Community Fundraising Means Showing Up for Each Other

Let’s talk interdependence and donor support today with our Director of Community Fundraising, Allison Celosia. She wants you to feel empowered as a returning or first-time donor to NaNoWriMo and our broader literary arts community.

Image id: A yellow and teal graphic of a bar chart entitled “FY22 Annual Budget USD $1.4 Million.” There are four bars, from left to right Corporate Partners 21%, Community Donors 46%, Store Merch 20%, and Affiliate Income 13%.

Did you know that NaNoWriMo is story-powered by more than 8,000 individual donors every year? In fact, more than 45% of our annual revenue comes from community members like you.

This year, our annual operating budget is $1.4M… aka, we have to raise $1.4M in funding to sustain our amazing community and writing programs. (For the super math nerds, that’s more than $600K from community members alone. Whoa! That’s donor power!) 

This annual budget plan ensures that we offer our programs free-of-cost to all our participants. We want to provide everyone access to their stories, to their imagination, to the overall joy of writing and reading. Eliminating a paywall is one HUGE way we can do that for our community.

But ahh, what does that look like in context with everything going on in the world? We’re seeing news headlines about the highest U.S. inflation rate in 40 years. This means a carton of eggs is 3 times the price as it was last year, gasoline is USD $7 per gallon in some cities… the list of commodity price pain points are endless. Same goes in the U.K., Canada, Germany, India, and so many other countries where Wrimos live, work, and write.

For me as a community fundraiser, historic inflation rates might spark fear and anxiety. I might feel pressure to “do whatever it takes to get that cash.” But that’s not me! I’m an abundance mindset fundraiser. I’m a humanity-comes-first fundraiser. I’m good with reorienting our metrics to better reflect our economic reality because at the end of the day, I know that our community—myself, the rest of the NaNo staff and board, and all of our 8,000 donors and counting—are doing the best we can to invest in the good health of our creative community.

We are about to enter our fall fundraising season with two big campaigns ready to mobilize all our community resources: NaNo Prep and our Double Up Donation Weekend. In a few weeks, I will be inviting all of us to give within our means, and that is really an invitation to be thoughtful about your own financial power and privilege.

For many of us, it means donating to NaNoWriMo this year might look a lot different. 

Maybe you want to give, but feel pressured to give at a certain amount and it has frozen you from making any contribution at all. My response is, “That’s fine! Would moving to a monthly recurring donation help ease the financial commitment? That way, it’s not a lump sum donation but a smaller donation once a month.”Maybe your donor interests lie elsewhere this year because of, well… gestures at the state of the world. My response, “Awesome! Do you want help budgeting, so you can make meaningful donations to all the causes that matter to you? We can do that!”Maybe you are straight up mad that rent is high and groceries are more expensive, and you don’t wanna hear from me asking for money. My response, “I hear you. I’m a renter in Los Angeles, and am feeling similar pains. Fundraising can feel extractive. After reading Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth as a staff team, we learned that we could reframe money as a tool for building love and restoration, rather than for punishment or penalty. You’re an important member of this community, no matter your donation level or even if you donate zero zip zilch at all.

Ultimately, we hold each other accountable and we also hold each other tenderly when it comes to mobilizing donor dollars to sustain NaNoWriMo as an available, inclusive resource for hundreds of thousands of writers around the world. 

The math of raising $600,000 from community donors doesn’t go away with hard times. We need those funds to keep our programs accessible and free-of-cost. Our annual budget covers personnel expenses, technology needs to support more than 350,000 Wrimos annually, and a merchandising store and fulfillment center to provide fun writers’ tools and goodies to support us along our writing journeys.

That’s when I remind myself that we’re a community first. We can rely on each other and step up wherever we can. Maybe this is the year we move from 8,000 donors to 10,000 donors to share the work of raising funds, maybe this is the year we build out more partnership drives to build resources with like-minded organizations and friends—the opportunities are limitless when we prioritize mutual support and interdependence as ways to sustain NaNoWriMo and our entire creative community.

Stay tuned, as I continue to wax poetic and bring more community support into our fundraising efforts here at NaNoWriMo.

Allison Celosia is a storyteller, written word mostly. She edits aloud in real time and trips over their native Bisaya (Filipine) tongue. Allison is also a movement building fundraiser who centers community relationships in their work. Outside of fundraising, they are active in local labor organizing. She makes challah bread with her own home-milled flour and reads bilingual children’s books with her nephew every chance they get.