INK blog

Do you feel sadly? No. You feel sad.
Do you feel gladly? No. You feel glad.

So why, oh why, do so many people — including many fairly well-educated folks —
say they feel badly when they just feel bad.

If you feel badly, it likely means something is wrong with your hands. Have you
lost all feeling in your fingers? Is your sense of touch on the fritz?

Once and for all: If you feel sorry about something, you feel bad. No –ly.

No need to feel bad about this; just say it correctly.

I hate looking into someone’s face and asking for money. I just can’t do it. Hence, I am not a development officer. I am, however, rather good at asking people for money via media other than the mouth.

From UJA walk-a-thons to synagogue bazaars to PFLAG dinner dances to nonprofit board-member letter-writing campaigns, I’ve unwittingly been involved in fund-raising my whole life. Still, when I began my eight years of work in a university development office, it was a rude awakening.

Thankfully, I was not unleashed on alumni and donors all that often. My job was to craft messages, design campaign materials, produce magazines and publications, and write creative yet heartwarming fund-raising appeals. I did most of this in the comfort of my little office. When I was allowed to leave, perhaps for lunch with a potential donor who happened to take a liking to me (go figure!), I begged for a warning sign so I could excuse myself to the bathroom when the big ASK was to take place. I seldom got that warning, so a well-timed duck under the table to retrieve my dropped fork often had to suffice.

Enter electronic fund-raising. You’d think I’d be thrilled, that the passive-aggressive medium of e-mail would be my saving grace. Alas, no.

It is widely known in fund-raising circles that 90 percent of the money comes from 10 percent of the people. And those 10 percent need care and feeding … in person. So no help there.

Then there are those who believe electronic communications can take the place of print communications. They are my enemy for a number of reasons. And they are wrong.

I am an old-fashioned print person. I love paper; I love ink. I love to read on the bus; I love to read in the bathroom. Reading electronic media in a moving vehicle makes me motion sick. Reading electronic media in the bathroom makes me … um, that’s just gross.

And every fund-raising study I’ve read supports the fact that electronic media cannot REPLACE print. It can augment; it can complement. But, praise be, it will NEVER replace it. Cue applause.

I use both kinds of media for fund-raising, and pretty much everything else. It’s time to talk about using these media together successfully — and, more importantly to me, how to use your print budget in the most effective, productive, creative and money-raising way.

With apologies to one of the smartest and most successful people I know (Anneke Seley, author of the terrific book, Sales 2.0): I am so over the 2.0 world. Really, how much staying power can one number have?

So, I will be drawing on my umpteen years of fund-raising experience to share some of my principals for Fund-Raising 3.0: Using Print Media for Fund-Raising in an Electronic World. Cue applause. And stay tuned.

Please don’t use the word impact as a (transitive) verb. It’s not nice. And it makes me wince.
Every time.

Your dictionary may tell you it’s OK. But it isn’t. You want to have an impact on something
(noun). But you do not want to impact something (verb).

Here’s why: If something is impacted, such as a tooth or your digestive system, it is a BAD
thing. So you don’t want to do that to someone or something. To impact is hurtful. To have
an impact is noble.

Most of the time, when people use impact as a verb, they should be using affect. You want
to affect an outcome; you do not want to impact an outcome. Wince.

I used to get paid to pee. I also got paid to walk around my office, talk on the phone, surf the Web, do my expenses, stroll around the block, eat lunch and visit with my co-workers.

Now I don’t.

That has been one of the hardest things to which I have had to adjust now that I work for myself. No one pays me to go to the bathroom or lunch or, well, anywhere. If I am not producing actual, tangible stuff, I am not getting paid. Ick.

While charging by the hour does allow me to happily make round 83 of changes and answer my client’s phone call on Saturday night with a smile, it also means I am never really “off,” and there is no such thing as “downtime.”

I always loved downtime.

And I often find myself reaching the end of what I thought was a busy day and looking back to find my billable hours were minimal. What the hell did I do all day? It’s 9 pm, and I felt busy until that moment. And I earned, like, $1.50 all day. Ick, again.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal talked about how self-employed people can’t take vacation. Sing it, sister. My past couple of “vacations” were really just changes of venue: I worked in a hotel room instead of in my apartment. Granted, I was so very happy to enjoy real theater at night while working in New York, where they mercifully make you turn off your cell phone for at least two hours. Of course, the rub continued: No one was paying me to see Hair (which I didn’t love, by the way).

And no one is paying me to write this post, which I am doing while watching a baseball game and a football game, answering e-mail and responding to a phone survey about the “Times Square-ization” of San Francisco (they wish!). This is my new downtime. So now I’ll just cross my legs and try to think of a way to make peeing billable.

To editors, superfluous apostrophes are a blot on the grammatical landscape. While apostrophes are necessary to indicate possession and construct contractions, please don’t use them willy-nilly. There are rules! And they are pretty easy to follow:

Do use an apostrophe with plurals of single letters: Mind your p’s and q’s. I got two A’s on my report card.

Do NOT use an apostrophe for plurals of multiple-letter combinations: The CEOs are meeting today. I gave her five IOUs.

Do NOT use an apostrophe for plurals of figures: There are four 727s in the fleet. The temperature is in the low 50s. The 1980s were filled with neon.

Ignore The New York Times’ incorrect use of an apostrophe in decades: It’s 1960s, not 1960’s, unless you are claiming ownership on behalf of that single year. I also suggest you ignore The Times’ crazy use of ’s after s (Times’s — no!). We all learned in elementary school that is just plain wrong.

And for the love of G-d, do NOT use an apostrophe to make a poor unsuspecting word plural. Just add the s, no apostrophe. Really.

To be specific: If you absolutely must put a sign on your house announcing your family name, don’t use an apostrophe: The Hauptmans, NOT The Hauptman’s (if you are feeling super-possessive, you may put an apostrophe AFTER the s, indicating the house belongs to the family — as in The Hauptmans’ House — but NEVER before).

P.S. Its is possessive: The posse lost its way. It’s is a contraction for it is: It’s now or never. Think of the apostrophe as a leftover from the dot of the i.

At long last, I have joined the blogosphere. I have vehemently avoided doing so until now, determined to evade the inherent responsibility and pressure. You must blog constantly and be fascinating all the time, I thought. But recently, as I was working with a client on her soon-to-be-published website and companion blog, I realized you can have a blog and post to it only when you feel like doing so: weekly, monthly, even yearly. No promises are required, I realized. I don’t have to be fascinating all the time — though it does give me the opportunity to be fascinating … sometimes, I hope. As wiser folks than I have said: “You gotta be in it to win it.” And as my sweet husband told me one year as we were watching the Academy Awards, and I was saying (whining) that I really, really wanted to win an award and give an acceptance speech: “But, honey, you weren’t in anything this year.”

Well, I’m in it.