I Don't Get It Update

Honestly I was so frustrated over that deal. It was so ridiculous and should have been so simple. So I go to the meeting and it turns out just to be me, my boss, and two other people. It has nothing to do with answering my question and, as a result, doesn't help me to provide the answer and info necessary at the meeting. POINTLESS MEETING!!!!

So the deal is I need to know what the value of this service is so I can get support commitments from participating donors. The support commitments were what was needed by the time of the meeting. Since I didn't get the value I couldn't get the commitments. To try to get the commitments anyway I went to last year's sole donor and said "would you be willing to provide a commitments that says 'I commit up to $X' - but it will probably be less because I don't have this number yet and there will be other donors, but they're waiting for this number that we don't have yet before they'll commit" They of course didn't want to commit to such an unknown. Who could blame them.

So we're facing a deadline. Without these support letters for this specific amount we can't qualify for a certain type of funding to support other related activities and we'd have to totally rewrite the budget for this application within a couple of days to submit it without the commitments.

In the end I made up a reasonable number. I contacted a number of potential donors, established procedures and a scope of services they'd be supporting - all reasonable and likely to be accurate. But since the bosses couldn't figure out how to come to a consensus to provide me with the necessary info, I had to make it up myself. I wrote sample support letters with amounts and each donor committed. I got all of the funding commitments necessary and then some.

GEEZE!!!