Monday, October 25, 2004

Thursday: board meeting. This was the one where they were supposed to implement their lame-ass fundraising proposal, come up with a schedule, answer all of our questions, etc. Our questions were basic. Is this a plan to end the year with a zero balance, or a real plan for our survival through 2005? Why do your budget and our budget have a gap of about $20,000? Will you pay us for our vacation days when ... sorry, if ... the organization folds? Well, they didn't answer many of these, and the answers they gave were infuriatingly dodgy. Fucking weasels. They want to write a fundraising letter and raise over $20,000 in the last two months of the year, during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. None of these people has ever written a fundraising letter before, except the board member I like to call Cocky Asshole, who has worked for organizations before that did fundraising. That probably means other people wrote letters and had him approve them. Fundraising is an art and a science. They've ignored the science - the budgets I drafted that suggested if we do exactly this, we might raise $15,000 if we're lucky and everyone works really hard. They want to raise $23,000, and I think they're crazy. Now they're making mincemeat out of the art of writing a fundraising letter. In a nutshell, they want a letter that begs for money and says pretty dramatically, "if you don't do it now, we won't be around next year." But they don't want to panic people. But they want it to sound urgent. but not desperate. So I would think they ask the one guy who's employed as their fundraising specialist to write the letter, hmm? Nope. They want to work with me - meaning, they don't trust me and want to write it over my shoulder to make sure I don't fuck it up. So I told them, fine, you write the first draft. You seem to have a good idea what the letter will look like. So go ahead. They wrote a first draft, and I swear it looked like a suicide note. I would have jumped out a window if I had gotten this letter in the mail - especially if I was a former board member, or former executive director. It was desperate, shrill, and it was so panicky that it intimated that the recipient should feel responsible if the organization collapsed. So they dicked around with it a little bit in the board meeting and decided that they would meet "my expert opinion." (After they said I wasn't a "fundraising professional" in the last board meeting.) Mr. Asshole flashed his best Cheshire cat grin and told me, "What we were offering to do was help you with this letter. We didn't want to suggest that you wouldn't be involved." I could have stabbed him. So I expect this morning that I'll have another shitty draft in my mailbox, and they'll tell me that they've done their best, now it's up to me to make it beautiful. Put some lipstick on this pig, make it purty. I hate being a part of their ridiculous plan, and now they've made me the center of it. Friday: board event! A wine tasting, perfect for all their pompous rich elitist friends. We gave away a few items and did a small sloppy silent auction. I did a ten-minute pitch for the organization and everybody told me what a wonderful job I did. It sounded like "we're completely fucking up the place. You're doing such a great job smiling while we do it!" Someone handed me a bottle of wine at the end of the night. No, not someone: another one of our board members. I got so many compliments that night that I was completely nauseated. We need leadership, not pats on the back. Flattery and a bottle of booze will get you nowhere, you pompous ostrich head-in-the-sand assholes. 9:06:11 AM