson, my main tragically hypocritical man, stole lines written by a man on the scaffold when he famously wrote that a favored few were not born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us.   He was famously wrong, of course, as he was born booted and sharp spurred, ask his terrified, bloody horse.

“This is how you want to go out?” asks, you, say.

“Absolutely not.  I want to go out with words of inspiration and gratitude for the many gifts of this wonderful life.  Sure you have a right to be sad, even bitter, but why waste time when you have less than 110 seconds before the end?  When you see that tsunami coming to wipe out the earth, right after you gasp ‘oh, shit!” it will not be anger, sadness or bitterness in your mouth.  Terror and wonder, terror and wonder, my friend.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” observed my father moments before he breathed his last.

“Nobody does,” I reassured him.  Then he did it like a champ.

Five minute drill

Hang on, let me get the timer.

Don’t know what this is, exactly, jotting notes here on a WordPress blahg.  Our oldest human need– to make ourselves known to others?   The exercise of writing is a good thing, and as James Lipton said in a recent interview– it is his happiest way to spend a day.  Outside of, he smiled to the camera, spending time with his lovely wife, of course.

I had no idea what a remarkable and brilliant man, and superb interviewer, James Lipton is, until recently watching his interviews of Dave Chappelle and Mickey Rourke.  But the clock is ticking and so, rather than trawl for the links, as I should, I commend them to you, and commend them again, recommending them, as it were.

“Hah! wordplay with only three minutes counting down?” you will ask, drawing a sword.  

“Whoa, why the sword, cousin?” I will ax in alarum, because a second ago it was wordplay and now, suddenly deploying this “s”— yow!

“‘Yow! you racsal?!!– Draw I say!” you will say, waving deadly steel.

I do love to draw, but I’m afraid, with less than two minutes left there won’t be time for that now.  Put by that sword, friend.

“‘Friend?  Knave, draw I say!”

Eyeing the clock nervously, I’m not trying to stall, mind you, but the whole point of this exercise is to keep tapping, like Bojangles, like, I don’t know what.  Why the clock?

Might as well ask God that question.  “Why the clock, God?”  And none of us know, except in this moment when I can see less than 30 seconds left, now 20, when the buzzer will ring and we will be gone, the only trace of us the mess we leave behind.

They Might Really Be Insane

I sometimes wonder about it, where the exact line is.  It’s hard to say sometimes.   A person can be fully justified, and still insane.  Oversensitive, obsessive- compulsive, “crazed”, psychotic — where the precise line is?  Fuzzy.

You can leaf through the DSM and find every one of your friends, relatives, colleagues.  We’re each the product of long-programmed reactions, prejudices, actual knowledge, fears, suspicions, notions of success and failure, collected tics.  

The actual line is not so bright, that’s all I’m saying.

 

koan

 

The Noble Toble was given the tit,

Griff fought the breast;

it was not offered to the baby.