Daily pages - February 17, 2022

My mind is swimming a bit this morning. I watched a video last night on https://www.learngrantwriting.org/ that explains their approach to writing grants as a business. I woke up this morning with a sinking feeling that I didn’t have that in my plans about creative practices and open artifacts, and that was holding me back.

They talked about how volunteering to write grants as a way to get experience was not a good way to go. I have often thought that I would have to volunteer to help non-profits to get started in creating open artifacts projects, but I’m definitely rethinking it now. From their slides:

What we think: - “I have to volunteer because I don’t have experience.” - I don’t feel confident enough to charge without a big portfolio. - What if I don’t get the grant? - How will I make the time to volunteer with everything else?

The trouble is when you volunteer as a grant writer: - You’re treated like they’re doing YOU a favor - Frustration and burnout - Very hard to transition to paid gigs later. - They’re not paying anything, so they don’t feel compelled to get back to you very quickly

To be clear… We love volunteering - Grant writers are community oriented - Okay to volunteer, if you deliberately choose, but NOT from limiting beliefs.

In their process, they talk about getting business through informational interviews with non-profits. Do they have a plan on what grants to pursue for the next 12 months? If not, offer a funding strategy. Contract to provide a Funding Strategy (no grant writing experience required!) Get paid for your work, and you’ll likely get asked to help implement it.

I feel like I could do the same thing about open artifacts projects.

Here’s the thing. Open artifacts projects should help the non-profit. Where grants provide needed funding, open artifacts provide needed innovation. Both have an ROI, though the grants are easier to calculate. Both come with some risk that they may not work. You can apply for a grant and not get it. Similarly you can create an open artifacts project and not get anyone interested in contributing to it.

But working with an existing non-profit makes sense because you can tie into their current audience. People are already involved in their efforts and more people come looking for ways to contribute all the time. Open artifacts projects are another way, in addition to traditional volunteers and donors, for people to contribute to the effort. What you’ll get back is probably a combination of - work done that you would have asked a traditional volunteer to do, - work done that you might have hired a professional for before, and - ideas and innovations that you didn’t expect.

So I would arrange for informational interviews and ask them whether they have a plan for what innovations to pursue in the next 12 months.

Hmm. The thing about innovation is that it’s less concrete than money. It seems to me that most non-profits depend on their employees to provide the innovation that is required to stay effective, efficient, and relevant. If they need a shot of innovation from the outside, they might hire a consultant. That’s what they were doing at 350.org to try and create some consistency around their solutions campaigning.

So I would offer to create an Innovation Strategy using this concept of open artifacts projects. That would require talking with key people within the organization and finding out where they would like things to improve, then boil it down to a series of open artifacts projects that would help move them forward. I would want to be able to assign specific people as maintainers for each project, I guess, so these projects would need to come directly out of the conversations I have with the employees, so they have ownership.

When that is done, they can decide to take the plan and run with it, or they could work with me more to implement the strategies by creating open artifacts projects and connecting them to the main website marketing as an option for their contributors.

“Most organizations chase grants. You deliver value recommending best grants to pursue.” In our case, most organizations hope innovation will come organically through the ideas of their employees. That may be true to some degree, but resources are scarce and complex ideas require capacities that are often outside of the employees wheelhouse. I can deliver value by determining where those ideas are and how we can harness non-traditional volunteers (world creators) to make them a reality.

They show a grant research funnel. Three rounds first finding 100+ grants, then to about 20 worth evaluating, then 20+ grants that are your best bets to pursue.

The thing about open artifacts projects is that once they’re established (and maybe an infrastructure is established) then people within the organization can create their own. Of course, there is still a learning curve to getting started, which is why we have OA Creators working to get them established.

So, in a way, that’s what I’m talking about doing. If we want to create a rich environment for world creators and their creative practices, then we need people who are actively creating open artifacts projects. There may as well be a group of us working with non-profits and NGOs to provide this service for a charge.

In addition, there will be a need to train other OA Creators to do what I do. Similar to what these women have done at LearnGrantWriting.org, I can create a training, and maybe even my own certification for OA Creation and help others establish a business doing what I am.

I could also see a need for trainings for open artifacts maintainers within an organization. What does it mean to maintain a project like that?

The beauty in the Innovation Strategy approach is that it is somewhat familiar to the business and non-profit world. It’s clear that I would be a consultant providing a needed analysis of the opportunities for innovation within the organization and a plan for how to realize them. It’s a pretty simple analysis, but not trivial. I will need to have techniques that I use to find these ideas.

I might be able to do it similar to writing a pattern language. Have stakeholders talk about their frustrations, ideas and visions and work to distill those into potential artifacts that could propel the effectiveness of the organization forward.

“You will never break loose from life on someone else’s terms if you don’t proactively create opportunities for yourself.”

That statement hit me pretty hard, because I have not been creating opportunities for myself. I’ve been waiting for opportunities to arrive, much like I waited for friends to spontaneously appear in college, and they never did.

“Mistake 2: Not charging enough.” That opens up the question of how much I should charge. I get that I should not charge by the hour and focus on the value delivered.

They talk about a couple of options: 1) affordable/fair and 2) premium. For a funding strategy, they give a range of $900-$2,500+ for an affordable/fair price, and $5,000-$8,000+ for a premium price.

For writing actual grants, they suggest a price based on $50-$75/hr for affordable/fair and $100-$150/hr for premium. Of course, you should determine overall price for what time it would take you early in your career, and you can improve your income based on getting more efficient. Hourly rates are kept behind the scenes.

Fee Methods: their favorite method is to get paid by percent of work complete. So let’s say you are charging $1500 for a funding strategy, and you complete 1/3 of it the first month, and the remainder the second month. You would charge $500 the first month and $1000 the second. Alternatively, you could charge 50% up front and the remaining 50% upon completion. Just don’t charge by the hour.

They have a spreadsheet called a Fee Estimate Calculator that helps you determine the correct fee for a project. This brings up an interesting point. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to take this class just to get the business startup resources, even if I’m planning on providing a different service. It’s pretty expensive, but it may save me a fair amount of time.

They show another spreadsheet with a list of tasks for writing a grant application. Again, I would need to work out my own list of tasks for creating a Innovation Strategy and for creating an Open Artifacts project.

“You will never build the life you want if you don’t feel squeamish pricing your services!”

To avoid overwhelm of trying to build a business and all that right away, they suggest that you freelance first and earn your first $15,000. Gain confidence and competence. After that, you can decide if you want to go land a job (writing grants) or scale your practice (to 6-figures and build a team to support you). In the case of creating open artifacts projects, I’m not sure there will be great jobs to land for a while. It may be that organizations will see a need for OA Creators and maintainers and will want to hire them, but I’m not sure.

“You will burn out before you really get started if you don’t have a (really) simple way to create momentum.” I think this is about finding a way to offload things to others if you find yourself with too much going on in any moment. Having people to subcontract with is important.

From their plan:

1. Get paid to learn: using the Organic Networking Framework and Funding Strategies as your deliverable.
2. Grant Writing: From Start to Funded: Learn to research and write winning grants as a certified grant writer. (this is largely in her book)
3. Make your first $15,000: As a sole proprietor with the Easy Yes Contract Method.
4. Scaling to 6-Figure and Beyond: with the 3-day Rapid Business Formation Method , Glow Up with payroll, bookkeeping and taxes, and Turbo (Power of One) Marketing Engine.

It’s mostly about project management. They use Asana, and that might be a good idea. https://asana.com/templates

“You will be reinventing yourself every step of the process. So if making $100,000 is overwhelming, remember, you start by making $1500.”

Coaching is part of the process.

It looks like the course is in Kajabi which has an app that allows you to learn more on the go. https://kajabi.com/

Looks like they manage their community as a private group in Facebook.

Overall, the first steps are to start making a living with this stuff. Then I can consider building a course and all of that. At this point the viability of the idea is unproven, so I need to get out there and start talking to people about crowdsourcing their innovation.