By: Melissa Bank Stepno, President & CEO
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin (1882)
If you follow The Intelligent Edge closely, you may have noticed that we publish a new blog post nearly every week. Once a month, we pause to publish a donor advised fund-specific post on DAFinitively Speaking, our sister blog.
Blogging is a shared responsibility across our team, with most consultants contributing one post each year. That can feel like an easy lift for those who enjoy writing, and a much heavier one for those who do not.
Then there is me: my schedule is much more rigorous, and I publish about once a month. Admittedly, that feels like a lot, even if it is nowhere near the pace of true social media bloggers who are posting weekly, daily, or even more often.
When ideas arrive and when they do not
For me, blog ideas sometimes arrive easily. A headline appears while I am reading an article, a client question sparks a broader reflection, or a conversation with a colleague turns into a topic worth exploring.
In fact, the posts that come most naturally often begin when I am not consciously thinking about writing at all, like while I am out for a walk, trying to fall asleep, or cooking dinner.
About once a year the ideas really start to flow, and I wind up with a couple of blog posts ready to publish well before they are needed or I create a list of topics that I want to come back to later.
And then there are times like this one, when I struggle to find a subject that feels meaningful enough to put fingers to keyboard, or one that I can develop into a full post. I focus and I think and I try to conjure a topic. Yet, the proverbial blinking cursor feels less like an invitation and more like a challenge.
Some might see not knowing what to write about as a sign that I have run out of things to say. I prefer to think of it differently: the ideas are still there; they are simply marinating and have not had enough time, context, or reflection to take shape.
Starting with reoccurring themes
When I am unsure what to write about, I don’t consider “what is a big enough topic?” Instead, I think about what keeps resurfacing. The questions that come up repeatedly in client conversations, team discussions, or the work itself are often the ones pointing toward something useful for a post.
But usefulness is only part of it. I also need to feel some genuine interest in the subject myself. There’s got to be enough curiosity, irritation, surprise, or uncertainty to want to keep turning it over. Without that, even a perfectly valid topic won’t produce the words or it will feel flat on the page.
As I continued to struggled, I realized that there was a theme that keeps reoccurring, one that I keep coming back too, one that was even causing some curiosity and irritation: This is:
I don’t always know what I want to write about.
So that brings us to this post, which is sort of about nothing but also a lot about prospect development all at the same time. Stay with me…
The cursor is part of the process
This blog post started with a deadline looming and my quiet admission that I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I briefly considered: “what if we just skipped this week? Would anyone even notice?” No, that would be to admit failure.
Then, I thought: “could I pull a Chuck Lorre and simply post a quick quippy quote?” like his show-closing Vanity Cards. No, that wouldn’t work either.
Sidebar: for those of you who are not familiar with Chuck Lorre and his trademark vanity cards, the widely successful sitcom writer and producer typically ends every episode of his shows with a short editorial comment.
Both options would be completely out of character for me, a deadline-driven, results-oriented professional who, has an immense personal pet peeve about being late or proverbially being “stood up.”
It would also not be a good show of leadership for my team, for whom we would not accept a response of “I don’t feel like writing a blog post this year” or even worse, a missed client deadline.
The Tie to Prospect Development
So, instead, I thought: How can I tie this to our profession?
Prospect Development often follows a similar path to this post. Much of our work begins without a neat answer in sight. We begin with fragments, questions and clues, and our innate curiosity allows us to follow them until a clearer picture comes into view.
Perhaps it is less so the case when responding to reactive requests for profiles or briefings on specific prospects.
Perhaps it is more so the case when asked to develop a net-new prospect list for a specific initiative our organization is launching or asked to create a new type of analysis on our data.
When we are building something from scratch, we rarely begin with the complete picture. We begin with our organization’s mission, a specific fundraising priority, a geographic area where our gift officer is traveling, an industry, an affinity group, a past giving pattern, or sometimes nothing more than a hunch from leadership that there must be more opportunity than what is currently visible.
We want to start with an organized approach, but the first pass may feel scattered. The first search term may be imperfect, the list may be too broad, or too narrow, or full of prospects that are only adjacent to the real answer that we are looking for.
At this point, we don’t just give up and ignore the request or project in front of us. And we don’t consider it a failure. Rather, we know it is part of the process.
By the second pass, we are beginning to refine. And, like when my blog topics come the most naturally (when I’m not trying to think about a topic), sometimes the best search phrase, research methodology or project plan emerges when we are working on something else.
In both writing and prospect development, the answer rarely appears all at once. It takes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to start with what we have until the right throughline finally reveals itself.
For more on my thoughts on this topic, check out my last Intelligent Edge blog post: Curiosity, Prospect Research, and the Value of Following the Thread. Maybe this is the irony of it all: even a post that started with nothing eventually found its way back to a thread worth following.
