The Shock of the Obvious

Today I went to the final session of the Carnegie Corporation/Kennedy Center Arts Management Initiative.

I found it quite fascinating, although I think many people were annoyed by this one guy who kept raising his hand to ask questions.  (Okay I admit it, it was me.)

There was a tremendous amount covered, but if you know Michael Kaiser's spiel, none of it will be shocking.  Kaiser essentially urges arts organizations to plan exciting programming way in advance (five years), market their work aggressively, build a family of fans and supporters, and repeat.  He is adamant, sometimes to the point of controversy, that arts organizations undermine themselves when they chip away at programming and marketing to save money.

But today, I realized what is special about a leader like Michael Kaiser -- or Reynold Levy or Karen Hopkins, for that matter.

In each case, these people have two special qualities, each of which is rare in its own right.

The first is fearless imagination.  

It takes courage to be imaginative.  Right after we have a bold imaginative thought (I want to be the President of the United States, I want to get Paul McCartney to play at my benefit concert, I want to launch a $10 million fundraising campaign), most of us hear a little voice in our head that says: you are crazy.  You are not the kind of person/organization to which such grand and glorious things happen.  If you tell people this idea, they will laugh at you.  If you try this you will fail and be scorned.  

But the Michael Kaisers of the world don't hear that voice.  Or maybe they hear it and ignore it.

Because they seem to be relentlessly audacious.  They are constantly surprising us with the grandiosity of their plans.  International collaborations involving hundreds of people.  Productions that cost millions and transform spaces.  

And if you inquire about the origin of the ideas, you'll find they often start with  an almost childlike enthusiasm leading to the question: why not?

But that's just the first quality.

The second quality, when combined with the first, is devastatingly powerful.

They execute relentlessly.

Most of the world's imaginative ideas are voiced over drinks and dissipate with the buzz of the alcohol.

But Michael Kaiser, as you'll know if you hear him speak (and he speaks widely -- you can listen to him here) meets with his marketing and development vice presidents every day (I'm not sure if that includes weekends) beginning at 7 am.

And they keep talking -- about implementation and adjustment of plans -- all day long.  

The point isn't to hero-worship Michael Kaiser or the others, but to be candid about why many of us in the nonprofit world bemoan the difficulty of raising money and surviving.

In the spirit of that candor, we must admit that standard operating procedure is to program cautiously and then manage haphazardly.

We're not committing ourselves to outrageously bold ideas.  And we're not arriving at the office at 7 am to hammer out the endless details to pull it off.  

So of course life is hard.

(My emphasis on the early morning issue, by the way, is just to illustrate the intensity of the process -- the point is the relentless commitment to the management of small details, no matter when you start.)

I can't prove it, but I think if we could all become more like Michael and Reynold and Karen, whether as leaders of organizations or trustees or development directors, we would all have more success.  Because "the pie" would just get bigger as more people got excited about all the amazing new things going on in the nonprofit world.

 

I'm at my computer now. Where does the food come out?

When this whole Internet thing started (or maybe ten years later, when the news finally reached me), I remember people saying that soon we'd be getting food through our computers.

I recall wondering if that meant that the food would actually come out of the computer. Like maybe binary code would somehow be transmogrified into food. Or perhaps we wouldn't need to eat at all -- the nourishment would just be biochemically programmed into our bodies.  All of which seemed horribly alienating. (Full disclosure: I love food.)

I realize that in retrospect my confusion seems unnervingly idiotic. But I recollect that others were equally perplexed. We knew computers were somehow going to revolutionize the world, but we couldn't imagine what that meant.

With a mixture of relief and disappointment, I've since apprehended that computers will not fundamentally change my experience as a human being.  So far they've just made it faster and easier to produce, transmit and access information.  Ultimately, it all gets translated back into familiar human experience.

Facebook, for example, feels like I'm stepping into a party (sans food and drink) every time I log on. Being able to access a party of lots of old friends and co-workers and half-remembered schoolmates is indeed different from life before Facebook. But on the other hand, I've been to parties before.

Anyway, all of these reflections are prompted by my reading of Janet Levine's latest Too Busy to Fundraise Blog post.

I can relate to Janet's bouts of exhaustion and discouragement in relation to the incessant chatter about nonprofits and social media. All of the compulsion to master Twitter and LinkedIn, not to mention Facebook and Blogging, and online fundraising opportunities like ChipIn or Karma 411, can be overwhelming.

But my feeling is that no matter how well we master this new world, we're never going to get pizza slices from our computer.

And, more to the point, I don't think we're ever going to transcend the fundamental human desire for personal interaction.

Just as watching TV doesn't make us lose the joy of seeing live performance or attending church or going to parties and restaurants, online fundraising won't replace one-on-one personal fundraising. It's just a new, and admittedly exciting, additional option.

We owe it to ourselves to learn all we can about these often fun and powerful tools.  But at the same time, we should accept that some of us, based on some permutation of personal inclination and organizational focus, will not likely incorporate online fundraising into our development strategy. Or will try and not have great results.

Because there are only so many hours in the day, and for some people, it's all just too hard to learn, and perhaps too poor a fit.  If you abandon your personal relationships, which you understand and which have meaning for you, in favor of crowd-sourced, media rich online giving efforts, which are baffling to you, you're going to look like a middle aged guy with a bad combover at a Radiohead concert, trying to dance your way over to an intensely ironic 25-year-old in a Sex Pistols t-shirt. Metaphorically speaking, you won't go home with the girl.  (More full disclosure: I've never actually listened to Radiohead.  It was the only cool contemporary group I could think of.  I just looked in Wikipedia and saw they started in 1985.)

Ideally, you'll figure out how to do it all.  Individually cultivated gifts and online efforts and grants and sponsorships and board development and planned giving and government grants and earned revenue initiatives and lots of other stuff. Whatever you can manage and whatever works.

Less ideally, you'll prioritize what works best for you.

Social media is another tool in the arsenal, not the war to end all wars.

At my fundraising workshop last weekend, I quipped that if the person in charge of your social media strategy needs to buy the book "Facebook for Dummies," you're probably not going to have much success.  (Final full disclosure: No one at the workshop laughed.  I hope someone reading this thinks it's funny.)