“Oh, I’m terrible at fundraising”.
People say this often. And often with a strange sort of…pride?
Being good at fundraising, in the popular understanding, means being good at schmoozing, the “charm offensive”, and other such social manoeuvring. “Being good at” is also something of a misnomer, as you’re either blessed with the ineffable social magic or you’re not.
Being “bad at fundraising”, by contrast, means one is reassuringly inept at social wizardry, and — by implication —good at Real Work (such as computer, research, and computer). One is bad at vibes, but good at skill.
I think this is wrong. Fundraising is a skill. It is an important one. Doing it well is a sign of intelligence, agency, and sound theory-of-mind. And it is learnable!
Yesterday, I yelled — misleadingly — “if you want to raise a million million dollars (for mission-aligned non-profits from techy/ EA/ Bay types), come and chat!”, to my fellow Inkhaveners. They asked great questions. See the cleaned up transcript below:
Where do you start if you have an idea and want to raise money for it?
Start with a one or two page memo — not a deck or a mammoth google doc. Be able to answer some really simple questions really well. The exact structure will depend on who you’re writing for, but in general be able to do things like:
Give a clear problem and solution overview. What is problem you are solving? What is your proposed solution?
Outline your plan: What is your plan for what you will do for the duration of the grant? What do you expect you’ll have at the end of the grant? (It’s OK if you can’t be hyper-specific or it’s open ended, just explain why and make sense)
Answer the question, why you? Why are you the right person to solve this problem in this way? This could be track record, it could be something else.
Connect to a long-term vision: Explain how your work could create large-scale impact beyond the grant. How might it transform the field? How might it enable wider progress?
Show you understand where you sit in the landscape: Be able to explain what makes your approach novel compared to adjacent work in the field
Show you understand the risks: Identify the most significant risks to your project’s success, and explain how you’re planning to mitigate them/ what you will do if they materialise
Provide a high-level budget.
Extraordinary clarity on these questions is rare and will set you apart.
Make the memo a pleasure to read. No weird diagrams. No massive footnotes. No weird jokes to show them you’re not like the others. No tortured sentences that makes them have to think real hard. No links that mean they have to click out of the document to understand what you’re on about. Respect your reader’s time and desire for clarity.
Before you reach out to funders, send your memo to people who know what you’re talking about and are willing to help you. If you don’t know any, ask people who might. Do as many intros as you need. Don’t just ask for “feedback”, ask specific questions. What is strongest? What is weakest? What would they change about the document before sending it to funders? If it gets rejected, why do you think that will be? (If people don’t want to answer the tough question, you can add if you had to guess)
Once you have a 2-pager you’re happy with, you want a warm intro to the funder from someone whose judgement the funder trusts. Don’t have one? Work backwards. Who might know someone who might know someone? Again, when you get on the call, don’t ask for “feedback”. Ask: What would need to be different for you to be excited to introduce me to potential funders? What would literally make you look good by introducing me? (credit to Mark Estefanos for these questions).
No one wants to help? Ask yourself why. Is your idea bad? Are you being obnoxious? Do you need more friends? All of these are solvable problems (order this shockingly good book by my bestie for more).
The easiest route to funding is often just to parachute in on the credibility of a trusted advisor. If their favourite genius drops in with “this guy is brilliant, I recommend you fund”, often all you have to do is not mess it up.
One thing that people worry to much about at this question, is donors asking “If this is so good, wouldn’t someone else already be funding it?”. It’s reasonable to have a strong, truthful answer prepared here — maybe it falls between funding categories; maybe you want a broader funder base; maybe the right donor will bring more than just money (network, credibility, etc).
What most people don’t consider, however, is that you are — in some sense — doing the funder a favour by bringing them an excellent executor with an excellent idea that might just transform the world. That is the jackpot for funders; it is often their pleasure and pride to be able to support you, and to have identified and incubated something incredible. If they are doing philanthropy, it is because they want to give away money. They could just not. It is not all a game of checkbook chicken.
How concrete does the plan need to be?
Concrete enough to show that you know what you’re doing, but do not attempt to impress someone by burying them in implementation details (unless they are the rare nerd that wants that — sorry, no hard and fast rules).
A lot of first-time founders or researchers — especially technical people — assume that the way to credibility is by showing their workings at every step. Funders rarely want to wade through all of that, and you shouldn’t make it their job to.
Funders are making a global assessment. They are using everything they know about you, and everything they know about the world, to ask questions such as — Does this person seem legit? Does their network seem relevant? Do they seem like a liability? Or charlatan? Or grifter? Does the evidence point in favour of them knowing what they’re talking about? When I drop into a random paragraph of this thing they’ve written, does it make sense? Could they actually….pull this off?
They are not there to read your PhD or do your PhD viva over a call. A lot of people fail to appreciate this, and fail to appreciate that your higher-level presentation often tells people more about your legit-ness than the technical implementation details (which they may or may not read). If you can state the problem, the plan, the uncertainties, and your comparative advantage with clarity and precision, people infer a lot.
(Obviously, the details should be right and make sense. I’m just saying don’t expect much to turn on them — if they make sense, that’s normal. Necessary but not sufficient, and not a huge focus. If they don’t make sense, the funder will probably have already guessed that from the rest of your application).
What if I’m missing something important, or the project later turns out to be wrong?
First, try not to get giant things wrong.
I mean that seriously. One of the most useful questions you can ask in preparing an application is— which assumption, if false, would invalidate this entire project? Name them yourself. If relevant, write them in your application. Acknowledging uncertainty and dependencies is a sign of seriousness, not weakness.
Second, consider that even if you fail, you will learn something important (which is almost always true, unless the failure is just some avoidable stupid blind spot that anyone with a Claude subscription could have found in the beginning — in which case that’s a bad look for both you and the funder). If failure would be interesting, you can say so, and explain why.
Third, if something does go wrong, be real and honest about it early. Explain what happened. Explain what you’re doing in response. Always propose a plan, never just a mea culpa and a shrug emoji. Take full responsibility. Show them what can be salvaged. People are kinder than you might expect.
How different is fundraising from ultra-high-net-worth individuals, as opposed to grantmakers?
Less different than you might think.
One mistake people make is treating “ultra-high-net-worth donors” as if it’s a personality type. It isn’t. They’re just people, with money. Who want to fund things that are valuable by their lights.
Some want to dive immediately into the technical weeds; some want to support ambitious young founders who remind them of themselves; some want to fund whoever the people they respect tell them to fund; some want to wire some funds once a year and get an annual update signal; others want to go on a hike and look at pictures of your dog and care about your life.
In other words — everyone is just a person. Relating to people is a skill. Form a model of who they are and what they care about; notice where your model is right and wrong (what do they seem to like? pay attention to? get bored by? get excited by?); and update your model in the direction of truth. People like to be seen, and seeing them in service of helping them serve the world is worthy and valuable work.
Thank you for reading part 1! More in part 2! A step-by-step, hold-your-hand guide for how to prepare for donor calls in part 3!
Excellent and straightforward advice here! Jen Shang, who calls herself a philanthropic psychologist, completely changed my thinking on fundraising and the ick factor of asking for money. She explained that working with donors is helping them realize THEIR dreams of making a positive and lasting contribution.
Good stuff!