New 501c3? 3 Things to Do Before Seeking Grants.

New and small organizations often come to me for help writing grants. I ask them a few questions and then often have to tell them that they aren’t necessarily ready for grants. When they ask me why, it’s usually due to some combination of the following:

1. Programs

You can’t just have a mission; your org needs programs because institutional funders like a target for their giving. They won’t simply fund an idea, because they are, by nature, conservative and will want to see a program with a basic track record and demonstrable, long-term upside that they can help you expand, sustain, and improve. You probably have ideas for a program or two, but are concerned that you need the money first. As you start to pick up donors, you can expand your program to what you envisioned. But at first, it’s a great idea to design early incarnations of your programs to run with little money and…

2. Volunteers

Volunteers are your org’s passionate army. They can help you do any number of things: help with your program implementation, marketing, clerical work, and more. And guess what? People that care enough to volunteer for your org or program are the ones that might eventually decide to donate. And as quick as that, you’ll be much more attractive to institutional funders, since they like to see support for your work in as many different ways as possible. Try one of these volunteer matchmaking sites to find people passionate about your mission. Or find a big local corporation with volunteer programs. People out there want to help you. You have to let them know that you’re there!

3. A Board That Gives

If your board doesn’t give to your organization – even just a little – that will be a red flag to funders. After all, if your board isn’t behind your programs financially, why should a foundation take a chance? And remember – there are many ways for your board to contribute: in-kind legal and financial services, finding other like-minded donors, use of spare office space… just make sure that it’s all demonstrable and quantifiable for a grant application.

Bonus: Well-organized Financial Information

You need to have projected overall and project/program budgets and then track reality throughout your fiscal year so you know how you’re doing. You don’t need an audit, but make sure that you can show budgets and revenue versus expenses in a coherent, accountant-approved way. If your non-profit is well-organized financially, it will go a long way towards signaling that you’re a good bet for funding.

Grant Proposal Rejected? 3 Reasons It May Not Be Your Fault.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this space writing about fiction writing and editing, but I do more than that. I act as a nonprofit and grants consultant to small or start-up nonprofits. I also work part-time at a private foundation, so I have a good bead on the general thought processes grantors go through when they get your material. In grant writing, rejection is a part of the process. But the reasons why your application is rejected may not be so straight forward. Or even your fault.

The rejection may have little to do with how well the proposal is written or the merit of the proposal. Even a good fit can get rejected. Often, there are factors that are simply beyond your control as an applicant. Here’s a few things that I’ve seen happen behind the scenes that might sink your otherwise fantastic proposal.

1. No more money

Even if you submit by the deadline, you never really know what the financial situation is behind the scenes. Despite the great care that foundations take in projecting dispersible funds, and planning the amounts to give away each cycle, some boards or panels might suddenly get behind a larger-than-usual gift that eats up available cash. A Pulitzer-level grant narrative can’t do a thing about that.

2. Board or panel doesn’t get behind it

If the grant you applied for is a small one decided by a program person, this wouldn’t necessarily apply. But most grants are awarded by panels of program officers or more often the board of the foundation itself. Every grant application needs a champion, and if no one on the panel makes a case for you, then it’s going to be much easier for them to reject the proposal, even if it’s meritorious.

3. Too much good competition in the cycle

Some funders grant money on a rolling basis, but many – including the one I work for – have between 1 and 4 cycles per year. If you apply in a crowded cycle, you may get rejected regardless of merit. Hopefully, you’ll get feedback from the funder letting you know about this or inviting you to resubmit at another time, but unfortunately, that isn’t always the case.

These are a few of the realities of of grant writing. The key is to not give up. Build your programs and track record, do your research, find the right fits, and try to develop relationships with the funders that are able and willing to talk with you on the phone (not all of them can or do, though). A good grants program is a marathon, not a sprint.

Ever been rejected for a reason out of your control? Did you get feedback? Tell us about it in the comments!

Fair Nonprofit Staff Compensation: Justifiable? Of course.

Update: please be sure to read the Annenberg Foundation’s amazing report on fundraising: Underdeveloped.

Original post:

The wonderful Annenberg Alchemy program has a blog, and recently they asked a question that’s been bugging me for all my years in the nonprofit sector: Justifying Compensation – Are We Worth It?

Read the short blog and questions, but the answer is simple: yes. Nonprofit staff are worth compensating at a rate comparable to the private sector. If an organization hires talent and bestows responsibility, that talent and responsibility should be fairly compensated. Staffs of established nonprofits are fully professionalized. These are not volunteers; they are professionals with deep knowledge and skill-sets. Justifying compensation to boards that often value not only lower overhead/administration costs but also directing money almost exclusively to programs can be difficult, but it shouldn’t be more difficult than educating them about new program directions and the like. Too often, it’s easy for some boards to lean on the “passion” of the staff to do work that offers public good. That passion too often justifies lower salaries and causes a sense of martyrdom on staffs, who are not only underpaid, but often work even longer hours to show that they have ‘passion’ for the work. (Of course we have passion. Why would that preclude fair compensation?) The burnout rate is really high. I read or heard somewhere that the average life-span of a development officer is 18 months. (And here’s an article with similar observations.) Why? Fundraising goals are usually too high. Also, development staff are woefully underpaid for the responsibility they have. During the economic downturn, I heard so many stories from development people who told me: “If I can’t get this grant or land a big gift, people are going to lose their jobs.” That’s too much.

As a viable industry sector that adds billions of dollars to the economy, if we can’t compensate our talent properly, then we will continue to lose that talent to the private sector. And rightly so.

How can this be fixed?

1. Educate the board. So many of them are often successful business people. If they like they way things are going, tell them that the reason is the staff and that compensation should be part of that. Find board members willing to give to general operations. The big foundations that give general operating support (thank you!) are spread thin and competition for those dollars is fierce.
2. Set reasonable fundraising goals. Rather than padding the budget lines with outlandish figures, make better decisions. Sometimes, though boards are loathe to see it happen, programs need to be cut. Make sure that cuts are equitable across programs, overhead, staff. Too often ‘lean years’ just cost people jobs and make it even harder for a nonprofit to recover later. And are ‘lean years’ the fault of the development associate? Of course not.

Look, there are no easy answers here. So much depends on the age, budget size, and board make-up of the nonprofit in question. Every organization is in a different place and facing different challenges. But the sector is going to continue to struggle with talent retention until that talent is valued, not only ideologically, but financially as well.

How The Goonies made me the writer/reader I am today. (Sequel in the works!)

This is fantastic news. My inner 11-year-old just died from joy. I don’t even care if the sequel is the worst thing ever. The Goonies is very probably the reason that I love to work with words. “But it’s a movie!” you say. That’s exactly right. It happened like this.

Like most boys that were of a certain age when the original came out, I loved it. Plus, my name is Mike, and I had asthma when I was that age, so no leap was necessary for me to identify with the protagonist. The group of kids were all familiar, too: they talked like me and my friends, irritated each other the same way, and had each others’ backs when it came down to it. In short, it blinded me with awesome.

But I wanted more.

My mother was gracious enough to get me James Kahn’s novelization of the movie, and though I had not been much of a reader to that point, I gleefully tore into it. When I was done, I immediately went back to page one and read it again. Then again. All told, I read the book fifteen times in a row!

After that, I discovered fantasy and sci-fi and never looked back. I’m fairly certain that I’m still catching up on the sleep I lost in high school and college from staying up too late to read.

So thanks, Richard Donner and Steven Spielberg for launching my love of books, reading, and stroytelling.

(And if Goonies 2 weren’t enough, word comes that Star Wars 7 just started shooting. My childhood returns!)

What got you into reading and writing? Let me know in the comments.

Looking Askance at the “How I Met Your Mother” Finale (Spoilers!)

(Big spoilers ahoy! For the whole series! And it won’t make sense to you if you haven’t seen the show!)

So… that turned out to be pretty divisive.

A lot of television series that go on for too many seasons run into the problem of a canon that grew randomly limiting the choices that can be made. This is what doomed the final season and finale of How I Met Your Mother.

HIMYM is a great show, and is one of my favorite sit-coms due to its daring format and great cast. Throughout its run, the creators and their writing staff really tried a lot of bold things and succeeded with them more often than not. Since the story is framed as a flashback, they were able to do a lot with that idea, including some seriously great non-linear storytelling within episodes. The actors’ chemistry worked. Neil Patrick Harris swaggered across the screen like a randy god of comedy. They managed a balance of hilarity with occasionally poignancy that worked very well most of the time. But the finale…

I can see why some people liked it. If you were a Ted/Robin ‘shipper, then you probably found it satisfying. I respected the choices that were made for the finale and even the final season, but feel that the showrunners painted themselves into a corner in several respects.

In the early seasons, Robin and Ted’s on-again-off-again romance did one of two things to viewers: made them want the two to get together, or made them really, really not want them to get together. I’ve been in the latter camp since about season 3 or 4 (but definitely by the time that Robin and Barney dated). I never thought the match made sense after a certain point. At first, Ted and Robin created balance for each other. Their early breakups were about people in their late 20s being unsure of themselves. But later attempts a reconciliation smacked of settling, and it felt like that to me even at the final scene of the series. But look, the writers had to get Ted/Robin back together or they would have created a deeply tragic figure out of Robin due to her extreme loneliness. Her marriage to Barney didn’t work, she was unable to have children, and she had become even more of a cat lady (but with dogs) than she was originally.

The Robin problem lead to something even weirder, particularly in the context of a sit-com about meeting the mother of your children: they had to kill off the mother.

Who we just met! And really liked!

Rather than the interminable lead-up to Robin and Barney’s doomed marriage, I would have liked to see a final season that started out with meeting the mother, followed by some great episodes integrating her into the group, and then she comes out at the end and finally tells Ted to stops telling their kids all of his crazy stories. But the writers went the way of something more literary – too literary for the sit-com format, I think. And the whole thing just didn’t feel right. Why? Because in hindsight the character of Robin ultimately drove the writing of the later seasons and the finale more than the mother and Ted did. The show if not called “How I Met Your ‘Aunt’ Robin”. The scene that stood out the most to me in the finale was the one between Robin and Lily in the empty apartment. The tragic nature of Robin’s situation overpowered anything the writers did to try to moderate it.

Once the writers painted themselves in to that corner, they just had to build a door where they could based on the canon they’d created. It’s just too bad a comedy of this quality throughout most of the run turned out to be so, so bittersweet.

 

Post NaNoWriMo Editing Sale!

Please note: this sale has ended!

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Hello to all you NaNoWriMo participants and winners! I hope that you achieved your goal for the month… whether that was to churn out 50,000 words of Nobel Laureate-worthy prose or just to get back in the swing of creative writing. Me? I didn’t get the word count, but I did get some work done on my work-in-progress, so go me!

Now that we’re all done celebrating our writerly prowess and awake again after our turkey comas, it’s time to… keep writing more! And making sure it’s the best it can be.

I promised a sale on editing services in honor of NaNo (you don’t have to be a winner), so here it is: 25% off of ALL services, big and small. Check my rates here. For work that I don’t charge a per-word rate for, we’ll go through a friendly negotiation and then take 25% off of that.

That’s not all. If you want to sample my services and see what it’s like to work with me in the easiest way, I’ve got deal the for you. Send me up to 5,000 words, and I’ll give it an edit and brief commentary for $35 flat. Simple! (In case you were wondering, that’s $0.007/word!)

“You’re crazy!!” you are probably saying. Nope. Just excited to see what everyone is working on. So contact me today so we can start talking about making your masterpiece even better. It’s going to be fun.

(Offer ends January 31, 2014. Resolve to take advantage of this deal before it’s gone! (See what I did there?!) And again – you don’t have to have had anything to do with NaNoWriMo this year to take advantage of this offer.)

NaNoWriMo: Last Day. You Can Do It.

In 2010, I did NaNo, but I also had a big Thanksgiving trip planned to California’s Central coast. It was an amazing trip, but needless to say, I barely got any writing done.

Before I left I had about 39,000 words. When I returned, I had about 40,000. I was pretty pleased with that, truth be told, but I wanted more. I really wanted to finish.

So I did. On the 30th, I had nothing planned, so…

Eight hours.

10,000 words.

Boom.

It was a great feeling to get that done.

You can too.

Once more into the breach!

Literacy and Music: An IndieGoGo Call to Arms!

Taking a break from NaNoWriMo posts to tell you all about a fabulous and important project over at IndieGoGo!

A few years back I was Curriculum Manager at LA County’s Music Center Education department and had a chance to work with Beth Sussman, a Juilliard-trained classical pianist and teaching artist. She’s done a lot of real, in-classroom work and research on literacy and how music and rhythm can improve reading skills. She wanted to figure out a way to make that learning fun and accessible to all. And so she came up with:

Joppity.

Joppity is awesome. Alongside her husband – Emmy nominated writer/director Bill Freiberger of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Sonic Boom, The Simpsons etc. – and actor Josh Sussman (no relation!) of Glee and Wizards of Waverly place – Beth has created a delightfully animated, internet-based tool that will help kids learn to read faster and easier.

And it will be available for free.

As writers, we need readers! And we need good readers – the sooner, the better. If you can spare $5 or more dollars for something like that, please head over to the link above and see what it’s all about. Then give. And spread the word! They are in the home stretch and need your help.

Thank you!

NaNoWriMo: Halfway home. Stuck yet??

Hi, everybody! Sorry I dropped off the map. Between NaNo and the nice little boost of editing and non-profit work you’ve been sending my way (many thanks to you all!), I’ve been busy. I suppose that as soon as I committed to NaNo and started running the sale on non-profit consulting, that work would ensue… but I have room for more! Please contact me today to get some great deals on editing. I am super-fun to work with, if I do say so myself. And as I recall, I promised you all a NaNo editing special. That’s still coming, I just needed to put it off a bit. Look for it around Thanksgiving.

End PSA. On with the post!

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Today is the end of the first half of NaNoWriMo. Dun-dun-dunnnnn!

Hit the doldrums yet?! I hope not. But if you did, here’s a few more ideas to get you going again:

• Write from a different/new character viewpoint. New blood = new story.
• Do something random. Add a flock of menacing ducks. An angry bank teller. Have an alien invasion at the mall. Make all the zombies start getting better. You know… weird stuff.
• Talk out your story situation with friends or family. Have them give you random ideas for new conflict and then draw one from a hat.

Or maybe this is you: “I missed three days, and am waaaay behind. Help!”

• Don’t panic.
• Worry even less about typos.
• Worry even less about the story making sense – as long as you can keep it going in a good/fun direction.
• Make sure that you end your writing day in the middle of a scene rather than completing it. That way you know what you are going to write right off the bat next session, and it will be easier to get going.
• Remove yourself from your normal situations. For example: Use an app that counts words, but isn’t one that you typically use or go outside or to a cafe to write.
• Set up a reward system. Make it good. What are your favorite little things in life? Do that for yourself.
• A couple of cheapies, but goodies: stretch descriptions and conversations. Make characters wax eloquent about otherwise boring details in a fun way. Describe every hair on the back of the murderous cat that is the villain of your sci-fi, alternate history.

Whatever you have to do to get that word count! And that brings up the question: what are YOU doing to keep yourself going? Share in the comments! You might help someone achieve their NaNo goal today.

Keep going, everybody! You can do it! Have a blast.

I’ll try to post sooner rather than later, but I’ll not make any specific promises. And please send me some more work! 🙂

It’s Four Days into NaNo. How are you doing??

Hopefully better than me! I started day one like gangbusters, but fell off on day two. Too much outside non-NaNo life intruded. This is all too typical of NaNo. Day two can be tough: the shine is already off and many folks think: Wait. I have to do all that AGAIN?

Yes, you do, but it’ll be alright. Here’s some things that you may be telling yourself already and some tips to get through them. Because you’re so very wrong about what you’re telling yourself!

I’ll never be able stick to it.

Don’t say that. Of course you will! Some days will be better than others and some days will be… awful. Just know that tomorrow is another day. And make sure that you have a good support system in place so people can kindly shame you into continuing when you think you’re ready to give up. Laugh at yourself. Writing a novel in one month is crazy funny. And don’t forget: crazy fun. It’s supposed to be fun!

I’m Terrified of the Blank Page.

Don’t worry. No one is judging you, aside from – most likely – you. Put that voice aside and get creating. You don’t have to be William Faulkner or Stephen King right off the bat. Just be you. The world already has plenty of Faulkner and King; it needs more YOU. Put something on the page or screen and then put something else. Don’t stop. Just write. BICHOK it. That’s “Butt In Chair; Hands On Keyboard.” Go. No judgement allowed.

I’m still stuck. Any more advice, brainiac?

• If you’re going to worry about quality anyway, try this: deliberately set out to write something you hate or is bad, as long as it’s within the context of your story. The trick is this: write the best nonsensical crap you can. Pulitzer crap. Once the juices are flowing again, you’ll just write your story.
• Try writing about the noises you hear outside or in the office wherever you are.
• Type what you’re feeling about being anxious and then put it into a character. Make sure that they overcome some part of their issues before the end of the scene.
• Ask a random passersby for an idea on setting or character quirk or bad-guy doomsday scenario. Then use it verbatim. With permission.

Whew. I’m going to take my own advice here and get back to work!

What are you doing to get through your early NaNo roadblocks? Or what are you doing that’s allowed you to avoid them? Please share in the comments!