Ten years ago I became a blogger.
I realize that’s not very interesting to anyone but myself — even though in blog years, it’s sort of like celebrating your bicentennial. But I’ve learned a few things from ten years of blogging, and that might interest you:
What I’ve learned
- Writing what you know helps you know what you write. In work like ours, you have to keep a lot of principles in your head. We all know a lot of things. Writing about those things for ten years means having to go a step beyond knowing.
- Having a monster to feed is terrifying, but good. Having a blog is like having a pet sasquatch. There are moments of high terror when the duties of your “real” job seem to crowd out writing anything at all. But that’s what makes it work: No sane person would sit down and write several thousand short articles about fundraising. Only a blogger would do that!
- People who care about fundraising are civil and incredibly generous. I’ve met — online and in person — and lot of my fellow bloggers, and their most salient feature is generosity — of advice, help, and spirit. And maybe more amazing, I’ve had trollish behavior show up only two or three times in the ten years. What is it about our profession? We should be proud.
Prehistory of this blog
Before September 26, 2009, I blogged at Donor Power Blog. It has since gone dormant, but you can still find it in a weird, truncated form, thousands of posts without a purpose but still possible to read. Google it.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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