I think I’ve done fundraising for Clarion West every year since my year, except maybe I missed one. Or maybe I planned to miss one and was guilted into it at the last minute.
They have updated their fundraising platform and I dutifully created an account and it was way more complicated than it should have been. I kept looking for the most streamlined way to create my profile (starting all over, the profile I’ve been using is gone) and provide a URL that people could use for donating.
Meanwhile there was new login and a dashboard and I could input everybody’s email so we could spam you all into contributing and goal-setting and farkity-doo-dah. I realized I’d been clicking around for 20 minutes with no progress — for the honor of raising money for someone else.
So I got mad and asked that my account be deleted. (Which involved two people at different organizations.)
So, I am not doing the fundraiser this year.
On the one hand I realize there is a generational divide here and young people are coming in and bringing more modern way of doing things.
On the other hand, I despise the way these technology platforms turn everything into both a giant data mining operation and also an infantile reward system like nothing we do has meaning unless a computer has sent us a virtual pat on the back with lots of exclamation points.
Also the workshop is virtual this year which sounds like the most terrible idea ever. That’s the whole point, that you’re all living together and all you do is hang out and write, talk about writing, or look at things other people wrote. I can see how they wouldn’t want to go another year with no workshop but I wouldn’t want to do it this way.
