From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual
fundraising appeal. It was a simple enough format, if I recall correctly. The
rabbi and the treasurer talked about the shul's expenses and how vital this
annual fundraise was, and then the synagogue's members called out their pledges
from their seats.
Straightforward, yes?
Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal. One that I ran, in
fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Topic_that_must_not_be_named]. One difference
was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet. And another difference was
that the audience was largely drawn from the
atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd. (To
point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace. If you
understood the phrase "empirical cluster in personspace" then you know who I'm
talking about.)
I crafted the fundraising appeal with care. By my nature I'm too proud to ask
other people for help; but I've gotten over around 60% of that reluctance over
the years. The nonprofit needed money and was growing too slowly, so I put some
force and poetry into that year's annual appeal. I sent it out to several
mailing lists that covered most of our potential support base.
And almost immediately, people started posting to the mailing lists about why
they weren't going to donate. Some of them raised basic questions about the
nonprofit's philosophy and mission. Others talked about their brilliant ideas
for all the other sources that the nonprofit could get funding from, instead of
them. (They didn't volunteer to contact any of those sources themselves, they
just had ideas for how we could do it.)
Now you might say, "Well, maybe your mission and philosophy did have basic
problems—you wouldn't want to censor that discussion, would you?"
Hold on to that thought.
Because people were donating. We started getting donations righ
Strypey
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