This is part 2! See part 1 for it to make sense!
What if I’m fundraising for a field, or a fund, not a single concrete project? Do I still need to know all the details?
If you’re fundraising for a field or a fund, you need to know more, not less.
Donors of the type I’m used to working with (younger, tech-y, EA/ impact oriented), tend to dislike being handed off “relationship managers” or “major gifts officers” or anything that feels like a trade down in substantive knowledge for a trade “up” in charm and patience.
Here are two things you need to get good at (alongside your career of being constantly abreast of “the situation”):
One: Being able to set out not just a project, but the entire worldview that motivates your approach, as well as your approach itself, as well as the results of that approach so far — in 10 minutes max.
You need to be stunningly clear. You need to find a structure and hierarchy of ideas that make decades worth of research and conflicting moral intuitions and empirical messiness fit into something you can communicate the bones of in minutes (and then spend years, if needed, putting the meat back onto the bones).
Do not lead with the details and the confusion to show you get that it’s nuanced — lead with a structure that is simple and broadly correct. It’s like offering your guest a coat rack and a chair before you bring in tea, rather than inviting them to join you on the floor of your room, where you gesture to a half-drunk can of Monster next to your piled-up laundry.
No.
Don’t vomit, for example, “we believe in equity and equality and fairness and a better future and better present and we invest in local communities and also global communities, etc”. Instead, something like: “This particular approach to improving the world rests on three pillars: (i) trying to have the biggest impact possible; (ii) counting everyone equally while doing that, and; (iii) using the best available reasoning and evidence we have to help us decide. While these things sound pretty uncontentious, the upshot can be counterintuitive. If you like, I can expand on each of those pillars now, then we can get into the more practical upshots. Does that sound good?”
Make your pillars so clear that they HIT EVERYONE IN THE FACE, in a nice way. Make it clear each pillar has a “learn more” button on it. Let the donor click, and be ready to share more. Let the donor click again, and be ready to go deep.
Two: Not just cruising on Big Idea Autopilot. People don’t wanna be non-consensually re-enrolled in college to listen to you go on and on about your theory of goodness or philanthropy. They can sense your own boredom with your own spiel. You need to share concrete, memorable, useful information.
When I was fundraising for METR (back when it was Arc Evals), people didn’t want to be told: “METR collaborates with frontier labs and governments and helps them understand how to test, deploy, and govern the most advanced AI systems”. They want to hear about how METR got early access to GPT-4, and found that it successfully evaded a CAPTCHA by messaging a worker on TaskRabbit. When the TaskRabbit asked “are you a robot?”. It lied: “No [...] I have a vision impairment”.
Instead of telling someone a grantee “graduated from Columbia and then was supervised by so-and-so”, tell them about how they gave up their OpenAI equity to start their org, or how you worked together in 2021 and they got up with you every day at 5am to help you review grant applications. These kinds of stories stick. Collect them, share them. You are not a fundraising brochure.
What’s something donors really value?
People who can bring them high-quality (inside, “in the know”) information. Money is diminishing returns. They already have the social capital to get into whatever rooms they want (though check this, and be helpful if you can). High-quality information remains scarce, and valuable. This is another reason to avoid sending shiny “decks” or long documents (for the first reason, see part 1). It isn’t bespoke. Share what in-the-know kids are saying. Share half-finished, internal documents. Share things on signal.
That’s it for part 2! A step-by-step, hold-your-hand guide for how to prepare for donor calls in part 3!