What it was like to raise $100,000 for the first time

Thank you, thank you, thank you

The last transfer has been completed, so it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on what it was like to plan and execute Psychcrisis’s first ever fundraising campaign, aimed at individual donors.

To start—thank you, thank you. Lots of the people who donated follow the Psychcrisis newsletter and will be reading this. You are the people I asked, and you are the people who gave. There were many moments of surprising generosity, surprising care from people I spoke to, that confounded my initial impression of fundraising as a sort of calculating sales process. There was a lot of warmth, and it arose with you guys!

So, thank you—both for the actual money, which will fuel the work, and for the often heartfelt and loving way in which you gave it.

A specific person who is not a donor (and who I barely even know!) who I am grateful to is Kim Klein, a fundraising trainer based in California who wrote a book called ‘Fundraising for Social Change’ which was as close as a literal bible for the fundraising project as I think any book is capable of being for any process.

I found this book in a circuitous way—my neighbourhood contains a lot of ‘Little Free Libraries’; small wooden shelf-boxes where neighbours leave out books they no longer want and pick up ones their neighbours left, and from my local little free library I picked up a book called The Accidental Fundraiser by Stephanie Roth. Reading it, I realised it was aimed at people raising money for schools and churches and such and aiming to raise a few thousand dollars at most, but looking through I discovered that she referenced her partner (who also wrote about fundraising), and the bigger book she had written—and that was Kim Klein’s Fundraising for Social Change. It was fun to imagine these two Berkeley lesbian ladies as sore of fairy godmothers to my fundraising efforts (I’ve since learned that nonprofit fundraising is extremely lesbian coded for reasons I don’t fully understand).

To describe a lot of the concrete fundraising steps involved would be to simply reiterate the instructions in Fundraising for Social Change, so I won’t, but the book was key in helping me draft a list of people to ask, some extra channels to find new people, and then formulate the best ways to reach out. It guided me to write the documents I needed to send to give people enough information to make the right choice for them.

One of the things I appreciated about the book (which is a tricky thing in most sales processes, and fundraising is a sales process) was how much it honoured respecting the real desires of the person you are asking for money, and also letting them exceed your expectations. One donor who committed money fairly early on sternly but jokingly reprimanded me for putting an upper limit on the amount of money I asked him for—‘let me reject you, don’t reject yourself!’ was how he put it. So I took a deep breath and stopped asking people for a range that ended at a maximum, and instead let them insert whatever maximum they wanted. Ahhhhhhh.

And I loved it.

I’ve always thought that sales is awful when you hate the product and exhilarating when you love the product, and this ‘product’ is one of my favourite things in the whole world. Fundraising (and the demands of my own integrity) forced me to get quite specific about what I intended to do, and what I knew with confidence and didn’t. It became more possible to speak honestly about what specifics I didn’t know, without losing confidence in this path being the best one I had found after much searching.

This process also forced the development of some operational systems—databases, ways to accept money, pitch materials, ways of communicating. Something that does still fucking suck is that despite weeks of trying and some kafkaesque interactions with customer service reps  I never succeeded in getting Facebook donations to work, which limited how much I could use Facebook as a platform for finding new donors.

Some wonderful things happened. As Kim Klein predicted, donations followed something like a power law distribution, where a couple of large donations filled a lot of the target, then some sizeable mid-range donations, then a lot of smaller ones. It was breathtaking to see a $250 donation come in to the PayPal donation page even before I sent a test donation, from someone I didn’t know personally. Who are you, and thank you, and let’s do this—all of that went through my mind a lot.

I write this update now after all the transactions have completed but in reality most of the work of fundraising was done by the beginning of February or so. And, to consider factors that contributed to it—if I didn’t know so many people in tech and in crypto who had built or acquired wealth that way—I think this would have been much, much harder.

-I’m- proud of this. I’m -beaming- at all of you, and thinking about the people lost who some donations were made in memory of, and excited to have ‘learned the ropes’ of running a private donor fundraising campaign in maybe the most supportive and encouraging way possible. I’m looking forward to helping Psychcrisis become a resilient, powerful player in how change happens in the mental health crisis system, and successfully completing this fundraising campaign feels like a first step in that resilience.