Notes from My Brown-Bag with the Interns

How to Be a Good Non-Profit Think-Tank Advocacy-Type Person.

A few weeks ago it was my turn to give a “brown bag” lunch talk for the interns where I work. (That’s the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, a 40-year-old think-tank that “promotes human rights, democracy, and social justice” but rarely buys lunch for its interns.)

I’d planned to rehash a lecture about U.S. military aid to Latin America, but half an hour before we were to meet, I changed course. There had to be something more engaging to tell a roomful of college kids (and a few new graduates) about work at a place like WOLA, including how to get started and whether it made sense for them.

Instead, I threw together a page of notes about what I think has “worked” in my career as a non-profit think-tank advocacy person. (Whether anything has actually “worked” for me is a discussion for another day. But I have been at this for 18 years now, I enjoy being in the fray here in Washington, I like that we bring some truth and decency to U.S. foreign policy, and I’m not tired of it yet. Probably never will be.)

I then read off those hastily typed notes. To my surprise, after I finished, the interns asked for copies of them.

Here are those notes, now in full sentences. I hope they’re at least a bit helpful to others just starting out.

Working at a non-governmental organization (NGO) like WOLA is strange. The hours are long, the money is lousy, and clean “wins” are scarce in the “peace and human rights” field. But we still get hundreds of applications for even the most junior positions. That’s because if you work here, you get to travel and to know some brave and admirable people. You get to tell stories about what you learn – stories that wouldn’t be told otherwise, especially here in Washington. You feel supported by the people who work alongside you, both here and in a larger community.

What for me are some indicators that someone would do well in this line of work? Not grades, educational pedigree, or connections, but disciplined, directed energy (sometimes called “passion”), a preference for collaboration, and an ability to communicate. In particular, I’d want to see evidence that he or she likes doing five things. All five of these have made a huge difference for me.

1. Read constantly about the issue you want to work on. Read in detail. Be omnivorous: read things you agree with and those you disagree with. Read books – but if you know with any specificity what it is you want to work on, you’ll find a lack of full-length books about that topic, at least in English. (There are very few each year, for instance, even remotely related to civil-military relations in Latin America.)

Read newspapers and blogs voraciously: today you have ready access to a couple hundred of them, both in the English-speaking world and in your region of interest. It is essential to follow media and blogs from that region. They will be updated more regularly than English media covering the region, and will go in depth more often. Plus, regular reading in that language will multiply your vocabulary in a hurry.

In order to read that much, figure out how to use RSS and to search your feeds for keywords (tools that let you do that include FeedWrangler and FeedSpot; I use keywords like “military” or “defense”). Build a Twitter list of reporters and analysts you admire, and use a service like Flipboard to read what they’re linking to. Use a tool like Instapaper that lets you read things later, not just at moments when you’re sitting at a computer gathering news.

Do whatever it takes to help you retain what you read. This may be entering notes and citations into a database, something old fashioned with printouts, highlighters and binders, stacks of index cards, or something else. The best way to retain what you read, though, is to think about it, analyze it, process it, and spit it back in your own writing – which leads to:

2. Be online. When I google you, do I see what you’re thinking about the field that interests you? If not, why not? People who say “you have your own printing press” are a bit exuberant, but they have a point.

Are you writing (or drawing, or taking pictures, or singing, or dancing) about things in “your” field – even when your professors aren’t telling you to do so? If so, great. You should always be writing. (Or sculpting, filming, podcasting, yodeling – from here on just read “writing” as shorthand for all of that.) Carve out some time each day – an hour to an hour and a half, even if it means getting up well before dawn or falling behind on Breaking Bad or whatever – with your door closed, social media off, the phone in “do not disturb” mode, and a blank page in front of you.

(You may say college has you “too busy” to dedicate that kind of time. Untrue. You may never again have the kind of free time you do in college. Just ask anybody with both a full-time job and kids. For us, it’s “finals week” every week.)

The best way to get better at writing is by writing. One thing I’ve noticed is that creativity is not finite: it reproduces itself, as tangents become new projects. If I write a podcast script about the foreign aid bill, something I discuss there will inspire a memo about Colombia’s peace process. While doing that memo I may create a graphic that I want to share on Tumblr. And somewhere in the process I’ll find something ironic that eventually mutates into a 140-character joke on Twitter. If I hadn’t written that podcast script, the other stuff would never have come up.

The more you write, the clearer you’ll get. But clarity is the hardest part of writing. Especially if you’ve been to college, because now you’ve got to unlearn that jargon-laden, cumbersome, obfuscatory academic style that’s been drilled into you for four years. Unless your goal is to be offered a tenure-track position at a university, please stop writing like that. Instead of padding your work out to 10 pages single-spaced, you’re usually going to be cutting it back to two pages, double-spaced. And if writing is your preferred format, please read, and re-read, books like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well.

But don’t write just to put things online. There’s no need to share everything you produce. Just share the things that make you proudest. Hold back the rest, and work on it further. And unless it’s time-sensitive, don’t click “submit” right away. You can revisit your work for days to make sure it’s right. I’ve had a draft of this piece ready to go for nearly a week, but after a few hours away, or a good night’s sleep, it looks very different than it did upon last drafting. Also, knowing you don’t need to “submit” right away – if ever – makes it easier just to barf up words knowing that you can fix it later. It’s a great antidote to “writer’s block.”

But you do need to share the things you’re proudest of. What have you put up on the Internet for me to see? Making a personal landing page to guide me isn’t necessary, but helps – especially if it’s current. A WordPress install or a SquareSpace site is more impressive than yet another Facebook page. (Even consider learning some coding – HTML and CSS, more ambitiously MySQL, PHP, Python or Rails – if you want to make it look better, automate it, and demonstrate another valuable and rare skill.)

If the things you’re proudest of are scholarly exegeses like I mentioned above, then do post them – but I hope you express your ideas clearly, document them well, and say something truly new. For the sort of persuasive, evidence-based narration that we do at WOLA, I’d rather see concise, well-argued pieces that a bright 9th-grader would find compelling. Don’t worry about typos as much as economy and readability. Think hyperlinks instead of footnotes. And use and develop your own voice, even employing a bit of humor or irony where appropriate.

Maybe, though, you feel you’re too new to the field to just start putting things out there. Or maybe you’re hyper-cautious, not wanting to say something you’ll later regret on the “permanent record” that is the Internet. Then step back a bit and just post links to things you’ve read online that have had an impact on you. A Tumblr site that’s just a daily or weekly list of links – ideally with a sentence or two about why you think each link is worth reading – could be useful to dozens or hundreds of people, who will become your audience. Or even just post relevant photos and graphics you’ve liked (or, better yet, made yourself).

Use social media for the same thing. Everybody is on Facebook, but it’s hard to get out beyond your circle of friends. Twitter is better for sharing things with the public, like a link to something you’ve just posted elsewhere. And as I mentioned above, Twitter is also good for reading things from people whose work you admire.

It’s also good for “interacting” with them. If you re-tweet or even reply usefully to someone “big” in your field, he or she will see it. Even most people who get 50+ replies or retweets per day are probably egotistical enough to look over them regularly. If you’re in there in an insightful way, that person will be aware that you exist, even if he or she doesn’t engage you back. That’s great, as long as you’re careful to manage a good “signal to noise” ratio. If you just repeatedly retweet somebody, you look like a robot. If you @reply someone nearly every day, you look like a stalker or a crank. But if your contributions are consistently thoughtful and add value, the person whose work you admire will eventually want to know more about you – and he or she will visit your website if you have one. Then you’re on his or her radar.

3. Show up in person. Woody Allen allegedly once said, “Showing up is 80 percent of life.” There’s something to that, especially if you’re new in town. Make a point of going to a couple of events per week. There are so many of them going on in Washington that are open to the public: think-tank confabs, university conferences, grassroots teach-ins, even congressional hearings. They’re listed on places like the calendar at our “Just the Facts” website, a relatively new site called LinkTank, and of course the “events” pages at all of your favorite organizations’ websites.

With a kid at home and more deadlines on the job, I have less free time to go to events these days, and I regret that. They can be a good use of time. In fact, some events can change your entire perspective by bringing together, in one room, some of the sharpest thinkers in the field you want to work in.

On the other hand, many of them are boring. But it’s also important to be confronted with how cautious, conventional, and inside-the-box the thinking can be here. It’s also important to go to the occasional event put on by a right-wing think tank or, say, the defense community, in order to hear the other side’s “outside the box” thinking. Going to congressional hearings is important to familiarize yourself with key members, their positions, their staff, the vocabulary that they use, the questions that they ask (or fail to ask), and the roles of the mid-level officials who testify.

So show up. Go often enough to be a little familiar to other attendees and panelists. Go outside your comfort zone. Talk to people you don’t agree with. Stand up and ask (short, to the point, non-preachy, relevant, value-adding) questions. Chat up the panelists whose presentations had a particular impact on you. (Extra points if you can say, “I read your [article/blog post/book] and I thought [something constructive].” People love that, and it rarely happens.)

4. Learn a bit about fundraising. If you want to work in a non-profit environment, one of the worst things you can think is “I don’t want to do fundraising, I’m not a development person.” In fact, you are a development person, for yourself and for your organization. Some evidence that you’re aware of that – not that you enjoy fundraising, but that it’s something you do want to do well – will do much to endear you to any cash-strapped NGO (that is, “any NGO”) making a hiring decision.

Sit through any NGO’s “all hands” staff meeting, and see how much of the agenda is dedicated to fundraising. That’s because what we do costs money, with our meager salaries making up the majority of the bills that have to be paid (people are expensive). And no matter how brilliant you are and how amazing the work you produce, that may not be enough to make donors flock to you, checkbooks open. Big donors have to say “no” to brilliant, worthy people all day long.

Any healthy NGO will have a development staff to help connect your work with supporters. But you should show that you have the willingness, and at least some of the necessary background knowledge, to help them help you.

Consider taking a short course on fundraising. For a couple of hundred dollars, the Foundation Center offers both in-person and online courses on things like foundation research and proposal-writing. I especially recommend proposal-writing, as it’s a skill applicable way beyond fundraising. What could be more essential to planning, management, and communication than the ability to describe what you’re going to do for the next X months, make a compelling case for it, explain how you’ll measure its impact, and add up what it will cost?

Even if you’ve only got a fundraising webinar or two on your record, be sure to feature them on your resume. It’s an attribute that hardly ever appears on applications, and non-profits will take notice.

5. “Ping” people meaningfully. We all have some “priority audiences.” Mine would include press and bloggers, congressional staff, funders, NGOs here and in Latin America, and people in government whom I pester for information. If you have something to say, you have “priority audiences” too. How long has it been since their members last heard from you?

But I don’t just mean “heard from you” – I mean heard from you in a way that’s of value to them. You’ve probably heard plenty lately from your aunt who emails articles about kittens and Obamacare, or your high school acquaintance on Facebook who voices his religious beliefs. But that’s not valuable.

Similarly, handwritten thank-you notes are nice, but they sort of feel like you’re just checking a box and there’s no reason for me to save them. Asking for a meeting is a good way to get acquainted, but if you haven’t even thought through what you want to discuss and I have to do all the talking, then we’ll have some nice small talk and I’ll want my 45 minutes back. And it’s worse if I never hear from you again unless you need a favor.

The trick is to remember to “ping” your audiences once in a while, but while maintaining a very high signal-to noise ratio.

First, the “pinging.” I still struggle to avoid having months pass by without members of priority audiences hearing nothing at all from me. If a key congressional staffer, reporter, or funder is wondering, “Whatever happened to Adam?” I’m doing my job badly. It’s vital to have a current system in place to manage and organize your contacts.

Second, when you do “ping,” you must have something real to say – even if it’s just “I think this article is important because [reason]” or “I’ve got my eye on [issue] and here’s why.” Don’t be a pest, don’t bury the lede (your contact shouldn’t even have to scroll his or her BlackBerry screen to see your main point), and ensure you’re transmitting lots of signal and very little noise. Remember that you are just one line in someone’s very full inbox, voice mailbox, calendar or Twitter stream: the person should be glad to hear from you because there’s a high chance that he or she will learn something new, something relevant that he or she might otherwise have missed. And remember, different “priority audiences” usually require different messages.

This is probably the hardest one to get right, and I admit I mess it up quite often, too. Too often I either drop off the face of the earth or spam someone I shouldn’t. But if you feel you’re contributing in a useful way without lapsing and falling off the radar, you’re doing it right.

So that’s it. That’s the prose version of the notes I wrote for the “brown bag” with the interns.

Looking over them, though, I worry that I may have put together a recipe for being a nakedly ambitious, sharp-elbowed, self-promoting asshole. I left out something glaringly big: your relationships with the people who are your closest collaborators. These people deserve a lot more than periodic “pinging.” So I’d add a sixth skill to develop, and to demonstrate evidence of possessing:

6. Collaborate with others. You need to be able to show that you’ve worked well on a team, playing a role in a project way too big for one person to carry out alone. Extra points if your role wasn’t a leadership role: if you do the other five things in this list, I already know you’re “entrepreneurial,” but I want to know if you can be a contributor to a larger effort. So while being editor of the school paper is good, it’s equally good to have had a solid record of mastering a single reporting beat and mentoring freshmen.

If you’re just getting started in this field, you’re not going to be the boss of anything anytime soon, and you’re going to have to contribute as a member of a team. At this point, just as important as your own achievements and knowledge are the relationships you are developing with colleagues, whether they be in your organization, in your coalition, or in the region where your work is focused.

And that’s it. I hope this was more inspiring than terrifying. I should end by just pointing out that I don’t think I’ve mastered any of these six points. I make mistakes and lapses constantly, and I feel like I’m not doing even 10 percent of what I should be doing on all of them.

We can always be reading, writing, posting, showing up, raising money, “pinging,” and collaborating more than we are. And we need to balance all of that with family (your sick kid will keep you at home), health (you need more sleep and exercise), “administrative” job chores (you’ve got 112 unread emails), and much else. In the end, though, the trick is to keep trying: no matter what, keep trying on all fronts.

You may never master it all. But maybe, from time to time, you’ll look back and find that all the while, you’ve been having a fulfilling career and making a big difference in your chosen field. And that’s what seems to “work.”