I know I already posted earlier today, but this is important.
Today emails went out to the NaNoWriMo community: The organization is shutting down due to lack of funding. I will repost the full email below, omitting the embedded video since I don't want to give her any more views.
The email and the video lean into the idea that NaNoWriMo failed to come back from its crises the last couple years because the community sabotaged Kilby. I argue otherwise.
Starting in early 2024, she emailed all of the Municipal Liaisons (volunteer regional coordinators, basically in-person event organizers and local points-of-contact for the organization) informing us of massive changes to the volunteer ML program. We would have to go through extensive identification and background checks, and sign an oppressive contract that had clearly NOT been written by a lawyer. After much debate, she put us on the back burner, and told us she would be in touch soon with more details. (Spoiler alert: We never heard back.)
This is important because when NaNoWriMo functioned the way it should, the MLs actually drove both local participation and donations. We encouraged writers, kept participants engaged, and promoted Double Up Donation Weekend and similar events. So cutting us loose meant cutting loose organized local participation and a ton of donations.
Next, she made a statement about AI that many writers, especially those with disabilities and in lower socioeconomic classes, found offensive. The entire community was up in arms, published authors bailed from the advisory board, and many longtime participants swore off NaNoWriMo, many even deleting their accounts entirely.
If you're keeping track, this means that by the end of summer, she'd not only cut loose all the volunteers who did much of the legwork to get donations, but also ostracized the community at large that provided the donations.
As November approached, we former MLs noticed a complete lack of communication from NaNoWriMo. All of the usual prep emails, designed to drive anticipation and get people to commit to doing the challenge, were missing. It also became obvious that there was little or no staff at HQ. Whether that was from people leaving when management changed, or new management forcing people to leave, we don't know, but the end result was that HQ didn't have enough staff to do all the things that usually resulted in a flow of donations.
In other words, staff ran the fundraisers. No staff, no fundraisers.
And without the staff, the big donation weekend that typically pulled in a huge amount of fundraising — the donation event that we MLs had all promoted at our events and in our emails in previous years — was never even scheduled.
Toward the end of the month, Kilby seemed to suddenly realize the organization wasn't getting funding, and several panic-button funding emails went out, but it was too little, too late. By that late in the month, many writers have lost momentum and dropped out — especially without local events and MLs helping them to stay focused and keep going.
And then early this year, the news broke that NaNoWriMo had actually failed to renew their registration to accept charitable contributions. As a result, they were listed as delinquent by the state of California and technically couldn't accept donations.
When you eliminate the volunteers and staff that get the donations, drive away the community that provides the donations, fail to solicit the donations, and don't even maintain your ability to legally accept the donations... uh, yeah, what did she think was going to happen to the organization's funding?!
So take Kilby's video blaming the community for killing NaNoWriMo with a grain of salt. I think that's indicative more of Kilby's know-it-all attitude and her refusal to acknowledge her mistakes, both of which were frequently on display in our (MLs') dealings with her.
With all that in mind, feel free to read the original email, below. If I can get a transcript of the video, I'll publish that too, as I don't want to give her video — which was posted to her personal account — millions of views and enable her to use that to monetize her YouTube channel over the dead carcass of the organization she destroyed.
To Our NaNoWriMo Community:
We come to you today with sad news. After six years of struggling to sustain itself financially, NaNoWriMo (the nonprofit) will begin the process of shutting down.
Explaining how we got here is both simple and complex. The funding woes that have threatened so many nonprofits in recent years are an unextraordinary trend. Many beloved organizations announced their closure last year. Many more are fighting for their lives. Media coverage of financial crisis within the sector—especially among arts nonprofits—has been widespread.
Yet, there are ways in which NaNoWriMo is extraordinary—and reasons why we had hoped we could buck that trend. The sheer size of our community, its global reach and its longevity, held at impressive levels, even during a tumultuous year. There is no shortage of writers who want to participate in NaNoWriMo. Yet, building a community and being able to sustain it are two different matters. 2024 was a revelatory year.
In order to fully understand how we reached this decision, and why we view it as the only alternative, we encourage you to watch this video about the State of NaNoWriMo. The video also contains some important acknowledgments and information about the logistics of our next steps. Most importantly, the video shares real data and information that the organization has not discussed previously. The plot is thicker than you might think.
We recognize that the closure of NaNoWriMo represents a huge loss to the writing community, and that grief over this outcome will be exacerbated by the challenges of the past sixteen months. This is not the ending that anybody wanted or planned. And—believe us—if we could hit the delete button and rewrite this last chapter, we would. But we do have hope for the epilogue.
What’s next for NaNoWriMo, the indebted nonprofit, is much different from what's next for actual Wrimos. We hold no belief that people will stop writing 50,000 words in November (and April, and July) or stop seeking support for the journey they’re on. Many alternatives to NaNoWriMo popped up this year, and people did find each other. In so many ways, it’s easier than it was when NaNoWriMo began in 1999 to find your writing tribe online.
Our greatest hope at this moment is that you do two things: support arts nonprofits you love (they really, truly need you) and keep writing words. Your stories matter.
Thank you for all you have done for the organization, and especially for each other, over all these years.
Sincerely,
The NaNoWriMo Team
A Few Additional Notes
- We anticipate that some people might want to log on and capture information that is meaningful to them, like their lifetime word count or stats from previous seasons or challenges. We also anticipate that some folks on the Young Writers Program website may not have backed up work that they wrote directly into our system, and may wish to do so at this time. If there is something you feel you need to retrieve, you are welcome to try. However, our site tends to crash a lot when overrun with too much traffic (chronic technology underinvestment is mentioned in the video). We apologize for any inconvenience if the site gets crashy.
- If you are a recurring donor, thank you for your ongoing support of the organization (truly). We have cancelled all recurring donations on our end in order to ensure that you will not be charged as we transition into our next phase.
- If you want anything from the NaNoWriMo store, please don't delay. We will shut that down soon as well.
- Finally, we have observed that, at times of change, many members of our community are in want of spaces to process these new developments, and that, historically, we have hosted many all-community online spaces. Unfortunately, we have very limited resources to reply individually to comments or to moderate our social spaces at this time. We will do our best but make no guarantees.
