“When in doubt…Solve a problem.”
“When in doubt….Solve a problem” is a tidbit of wisdom I picked up somewhere. It was probably something I read during my 8 months of job (and soul) searching in 2016, prior to starting my company FansRaise.
A large part of my life was dedicated to becoming a performing musician and educator. I applied to exactly ONE college, because that was the place to go if you wanted to become a high school band director. I’d like to say that I grew up with a dying passion to become a band director, but I didn’t exactly have that. Going to college to study music seemed like the natural thing to do, as band and the performing arts was simply my persona, and to do anything else seemed unnatural.
After teaching in the public school classroom/bandroom for parts of 7 years (not counting the years of private lesson and marching band instruction/design) I set forth into the more commercial/corporate job market place. I probably transitioned better than most teachers do that are exiting the teaching field, mostly due to some awesome part/full time gigs I had in sales. These experiences were more than just paying the bills — they were setting me up for what came next.
In my journey in the B2B corporate sales world, I found quickly that sometimes the only way to move up the ladder is to move out onto a different ladder. I found that “job-hopping” as our Talent Acquisition colleagues termed it ACTUALLY helped me much more than it hurt. I’m sure there were positions that I was disqualified from because some recruiter was working under the mandate of “NO JOB HOPPERS”, but I’ve come to learn that those types of organizations are trying to thrive on the premise of bringing in new employees that are less likely to quit. “Rather than try to strive for a better workplace culture or deeper support of employee development, let’s focus on finding candidates that will put up with a lot of stuff without leaving…”
I found my fit (and what I had hoped might be my professional “ForeverHome”) with a HR and Recruitment software provider. I had a great boss, my employer was interested in my own development, my sales team was full of great people, and we were disrupting the HR Tech space and generally just FREAKING OUT our competitors. What ended up happening is that our primary competitor bought us (“merged” was the official release, but come on), and my whole team was laid off.
This hurt, because for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a purpose and I felt like I had something to really dig into. I picked myself up, brushed myself off and began job searching. I got close on a few things, but I didn’t LOVE any of the roles (and it might have shown through to be honest). I saw the job seeker’s candidate experience from the other side, and I hated it. If you read and follow the HR and Recruitment thought leaders that preach “better candidate experience” — I can tell you that it is still pretty horrible even when Glassdoor rates a company pretty high.
In the interim, I saw one of my old performing groups (Drum Corps International Finalist The Crossmen Drum and Bugle Corps) kicked off a capital fundraising campaign to purchase a new $100,000 tractor trailer for equipment. As an alum I donated, but then I took careful note about how the campaign was conducted, how donors were treated and how progress was tracked. I began to think of ways that a campaign like theirs might help other drum corps, and then other high school and middle school programs, and then community groups, faith-based music ensembles, theater, drama, etc. The lightning bolt hit about 11:30pm one night, and I pulled the proverbial all-nighter and filled 3 legal pads with ideas, drawings, and notes.
One of the things that they DON’T teach you in music education is how to raise money for your arts program. By this point in my life, my daughters had started their own music education in their school’s band, so I was technically a “band parent”. In addition to the candy/cookie/wrapping paper sales that would come home as fundraisers, I thought that there might be a way to “platformize” a well-orchestrated capital fundraising campaign in a pre-packaged way that would be accessible to non-profit and school-based arts programs without the budget to pay a non-profit consultant.
This notion of starting a new web-based platform to help the performing arts began to crawl into my moment-by-moment consciousness, and in late 2016 FansRaise was officially born. We went to a closed beta in the spring of 2017, and moved to a wide release in May of 2017. To date we have touched over 13,000 student participants and educators while helping 180 performing organizations around the United States create funding that wasn’t previously available, and we’ve done this via a platform that requires very little human intervention from our end. The system is designed to tap-into students’ real life and social networks to gain support for a unified goal, and our delivery vector is a combination of targeted emailing as well as social media. Administrators and student participants are coached “virtually”, and we’re seeing amazing results across the board.
The problem that we set out to solve was the lack of funding support for our nation’s performing arts. Everyone that either works for FansRaise directly or indirectly has some sort of past exposure to the marching or performing arts, and that knowledge and understanding of what our clients are facing has proven invaluable. The path forward will be exciting as we explore new ways to interface with our student participants and their respective donor contacts, and remove the barriers that programs face that get in the way of growth.
FansRaise has been a very personal journey for me as a first time CEO. One thing we’re trying to do is move rapidly without the fear of making a mistake. We feel like making a mistake ONCE is OK, provided we learn and fix. Sometimes, moving fast and breaking things along the way is the only way to make sure you cover enough ground.
