Writing Your Fund-Raising Case Statement: Process, Not 'Creative Agony
Donway, Walter
Synopsis "Writing Your Fund-Raising Case Statement: Process, Not 'Creative Agony"
Do not begin your fund-raising statement, or use anywhere within it, any quotation of poetry. Unless you are the American Academy of Poets. It is not poetry that moves your potential contributor; it is demonstration of the value you deliver for the philanthropic dollar. It is the contributor's conviction that the values your organization works to achieve are those that the contributor wants to promote-or even, it may be, holds dear. Drafting a case for new financial resources is a task undertaken by tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations every year. It is vital to the future of their mission, sometimes to their survival. It need not be-but all too often is--a gauntlet of creative angst. Of course, the job can be farmed out to a professional writer. Any fundraising firm will do it. But the top firms may charge $2,500 a day or more for "strategic communications" services. Freelancers will do it for less and call it "writing." The fees are not significant if your organization plans a multi-million-dollar campaign. What often happens, I find, is that someone in the organization is assigned or volunteers to draft the case. Plenty of time; it is not needed for months, perhaps. But the writer puts off the dreaded encounter with the blank screen until the case must be done-soon! And then the psychic pressure is unmanning. The organization cries out to a professional writer and explains that it has only two weeks until the board meeting at which the draft must be presented. There always is a writer who will do it. Now, the organization does not negotiate the fee. It pays up. One director of development came clean, telling me: "I find this embarrassing. We couldn't write our case statement in three months and we are giving you one week." The message is not that you cannot write your case statement. It is that the job is not to await inspiration, the creative moment. It is to follow a known process that requires intelligence, diligence, persistence, but not elusive inspiration. Inspiration is not how professionals manage to produce case statement after case statement, day in and day out, good enough to get the money. This brief guide can be used in at least two ways. It can help your organization to draft its own case statement-avoiding the agony by making the process systematic, not "creative." Or, let me say, by reducing the "creative" writing to the editing phase. Or, it can be a guide to understanding-and monitoring-the work of a professional writer. Combining the two functions, it can be a way to draft your own case until you reach the point where a professional writer can give it a bit of the pizzazz and polish you want. My chief message to you, then, is that much of the preparation of your case statement can be reduced to steps that do not require "inspiration" of the writer. And that creative step, which is to make the case in fresh, passionate, urgent prose, is far less daunting when all preparatory steps have been taken. I should not say this, perhaps, as a guy who has made a living drafting case statements in high style; but if you honestly, fully state your case, as specified below, then even clear, work-a-day, business-letter prose may be good enough. If you demonstrate that your product is excellent, you need not sing its praises like a bard at the king's table. (If you insist on stylistic grace and rhetorical passion, then I am your man. My avocation is writing poetry, novels, and memoirs.)
