[Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.

Sat Dec 31 23:05:42 UTC 2011

Phoebe,

Thank you for your thoughtful response. Do you have any more details
on the contingency plan? Really, we need to know what spending would
get cut. To make these decisions you need to, as economists say,
"think at the margins". You need to compare marginal utility and
marginal cost.

That is, you need to look at what the cost of raising an extra $1000
is (including effort of the fundraisers, ill-will, processing costs,
time wasted on foundation-l arguments, etc.) and you need to look at
what you could do with that extra $1000. Only then can you decide if
it is worth raising the extra $1000.

You can't look at the fundraiser and the budget as a whole, you have
to look at just the extra bits (the margins). That means you need to
have some kind of priority order on your various budget items. It
doesn't necessarily have to be very precise, splitting things into 4
or 5 categories (eg. core things that we have to find some way of
funding whatever happens, very important things that it would really
hurt us to do without, optional stuff that will have a really big
impact, optional stuff that it would be really good to do but wouldn't
be that big a deal if we had to cut it) would be a good start.