Intro to Writing for Other People

(or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog)

Remember blogging? I do. Back when I first ventured out into the working world, it seemed like everyone had a Blogspot. RSS feeds would deliver new posts right into someone’s eyeballs, without them having to remember to check any one blog. 

As a young professional trying to figure out my place as a writer in the modern workforce, the blog was a great gift. Sure, I would have preferred that the media ecosystem still supported local print papers, as print journalism was my profession of choice at the time, but a blog was a nice fallback. I wouldn’t say blogging made my career, but my ability to comment on major issues within my field (which was, at the time, nonprofits and philanthropy), connect with other thinkers and writers, and share my own “thought leadership” (whatever that means) helped me make a mark. 

I also really enjoyed it. I loved being able to come up with a coherent narrative or commentary on something and link to things all over the internet to back-up my claims. Making those kinds of connections between ideas, concepts, events, or other happenings is still what I love doing as a ghostwriter. I work with people to figure out how all of their ideas can come together for a coherent narrative in a book or other short-form pieces. 

My first real exposure to the power of blogging came when I was just a year out of school, and microfinance was in the zeitgeist, so to speak. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, who had popularized the concept, had won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years earlier, and Oprah had featured the peer-to-peer lender Kiva as a way to loan money to entrepreneurs all over the world. 

Kiva was getting some flack, though, for not being transparent enough about how its loans worked. People had questions about how Kiva made sure that the money any one person would loan--whether that was Oprah or a random college student--would get to the entrepreneur. The logistical challenges seemed quite complex. 

In fact, they were, so much so that Kiva didn’t work that way. Whereas Kiva presented its model as your money going directly to the business owner, in fact when you contributed to a loan, that loan had already been filled and it was possible the entrepreneur already had the money. What Kiva did instead was send money to microfinance banks for loans up front, which was then back-filled by their (mostly) western donors giving to what they thought were individualized loan profiles on their site. 

I knew this because I had done work with Kiva in college. I actually had the one pager that illustrated their operating model. Because I did not think this way of doing business was that big of a deal, and in fact actually a genius way to move money to people who needed it, I wrote a blog about it. I was building off a conversation started by microfinance expert David Roodman, so I linked back to him, and shared the one pager I still had saved on my computer from my days in college. 

I posted the blog and forgot about it. I didn’t check back to my blog for probably a few days, and when I did, I couldn’t believe what I saw in the comments. Roodman had commented on my piece, trying to get in touch with me. He had re-shared my post, and others had latched on to it as proof of Kiva’s deception. I had broken the case wide open, apparently, to the extent that a slightly incorrect framing of a nonprofit’s business model can be considered something worth investigating. (Side note, if you think everything on the internet sticks around forever, you’d be wrong. Roodman’s blog is now blank and I can’t find any trace of this decades-old drama.)

This was before social media, so I received no alerts to how fast my blog post was traveling the internet. These days, this kind of thing would be over and done in about six hours. At the time, it lasted about a week. I wrote a few more posts about the one pager and mostly moved on, because, again, the drama was not that dramatic and we all had better things to do, including me with a full time job.

But it gave me a taste of what blogging could be and the connections to be made. I spent the next few years blogging for myself and then started a blog about cross-sector collaboration featuring blog posts from others interested in social enterprise. (Yes, that’s right, a blog specifically for cross-sector social enterprise. It was the Obama years! We had so much hope.)

Alas, the blogging eventually all came to an end, not with a bang, but with a whimper, slowly, as social media started to reduce content to smaller and smaller pieces, and our attention spans reduced to nothing. Now, I suppose if I was starting my career I’d have to do TikTok, or find a way to make Substack work. 

Instead, I’m just going to revisit my early days and start blogging again. I suppose this is the Millennial version of the grumpy old man. I’ve called it “Writing for Other People” because, well, that’s what I do. As a ghostwriter, almost my entire day is spent writing in the voice of other people, making connections between their ideas to create compelling arguments. 

“...the blogging eventually all came to an end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

But also, I hope I can have a blog again that becomes, truly, writing for other people. Meaning, you, the person reading this. I hope you read, think, share and maybe even write a little bit in response. 

I am not quite sure what I’ll write about here, exactly. I write for many reasons, but one of them is to solidify my own ideas. Writing helps me process. So, from time to time, you’ll find the output of that process here. I will probably write about writing, and the craft of ghostwriting. You’ll read lessons and insights from me helping others achieve their goals, and probably other random things too. I’m a dad, so that’ll come up. I like comedy, so expect some of that too. I also like sci-fi stuff, and so why not that too? (If you are one of the holdouts from my early days of blogging and want more nonprofit-social enterprise-microfinance content, well, let me know. I can also oblige on that too, I suppose. But not sure why you waited so long to tell me.)

Maybe my thoughts will bounce off yours in just that right way and you’ll make some connections I hadn’t thought of, or you hadn’t yet either. That collaborative, generative spirit was the original promise of the internet, and blogging, after all. (And we know how that ended.) 

Either way, I hope you follow along and enjoy whatever I put out there. Because that’s what good writing does--offers a chance to sit with someone else’s (hopefully) well-crafted thoughts and come up with your own.  

(Also, if you don’t want to have to wake up each morning and check to see if I posted something, which I know you would do, you can easily subscribe below to get new posts in your inbox. Or follow me on LinkedIn. Or, just drop me a line and we can chat.)