I love answering the question "what background prepared you for your
job?" Running online fundraising programs is still a new enough gig that
lots of people want to know how to get in on the ground floor, so I'm often approached for advice on what course of study someone should pursue, what opportunities they should spend their time on. Based on the verbal and physical reactions of those I speak with, my answer is engaging and entertaining and frustrating.
My life as a pseudo-grown-up prepared me for my job.
I didn't go to school to be a programmer or a designer or a marketer or a philanthropist. I went to school to be a speech therapist, but got bored with the work of constantly struggling to bring people back to "baseline normal" after a few months (loved the patients, bored with the work). So I talked with some really smart, kind, generous professors who said "figure out what you want to learn and we'll help you figure out how to put things together," so I designed a degree in American Literature that combined comp & rhetoric, literary theory, history, sociology, contemporary and historical performance art, and creative writing.
I spent a year working at a government hospital, providing office assistance to the surgical staff and building a database to sort the dead files, looking for patterns between records of patients who died while under a physician's care. I listened to music in my office, learned how to answer a telephone promptly and with cheerful compassion, and spent countless hours finding patterns in disparate data -- and making up stories in my head about what those patterns meant. Turned out that some of the stories were true.
Then my Dad was diagnosed with cancer, and I spent a year caring for him and doing odd jobs as I found them to keep myself solvent; convenience store clerk, night auditor for a hotel, substitute English teacher. saxophone tutor, babysitter. While spending sleepless nights blogging and stumbling around on the internet, I found this thing called "
the Harry Potter fandom" that introduced me to the concept of virtual friendship and virtual community. I made a dozen friends who still remain an integral part of my life, and worked with a few of them to plan an international literary symposium, all as volunteers, just because it sounded like fun.
I spent five months at Salem, living with my favorite Aunt and Uncle and my youngest cousins -- realizing how much fun kids are at 7 and 13, working as a TA, studying French, and doing the first half of my Master's coursework for literary theory and technical writing, composing hundreds of pages in "the fourth genre" to develop a social understanding of creative non-fiction -- all centered around the main question of "what makes a true story true?" I was unfulfilled by my teaching experience with entitled, unappreciative Freshman Comp and ESL students; since the end goal of academia was a professorial teaching gig, I cut my losses and dropped out of the MA/PhD program. I brought three blogs, a tentative script-writing opportunity, and an unbridled passion to help people who really *need and want* help back to New York.
I developed a skills-based resume and used my story-telling skills to write unique cover letters for nearly 200 jobs in the nonprofit sector. 92 days later, I started work with the American Cancer Society as an events director, planning Relay For Life events with college and university students throughout the capital region. I quickly learned that the students I worked with loved surfing the web as much as I did, and would take any excuse to play with online tools; worked with the online fundraising guy to market our websites as study-break fun that made the world a better place. I spent a lot of time breaking my sites while trying to make them better and Jack got tired of fixing them, so he taught me to do so myself. When he moved on to a new role, I made a pitch to step into his shoes.
Three years later, it's still an amazing gig.
But here's the kicker: I won't do this forever. Online fundraising is an awesome field, with a vast amount of potential. It's inextricably linked with marketing, story-telling, supporter engagement, relationship management and long-term financial health for organizations. But when you get down to it, it's a system of doing work -- one that I've become a recognized expert in, but still just a system. My life is not about systems, and neither is my career.
What excites and energizes me are the problems that need to be solved and the people who can be helped and the stories that can be told, the opportunity to create a community and a society and a world where improving life for everyone is the standard
modus operandi. The patterns that I see, the solutions (some successful most not) that I propose for problems we find (or create) -- these are the things that interest me most of all, the art that I bring to my work. The path of my career will follow that line, irrespective of the systems I have to learn or master.
So my advice to those who ask me for it is always the same. Forget about the system -- it might not exist in five years. Figure out what you want to accomplish -- what ultimate problem do you want to address, what need do you want to fill? Then fill your tool box with the stuff that will help you work through systems in order to make that possible. It's not an easy answer. Then again, there's no such thing.
This post inspired by Seth Godin's One in a Million.
