Fundraiser Ideas Quotes

There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself – Senator Daniel K Inouye

I don't know why, but I didn't want her to call me Dick anymore. It was feeling kind of fake. 'Maybe we should use our real names outside of class. Yours is Rosetta, right?' 'Yes. Rosetta Vaughn.' 'All right,' I said. 'Well, mine is - ' 'Seth McCoy. I know.' She kind of wrapped her arms around herself like she was getting cold. 'I've known since February fourteenth, actually.' She's memorized the date she found out my name? What the hell? She laughed. 'Don't freak out! I only remember because it was Valentine's Day.' As if that explained it. 'And why do you remember learning my name on Valentine's Day?' 'Kendall Eckman was running after you in the hall screaming, "Seth McCoy, if you don't buy a rose from me, I'll kill you!" She was doing that Valentine's drama club fundraiser. Remember?' 'Actually, yes.' What I remembered was getting stoned with Isaac before school, and Kendall harshing my mellow the minute we walked in the door. Rosetta was looking like there was more to this story. 'And after she kept asking, you bought a red one?' 'Right. And I passed it off to -' I'd been about to say 'some chick,' but with how intently she was watching me, I was getting a different idea. '-you, right?' She extended her arm to pass me an imaginary rose in the same way I must have handed her a real one. Then she imitated the corny voice I must have used. 'Here, beautiful. Have a wonderful Valentine's Day.' Oh, Christ. The stupid shit I said sometimes.

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

There was a time when our minds were always on a roll. We used boxes and sticks to become astronauts and artists. We created fantasy characters and outrageous worlds. We drew whimsical pictures and cooked up wild ideas. We were complete originals.

And more to the point, I have no idea what I want to do. It shouldn't be a surprise. I've had years to think about it. That and just the other day I was pestering Wolf about what he wanted to do--talk about the pot calling the kettle black. But that's just it, I guess. I've never had to think about it. I have very diligently kept all of my options open. The AP classes, the killer GPA, the SAT scores in the 99th percentile, the varsity letters from swim team, the debate club, the fundraising... I've taken on everything and succeeded at it. There is not one weak spot that can be pointed to in my resume, not a single thing that would make an administrator say, "Yes, but what about her..." Except maybe this. Except the part where it's suddenly clear to me why I've been struggling so much with my college essays, with articulating who I am in so few words. How can a person even know who they are if they don't know what they want?

And then I saw him speak. Years later, after writing dozens upon dozens of presidential speeches, it would become impossible to listen to rhetoric without editing it in my head. On that historic Iowa evening, Obama began with a proclamation: “They said this day would never come.” Rereading those words today, I have questions. Who were “they,” exactly? Did they really say “never”? Because if they thought an antiwar candidate with a robust fund-raising operation could never win a divided three-way Democratic caucus, particularly with John Edwards eating into Hillary Clinton’s natural base of support among working-class whites, then they didn’t know what they were talking about. All this analysis would come later, though, along with stress-induced insomnia and an account at the Navy Mess. At the time, I was spellbound. The senator continued: “At this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said you couldn’t do.” He spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed. Barack Obama spoke for the next twelve minutes, and except for a brief moment when the landing gear popped out and I thought we were going to die, I was riveted. He told us we were one people. I nodded knowingly at the gentleman in the middle seat. He told us he would expand health care by bringing Democrats and Republicans together. I was certain it would happen as he described. He looked out at a sea of organizers and volunteers. “You did this,” he told them, “because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.

Thiel’s doomsday predictions also prompted an unusual request. In preparation for a summer 2000 board meeting, Thiel had asked Musk if he could present a proposal. Musk agreed. “Uh, Peter’s got an agenda item he’d like to talk about,” Musk said, handing the reins to Thiel. Thiel began. The markets, he said, weren’t done driving into the red. He prophesied just how dire things would get—for both the company and for the world. Many had seen the bust as a mere short-term correction, but Thiel was convinced the optimists were wrong. In his view, the bubble was bigger than anyone had thought and hadn’t even begun to really burst yet. From X.com’s perspective, the implications of Thiel’s prediction were dire. Its high burn rate meant that it would need to continue fundraising. But if—no, when—the bubble truly burst, the markets would tighten further, and funding would dry up—even for X.com. The company balance sheet could drop to zero with no options left to raise money. Thiel presented a solution: the company should take the $100 million closed in March and transfer it to his hedge fund, Thiel Capital. He would then use that money to short the public markets. “It was beautiful logic,” board member Tim Hurd of MDP remembered. “One of the elements of PayPal was that they were untethered from how people did stuff in the real world.” The board was uniformly aghast. Members Moritz, Malloy, and Hurd all pushed back. “Peter, I totally get it,” Hurd replied. “But we raised money from investors on a business plan. And they have that in their files. And it said, ‘use of proceeds would be for general corporate purposes.’ And to grow the business and so forth. It wasn’t to go speculate on indices. History may prove that you’re right, and it will have been brilliant, but if you’re wrong, we’ll all be sued.” Mike Moritz’s reaction proved particularly memorable. With his theatricality on full display, Moritz “just lost his mind,” a board member remembered, berating Thiel: “Peter, this is really simple: If this board approves that idea, I’m resigning!

Melanie believed that her problem was getting fifteen million dollars to fund her social innovation institute. But that wasn’t her problem; that was just her first idea of a solution to her problem, and she got so anchored to that idea that she was mired in stuckness and failure. Oh, and did we mention that she was getting depressed by all this rejection, and that her teaching was suffering from the fund-raising distraction, and that her colleagues, sick of the Melanie money lament, had begun avoiding her? You see, when you anchor yourself to a bad solution, it just gets worse and worse with time.

2017 has been the year of ICOs. According to Bloomberg , ICOs have raised over $1.6 billion in 2017 alone. The explosion of ICOs is a result of the ease with which Ethereum permits the creation of new coins. With little more than an idea and a white paper, you can set up an Ethereum-based ICO and raise millions of dollars, circumventing the old-school fundraising channels of venture capital or seed funding from institutional investors.

People who’ve adopted an individualist attitude aren’t necessarily sociopaths or assholes: they’ll still donate to a GoFundMe to help a local kid with cancer, or even stop to help someone on the side of the road if they look “safe.” They chip into the gift fund for a co-worker’s fiftieth birthday, tithe to their church, and fundraise for their children’s school. They do want to help others, but they want it to be on their own terms and arbitrate who’s worthy of receiving it. They are often obsessed with the idea of “fairness”: that one can benefit from something only insomuch as they’ve contributed to it themselves.

Senator Daniel K. Inouye who in 1987 chaired the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, which held public hearings on the Iran-Contra affair, summarizes here the cover-up of the U.S. shadow government involvement by saying: “There exists a shadowy government with its own air force, its own navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

I’ve been over every inch of what happened. The NRA had nothing to do with it. This happened in a Democrat county with a Democrat sheriff, a Democrat superintendent, and a Democrat school board, implementing Democrat ideas on criminal justice, Democrat ideas on special education, and Democrat ideas on school discipline. And after Democrat voters gave all these Democrats a resounding vote of confidence in the school board election, the Democrat teachers union president, Anna Fusco, wrote in a Facebook group about our campaign for accountability: “Now you can all shut up!” Meanwhile, at the national level, Democrat organizers swooped in and weaponized my daughter’s murder for their Democrat agenda and to fund-raise to elect more Democrats.

There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” —

Speaking of fundraisers, another special educator had a suggestion. She wore a black leather belt with metal studs that was at odds with her slender frame and long brown hair. She was the chair of the special education department at Peachtree Alternative School. “At my son's school in Tucker,” the chair said, “the principal stood on the roof and did hula dances in a grass skirt. She also let students throw pie pans of shaving cream at her." The idea did not appeal to Ms. Henderson. “You've got to remember our population,” she said. “If our students threw pans of shaving cream at me, it would hurt. I've had to suspend eight kids, today, and did it alone because I don't have an assistant principal. I'm not very popular.

What Are Skills? Skills are the capabilities developed through training or hands-on experience. Skills are the practical application of knowledge. Someone can take a course on investing and gain knowledge of it. But only experience in trading gives them the skills. What Are Abilities? Abilities, often confused with skills, are the innate traits or talents that you bring to a task or situation. Many people can learn to negotiate competently by acquiring knowledge and practicing skills. But a few are brilliant negotiators because they have an innate ability to persuade. What Are Assets? Assets are funds you have saved up or that you acquire through loans, investors, or fund-raising. So how do assets work with everything else to push your business from idea into reality? Take a look at the example below. This is what I call the knowledge, skills, abilities, and assets matrix:

Eyeing this tableau, I had a sudden epiphany—I understood why Thomas had come to Rockford: for all his fund-raising abilities and management abilities and entrepreneurial genius, his dexterity as a salesman of ideas and gift for answering the collective prayers of the Zeitgeist, Thomas Keene wanted something else entirely from his life. He wanted to be a director.

Even the U.S. government has shown its interest in this field, with the Department of Homeland Security awarding blockchain infrastructure builder Factom a $199,000 grant to develop an IoT security solution. It’s a small number by ICO fund-raising standards but a noteworthy vote of confidence in blockchain technology from a government agency. Factom’s model would create an identity log of data emitted by a device, including its unique identifier, its manufacturer, its update history, its known security issues, and its granted authorities. The idea is that if a device’s history of performance, permissions, and certification is recorded in an immutable ledger, hackers can’t alter the record to disguise a flaw they’ve exploited. It’s not clear how much oversight the U.S. government would have over the system. Context Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is doing similar work to achieve what it calls “data veracity.” In various industries, it is pulling together consortia of interested parties to agree on open-data standards for APIs (application processing interfaces) that would allow parties to share data stamped with unique cryptographic hashes that provably identify the device and its owner.