The strings attached to money from funders, investors and sponsors often suffocate the very creativity they intend to nurture. Here’s an (original, innovative) way to dodge the Gatekeepers, maintain your vision’s integrity and pay the rent.

This article reveals one organisation’s strategy to maintain its integrity by incentivising potential funders to tick its boxes, rather than compromising its vision by ticking theirs.

The Golden Rule

Those who have the gold make the rules.

It’s a consequence of imbalanced supply and demand. The demand for brilliant new ideas rarely exceeds the supply of people seeking others to fund their brilliant new ideas.

Funders therefore set the rules for deciding which one of a constellation of brilliant ideas should benefit from their scare funds.

This may seem too obvious to be worth mentioning, but the resulting power imbalance is the bane of most innovators’ lives. The Golden Rules’ implicit imbalance merits examination, just in case less painful alternatives are available.

First, let’s address the exceptions, when the usual roles are reversed: 

• Football clubs paying huge sums to sign star talent
• Companies forking out massive compensation packages for top CEOs
• Investment funds falling over themselves to buy up the latest unicorn IPO shares

Even for these exceptions, it’s worth noting that in a zero-sum game, success for the outlier implies greater failure for everyone else:

• Footballers have a 0.05% chance of ever getting paid to play their beloved Beautiful Game
• The more multiples of average employee salary CEOs are paid, the less there is left for their colleagues
• Retail investors are structurally stiffed by institutional investors who hold more, better cards

So let’s focus on the 99.9% who aren’t showered with blank cheques by strangers just to do their thing. 

What’s the power dynamic at play for the rest of us?

The Beggars

The tool of trade familiar to most entrepreneurs, creatives and other original thinkers driven to create something new rather than get paid to do something for someone else, is the begging bowl.

You’re nearly always the supplicant, usually one among a huge throng of fellow-supplicants. 

Each of you is convinced your idea is not the only the best, but will advance humanity and redound greatly to the benefit of anyone wise enough to help realise your vision.

Which nearly always involves them giving you some of their money.

This looks – and feels – a lot like begging.

The Gatekeepers

Now consider the transaction from the other side of the pitching table, selection meeting, or Gatekeeper conference.

The Gatekeepers – investment funds, publicly-funded bodies, private philanthropic trusts, charities/NGOs redistributing their own hard-earned funds – all face the same dilemma.

There are way more beggars than providers.

To deter chancers, triage time-wasters, and sift out the mediocre, Gatekeepers need Rules:

• Investment scopes: for investors striving to spot the next unicorn before anyone else and make a killing.
• Official criteria: for holders of the public purse responsible for allocating funding as legislators intended.
• Funding forms: for trustees to demonstrate they’ve distributed the funds entrusted to their good judgement in an appropriate, responsible, effective and transparent manner.

In other words, they all have boxes to tick.

Any student looking for scholarship funds, entrepreneur looking for seed money, or artist trying to realise a creative vision, knows the perils of box-ticking.

Every new box ticked, is another string attached. Each string is another compromise to your original vision.

If this still isn’t resonating, maybe some narrative creativity will.

The Dilemma Of Sam The Sculptor

Sam the Sculptor makes big marble pieces. And we mean BIG.

Sam could have worked in paper-cutting, plasticine or objet trouve collage, but the Muse speaks to Sam in marble.

Sam’s sculptures require very expensive blocks of marble, which take ages and ages to carve.

One morning Sam awakes with an exquisite vision: 

an old man, crouched behind a sheltering palm tree, huddles with two little girls, as a tiger prowls menacingly around them.

Inspired, Sam:

• makes detailed sketches and 3D computer models
• Researches, and consults widely on all potential funders,
• whittles the best candidates down to a shortlist of three
• fills in each of their forms, ticking all the right boxes
• crafts a cover letter tailored to each funder’s mission statement

Applications posted, Sam waits nervously in an empty studio, alert for the postman’s tread, staring at the letterbox in the studio door.

One morning, three letters plop onto the doormat. All three funders want to meet Sam, as soon as possible, to discuss getting this sculpture made.

Sam the Sculptor makes appointments over the next three days.

Sam shoulders a leather portfolio, and leaves for the first appointment.

Funder A loves the sketches and computer models, saying:

‘Sam, this is just the kind of thing we love. We’re American, though. Can you make the tiger a cougar? Also, could you make the cougar a bit less prowly, and a bit more friendly? Maybe a regular cat, actually. Make those tweaks, and we’ll give you a third  of your budget.’

Sam revises the sketches and computer models.

Funder B loves them, saying:

‘This is just the kind of thing we love. We have a gender policy, however, and are uncomfortable with adult men touching children. Make one of the girls a boy. Make both of them clearly over eighteen. Just to be sure – no physical contact. Do that, and replace the old man with an old woman, and we’ll give you a third of your budget’.

Sam revises the sketches and computer models.

Funder C loves them, saying:

‘This is just the kind of thing we love. As you know, however, we’re the philanthropic arm of a gazebo magnate. Can you replace the palm tree with a gazebo? With their logo? Do that, and we’ll fund the final third of your budget’.

The funding includes a decent fee that will pay Sam’s rent and put food on the table for the next year, and permit Sam to profit from any sale.

Back in the studio, Sam looks at the revised sketches, which depict:

an old woman, under a branded gazebo, standing next to a young man and a young woman, as a friendly cat approaches them.

The question only Sam can answer is: 

‘Is it still worth it?’.

The True Story Of Sam The Sculptor

As anyone who’s ever applied for funding for anything knows, The Dilemma Of Sam The  Sculptor is a risible fantasy.

Here’s what really happened.

• Sam applies to several dozen funders.
• After several months, only a handful respond.
• All but four are a ‘no’.
• Two of the four ‘maybe’s don’t respond to any further communication.
• The remaining two attach similar strings to the Dillemma version, but only offer 50% of the budget between them.
• To make up the balance, Sam’s options are to self-fund, beg from family and friends, or sign away any prospect of breaking even to an agent who takes on no risk, but all potential profit.
• Eventually, worn down or penniless, Sam accepts sculpture is actually a lifestyle choice/hobby, and not a living.
• Sam gets a proper job to pay the rent.

The story doesn’t always turn out this way.

Sometimes there can be a perfect alignment between vision and funder mission statements, so any strings attached are not really strings at all.

Sometimes, canny applicants craft their original applications to precisely match particular funders’ requirements. Funders have to dispense the money to someone by year end, so this strategy maximises chances of being the recipient, even if it comes at the cost of original vision.

Sometimes ‘white knights’ appear, like a rich relative who believes in your vision, or dies and leaves you their money. 

Rarely, you might find an authentic ‘angel investor’. Your personal passion, integrity and track record is all they need to shower you with gold, no strings attached.

But most original thinkers, most of the time, experience some version of the True Story of Sam The Sculptor.  

All things considered, The Dilemma of Sam The Sculptor is a pretty good outcome. Materials all paid for, enough to live on for a whole year, and the prospect that someone might buy it in the end are not to be sniffed at.

The only problem is that spending that year of your life sculpting the corrupted version of your vision, designed by a committee of strangers spending someone else’s money, requires you to completely re-define your notion of success.

• Is making any marble sculptures better than stacking shelves?
• Should you try another project that might end up with some resemblance to your original vision?

Or is there an alternative strategy?

Whose Rules?

The trick is not to fill in application forms.

Easier said than done, but as we already know, the outliers do sometimes get to call the shots: 

• Elite football stars can force clubs to break their wage structures.
• Boards of Directors can pay top CEOs ‘whatever it takes’ to turn their business round
• Individual investors can beat the big boys through agility, prescience or luck

The common factor reversing the usual power dynamic. 

Who’s setting the rules?

Who’s deciding to break their rules?

Who’s approaching whom?

Who fills out whose form?

Who’s ticking whose boxes?

Who’s the string attacher, and who’s the string attachee?

This is the privilege of the outliers, but ‘be an outlier’ is hardly helpful, or actionable, advice.

Here’s an alternative. Fair warning, it only works if your goal is defined by something other than making money.

You can still get paid, if you want, but it requires your impulse to be something other than making money for its own sake.

Most of all, you must have the best story.

Learn From The Best Storytellers

Filling in the same form as thousands of other applicants makes it much harder for you to stand out. 

Each box dilutes your vision, and each rival applicant diminishes your chances of winning the lottery.

Critically, the act of filling in a form places you in the power dynamic of being a beggar, not a beguiler. 

This can be addressed with sophisticated storytelling.

Two of our greatest storytellers, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, have bequeathed us fictional archetypes to make the point.

Would you rather be Dickens’ Oliver Twist, begging poorhouse tyrant Mr. Bumble the Bedale, doling out the gruel?

‘desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

(This is often misquoted, revealingly, as ‘Please, Sir, can I have some more?”).

Or would you rather be Twain’s Tom Sawyer, reluctantly permitting his friends to serve his punishment of whitewashing a fence in exchange for transferring the contents of their pockets to his own, yet leaving everyone perfectly satisfied with the transaction? 

Twain says of Tom:

‘He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain’. 

Oliver Twist and Tom Sawyer both started in desperate straits. Why did Tom prosper and Oliver suffer? 

Because Oliver was desperate, extending his begging bowl and counting on the kindness of strangers. He had no story beyond an appeal for pity.

Tom, however, was reframing. He had the storytelling alchemy to turn lemons into lemonade.

Tom instinctively knew the smart way to create an object of desire is not to sell it, but to not sell it.

The Best Story

The Gatekeepers’ refrains:

• We’re looking for original ideas
• Surprise us
• What’s your Unique Selling Point?

If they mean what they say, The Best Story will not only tick all their boxes, but will mean they should agree to tick your boxes, in the sense of simply facilitating your original vision.

Something truly original, surprising and with a genuine USP, should render the rulebook redundant:

• To hell with our investment checklist
• Screw the funding criteria
• What do you want from us?

Not easy, which is why it takes the Best Story to induce such authentic enthusiasm. They’re looking for uniquely compelling ideas, so it should takes something truly unique to convince them to rip up their rulebooks.

Only something truly outside-the-box could induce a Gatekeeper to ditch the multi-volume manual, and instead apply their pithy Mission Statement.

The Best Story would induce such trust in your integrity, the Gatekeepers’ would feel petty to attach any strings.

The most convincing proof of sincerity, after all, is not words, but action.  

Doing the right thing relieves Gatekeepers of the need to prove their sincerity. Rather, the fewer strings they attach to any support, the more feeble they render any attempts to carp, criticise or nitpick. 

Sceptics, cynics and doubters are powerless to combat unambiguous, transparent acts of support.

There being no area of human activity more deserving of scepticism, cynicism and doubt than greenwashing, how might Tom Sawyer might go about measurably reducing carbon emissions?

But before revealing the answer, we must ask what we need money for.

Money and Love buckets

We’re all so gaslit by Money, we find it hard to imagine interactions unmediated by it. 

This is odd:

• we constantly barter in our daily lives without mentioning money: ‘You wash – I’ll dry’. Eat your greens and you can have an ice-cream’. 
• news headlines are full of examples of people acting unmotivated by money, from acts of charity, terrorism and faith to political protests.
• we all have parts of our life we don’t measure in money – indeed they’d be much diminished if we did: family, community, religion, sports team affiliation.

Unconsciously, we tend to separate activities into buckets:

1. Things I Do For Money: work, shopping, commuting.
2. Things I Do For Love: hobbies, caring for relatives, community projects.

We treat the Money and Love buckets as if they were completely different spheres of human activity. In reality, everything we do is on some kind of Money-Love spectrum. We each have our own red lines at either end:

• I’d never stack shelves at a supermarket for free
• I’d never expect to be paid to care for my mother

Most activities, however, could straddle both buckets, depending on context:

• if you like our music, we’ll be passing the hat round the pub
• my elderly neighbour insists on paying me when I mow their lawn

Our motivations are far more complex than we acknowledge. The 99.95% of footballers who never get paid to play, still play. The figure for musicians must be similar.

Like Sam the Sculptor, an artist jeweller making Tiffany eggs needs expensive materials and can’t live on air. Yet they persist anyway, driven by other, more powerful, reasons. Or do it for the money. Or something in between.

Anyone volunteering for any unpaid activity – a local litter-pick, picking up a friend’s kid from school, working at a charity shop or marching on a political protest -does it because they think it’s important. They’d recoil at the very idea of ‘putting a price on it’.

Tom Sawyer would put his Tiffany egg in an unobtrusive corner of a shop window, unlabelled, with no price tag, stand outside staring at it, refuse all initial offers to buy it, and end up with the eventually highest bidder thinking they had a great bargain.

But neither Tom, nor the buyer, is primarily motivated by money. 

So how can people motivated by, say, carbon emissions reduction, square this circle?

The Best Green Story

Here’s the dilemma:

1. Pursuit of profit over planet is the root cause of our climate crisis. This means effective climate activists shouldn’t divert their energy towards fundraising, or dilute their integrity to win funding. 

2. In the ‘real world’, people need money. Every new flood, fire and drought may gives more of us more reason to be climate activists, but how can a network of such people thrive and scale on their own time, and dime, without money?

Here are solutions:

1. Don’t have a bank account. The best possible insulation against money’s distraction and corruption is not to touch the stuff. It also attracts people who are disillusioned by such experiences. Not having a bank account is, ironically, a Unique Selling Point that sets you apart from the pack.

2. Let funders directly support your volunteers to do what they’re doing anyway. They can provide goods and services (with no strings attached). They can directly pay volunteers for the no-bank-account network. They can indirectly pay them via trusted third parties who’ve signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with the climate action network that only require transparency, by publishing any contracts so the transaction amounts and purposes are clear to everyone. 

That’s it.  

• The mechanisms look like this.  
• A transparent MoU with a commercial enterprise looks like this.
• An MoU with a government official looks like this. 
• An unsolicited, no-strings-attached donation of US$500K-worth of goods and services looks like this.
• An end-user licence agreement looks like this.
• A privacy notice looks like this. 
• A Disclosure Agreement looks like this.

There are plenty of funders whose mission statements claim they support emissions reduction. 

Their sincerity is easily tested by whether they insist on their rulesbooks, application forms and tick boxes, or whether they themselves apply as a Partner or Patron here.

One thing is guaranteed. 

Those that do will get The Best Story.

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Details on how the See Through ecosystem gets other people to pay its pro bono contributors cold hard cash to do what they are motivated to do for free anyway (Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active)  here. 

Same link for anyone who wants to contribute their time, expertise or goods and services in kind regardless of remuneration.