Fundraising Strategy

Phil's Notes

Imagined Stakeholder Persona

Role: [STEAM] Funder / Donor

Name: [Thurston Howell III] Age: 50 Occupation: Corporate Philanthropy Director [Do they exist?] Type: Would-have-been screenwriter or sculptor.

Characteristics: Driven highly-capable professional Potential Ivy League or similar background [specified in discussion: Stanford] Inured to corporate ecosystem. [Major? Career path? Not specified in my write-up, underspecified in discussion; one could (stretching it) imagine a quantitative analyst who began as a physicist and moved to Wall Street e.g. but that is a relatively narrow path that doesn’t seem consistent with the interests specified in “type” above. THIS PART OF THE PORTRAIT NEEDS WORK.]

Goals: Make corporation look / do good. Build a portfolio of high-prestige / high-interest-value (press-ready) projects funded Wants to see results in real world.

Motivations: Make corporation look / do good Help others excel in careers he had no time for

Barriers: Must justify decisions to higher-up boards [, public-relations professionals, etc.] Must satisfy high-prestige / high-status parties he consults with / in his social network Trusted contacts not omniscient: HacDC’s visibility buffered / mediated by established authorities & patterns of thought, patterns of media coverage [Discussion: - is a hackerspace a shady / disreputable / potentially criminal organization in the way “hackers” are portrayed in the press? - is a hackerspace established in some way culturally, popularly felt to be a meritorious site of activity? - [Abstracting from some discussion: is a hackerspace just a club for geeks? Do they deliver a product in the form of invention? Do they educate? Are they helping kids to learn? A hackerspace is educational? So do they fill an educational niche not better or sufficiently filled by traditional or charter schools & school activities?] - [Thinking further: is a hackerspace a site of creative use of technology, as in supporting arts? I’m thinking of Nam June Paik and Ai Weiwei and artists like that; would a hackerspace enable such a person to develop or to develop and bring out their works? No way. Tell me more . . . ]

Trusted Sources: Professional nonprofit BOD / Executive directors Art & literary critics Leaders in academia [Added after: Contacts he cultivates in the press to see what is hot & new / in effect, proxy “coolhunters” enabling to see out towards technical and cultural horizon] Publications / Press: [The unifying principle of these notional selections is a very broad net cast in the open media, professional and gray literature, etc. scoured as time allows for leads on emerging fields for the creative use or teaching of technology; our idealized / imagined philanthropy director samples these media partly to escape boredom and repetition with habitual paths of cultural investment, but relies on them also to fact-check and assess the success potential, prestige potential, and a fuzzy idea called “merit” for his corporation’s funded projects.] Newspapers: New York Times Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Business Week Journals (Broad coverage): IEEE Spectrum Scientific American Nature Science Daedalus Inside Higher Education Chronicle of Higher Education Los Angeles Review of Books New York Review of Books Smithsonian American Craft Arts Journal (& Website: artsjournal.com) Leonardo (& Website: leonardo.info) ARTnews (& Website: artnews.com) Raw Vision (& Website: rawvision.com) BT Technology Journal Atlantic (with reservations) Slate

Journals (specific): The Behavioral and Brain Sciences [various] IEEE topic-specific journals [journals in a field he is well-versed or previously professionally specialized in—biomed engineering? Physics? Economics?] Make

Broadcast media (radio): NPR Science Friday RadioLab etc. TED talks [same for WWW --& broadcast?] Broadcast media (television): PBS? [a spread of news networks such as Fox, CNN, & MSNBC taken with healthy “grain of salt” – these media less trusted than sampled for trends] WWW: Boing Boing Brainpicker [broad spread of topical sites / blogs / subscription databases] Outsider Art Pathfinder