What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?

I have a new post up at the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog called “What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?” Here is an excerpt:

There is a concept that good entrepreneurs know only too well, but nonprofits could stand to explore. A “value proposition” is the unique value a product or service provides a consumer. Without a value proposition a business has no place in the market. For a nonprofit, a social value proposition is just as critical to success, but often ignored. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, due in part to the growth of for-profit social entrepreneurs, nonprofits must analyze, articulate, and deliver on a social value proposition.

In the past, nonprofits could exist without a value proposition. Donors wouldn’t argue that a library, homeless shelter, food pantry or school provided a necessary service. But as we move further down the road of social innovation, the assumption that money will automatically follow good works is no longer valid…

You can read the entire post here.

Tags: nonprofit, social entrepreneurs, social value proposition

Beating Innovation to Death

There is a tendency in America of late, or maybe for awhile, to over-analyze to the point of distraction. So too is the case with the Social Innovation Fund, the federal government’s $50+ million experiment in providing growth capital to nonprofits. This great experiment to see whether government can do something pretty different to address social problems is in danger of being railroaded by leaders of the social innovation community who should be the ones most supportive of a new day for government.

The Social Innovation Fund (SIF) was modeled after the idea of venture philanthropy funds who were themselves modeled on venture capital funds. The idea with the SIF is to grant $50 million to private grantors (foundations, venture philanthropy funds, etc) who match the money and then turn around and grant it to promising nonprofits to scale their proven programs. Is the idea really innovative? No. But what is innovative is that the government is  recognizing the concepts of social innovation and scale and is experimenting with becoming a builder instead of just a buyer of nonprofit services.

But this experiment is in danger of failing before it even gets out of the gate. A major controversy developed this week with the announcement of SIF grantees. The controversy centers around whether New Profit, arguably the inventor of the venture philanthropy concept, was given preferential treatment in being awarded a grant.  Paul Light, the Nonprofit Quarterly and others voiced their concerns about the granting process. You can read all the details of the saga here.

Let’s be honest, everyone knew New Profit was going to get a SIF grant. New Profit pioneered the idea of venture philanthropy. And their spin-off organization, America Forward, which works to connect the vast governmental resources to social innovation, was behind getting the Serve America Act,  containing the SIF, formulated and made into law.  Would the SIF make any sense without New Profit? They have been scaling nonprofits for years, and they have unlocked the door between government and social innovation. How could they not be at this table?

And the growing amount of documents being released by the Social Innovation Fund demonstrates the fairness and process behind the grant awards and more than makes up for any of SIF’s initial ignorance of the importance of transparency.

I understand that discussion, transparency, and refining of process are all critical elements to getting change to happen, but too much of that before the actual experiment happens can actually prevent change. Let’s not conduct business as usual by over-analyzing a new project to death. Let’s see where this experiment takes us instead of railroading it before it even begins. It’s not perfect innovation, it’s not a perfect process, but experiments never are. If we don’t give the government some space to actually innovate, they may never go down this road again. Instead of beating innovation to death, let’s get out of our own way and see where this goes.

Tags: America Forward, builder versus buyer, New Profit, Nonprofit Quarterly, Paul Light, Serve America Act, Social Innovation Fund, Venture Philanthropy

Wielding the Money Sword

A new blog at the Chronicle of Philanthropy site launched this week that I’m pretty excited about. Written by Clara Miller and others at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Money and Mission blog will help nonprofits “understand and skillfully wield money as a tool.”  What a revolutionary idea.

As Clara writes in the inaugural post:

Great ideas, deep caring for those in need, creativity, resourcefulness, a service ethic, and an expansive vision for the future are abundant in the nonprofit world. But we lack the financial capacity to meet these ideals, and our financial habits undermine efforts to build it. We need to think of finance as more than a muddle of fund raising, budget monitoring, and compliance with overhead rules. The current, tough economic environment is spurring needed change. Now, understanding money concepts like risk, leverage, and accounting, seems to be a moral imperative.

Indeed, the nonprofit sector has for too long been burdened by a lack of financial literacy and thus an inability to use money effectively. Sure there isn’t enough money in the sector, but if nonprofit leaders better understood the financial tools available to them and how to use them to their advantage, the results could be revolutionary. This is the argument in our Financing not Fundraising series.

Capital campaigns provide a great example of this. Nonprofits have used capital campaigns for years to raise money for a new building or, less often, an endowment. Capital campaign money is raised and used in a very different way from how general operating money is raised and used. A capital campaigns USES money raised to buy a building. An annual fundraising campaign USES money raised to buy additional services that the nonprofit provides (food for a food bank, mentors for kids). An annual fundraising campaign often RAISES money by cobbling together various activities (events, grant writing, some direct mail appeals) hoping that the sum will equal the expenses needed for the year. A capital campaign, however, RAISES money by conducting a feasibility study to determine how much they can likely raise, then creates a plan, budget, and case for support. Then potential donors are cultivated and solicited in a systematic way. This is a deliberate, strategic way to bring capital campaign investors in the door.

However, capital campaigns are often misguided attempts to grow the impact of an organization. A nonprofit thinks that in order to be taken seriously in the community and attract larger donors they need to build a new building. Enormous amounts of time, energy and money are spent to create a building they don’t need, burn out their development staff, and eventually shoulder new building maintenance fees for years to come.

What if nonprofits could pour those same desires–to do more, to make a bigger impact, to attract more resources, to build deeper networks–and that same time, effort and resources into a campaign that will actually help them build a more effective, more sustainable organization that delivers more impact? What if the methods of a capital campaign were instead employed to raise growth or capacity capital that allows the organization to provide more, better services to the community? That would be huge. Enormous.

The Nonprofit Finance Fund turned capital campaigns on their head with their SEGUE (Sustainable Enhancement Grant) program. It is essentially a capital campaign, but instead of buying a building, the nonprofit raises growth capital to scale the organization for greater social impact. NFF takes a concept nonprofits understand and are comfortable with, a capital campaign, and transforms it into a way to raise organization building money, a completely new idea. I’d love to see more nonprofits using financial tools already available to them to accelerate their ability to create social impact.

Like it or not, money is an incredible tool. If nonprofit leaders could better understand it, stop fearing it, and learn how to wield it effectively, the results could be transformative.

Photo Credit: piermario

Tags: capital campaign, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Clara Miller, financing not fundraising, growth capital, Money and Mission blog, Nonprofit Finance Fund, SEGUE

What I’m Reading

Someone asked me the other day how long it takes me to write a blog post. I told them the writing only takes about an hour or two. However, the reading and thinking about what’s being done, or said, or written about and what I want to add to the conversation takes many times longer. So, to that end, I thought I’d give you a list of the blog posts, articles, and books that caught my interest and really made me think in the past month…

• Punching at Your Own Weight in Social Media
• Philanthropy’s Next Decade
• Leadership to the Rescue
• The Social Innovation Fund One Year Later
• The Giving Pledge and the Opportunity of a Generation
• U.S. Lagging, Not Leading, Social Entrepreneurship
• Warren Buffett’s Philanthropic Pledge
• How Can Nonprofits Plan for Growth and Impact?
• The Networked Nonprofit
• Social Media Listening: You Don’t Have To Be Joey Chestnut on the 4th of July!
• Wall Street Saves the World!
• Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes & Impact
• The Slacktivist Debate Continues
• Is All Entrepreneurship Social?
• Are You Crazy Enough to Change the World?

What caught your interest this month?  Add to the list in the comments.

Photo Credit: pixel0908

Tags: nonprofit growth, nonprofit leadership, nonprofit outcomes, Philanthropy, Social Innovation Fund, social media, The Networked Nonprofit, Warren Buffett

Can Reactive Clark Kent Become Strategic Superman?

For the nonprofit sector to truly climb aboard the social innovation train, as opposed to being abandoned by it, nonprofit leaders need to move past the reactive toward the strategic.

But is that possible? Have nonprofits been stuck in a resource-constrained, charity mindset for too long to be made strategic, bold, big thinkers? It’s been a vicious cycle. Nonprofits lack adequate resources so they become very protective of what they have and wary of any actions which might threaten those resources. Therefore they become exceedingly risk averse and fearful of innovation. They focus more often than not on keeping the doors open as opposed to investing time, energy and resources in long-term strategy.

But that’ s just not going to cut it anymore. These times demand a radically different mindset and approach. The nonprofit sector must move from the reactive to the strategic. So how does a reactive approach differ from a strategic one? It looks like this…

This is an excerpt from my latest post at the Change.org blog. You can read the entire post here.

Tags: nonprofit charity mindset, nonprofit sector, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, social innovation

Funding Social Innovation: An Interview with Paul Tarini

In the July installment of the Social Velocity interview series we are talking with Paul Tarini of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can read our previous Social Velocity blog interviews with Clara Miller and Kevin Jones.

Paul Tarini is the head of the Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, which actively seeks innovative projects that can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in health and health care.  Because the Pioneer team is dedicated to thinking and talking about new ideas and groundbreaking approaches, including those from nontraditional sources and fields, Pioneer enables the Foundation to make conceptual leaps and take risks in grantmaking that would otherwise not be possible. Since funding is so critical to making social innovation a reality, we thought Paul would have a unique perspective on what funders can do to incentivize social innovation.

Nell: The Pioneer portfolio strikes me as a more risk-tolerant approach to giving than typical foundations are used to. Why is RWJF more comfortable with the risks inherent in this kind of portfolio of projects?

Paul: RWJF is comfortable with the higher risk, unconventional, future-facing ideas Pioneer supports because it first identified a specific niche that needed to be filled within the institutional ecology.  We call that ecology our Impact Framework.  It was conceived of at a time when RWJF was thinking hard about how we organized our work.  The Impact Framework helps us understand our grantmaking as a whole, so, not just what do the grants in a particular area add up to, but what does the whole enterprise add up to.  As we were thinking about the impact we wanted to have, we knew we needed to work in fewer, more focused teams that were/are accountable for specific outcomes.

But we realized that while focus brings power and discipline, it also can be limiting.  We wanted a way to look out beyond the work of these targeted teams.  We were thinking about how to stay relevant for the long run as a philanthropy that operates on a national scale.  We felt that in addition to the targeted work being done, we needed a place devoted to the exploration of new ideas, where we could bring in new concepts, work with different people, and support more unconventional and future-facing ideas.  Such work could help RWJF stay fresh, bring in new ideas and new grantees, continue to grow, stay ahead of the curve.  And, if we found some real winners, health and health care would benefit from the outcomes of those projects.

Out of this came Pioneer.  Here are some examples of the work we’ve supported…We funded a natural resources economist to work on the problem of antibiotic resistance (Don’t approach it as an infectious diseases problem; think about our stock of antibiotics as a natural resource that needs to be managed and develop new policy from that perspective; we’ve been funding research into whether and how digital games can be effective therapeutic interventions (Can a game that uses a breathing tube as the controller that moves characters around the screen help kids with cystic fibrosis improve their breathing therapy?); we’ve funded early work exploring whether there are specific health strengths which, if strengthened more, could serve to forestall disease and mitigate effects once disease strikes.  We’re also supporting work that builds platforms that could produce lots of new knowledge and improve care, including Kaiser Permanente’s Research Program on Genes, the Environment and Health; and, efforts to link electronic health records databases with millions of patient records in order to learn much faster about what works for patients (Rapid Learning).

Nell: I understand that the Pioneer program has a rolling unsolicited application process, but I imagine you probably need to do a good bit of on-the-ground scoping and cultivation of ideas in order to get the most promising projects into the portfolio. How do you create a deal flow for innovative projects?

Paul: This is a constant challenge for us.  We do have an open door, and we do accept unsolicited proposals at any time. But most of the proposals that come in through this door are not good fits for Pioneer. We were set up to explore unconventional and untested approaches to problems, to bring in ideas from other disciplines, to look to the future.  We were not set up to support projects that promise incremental improvements, however important those improvements may be.  We look for projects with the potential for transformative change, the kind of change that can reach beyond a single discipline or group.  Most of what comes in unsolicited doesn’t meet that standard.  Finding ideas takes work.  And because we look for ideas across the breadth of health and health care, we can’t focus on just one haystack to look for needles.  We network.  We connect with interesting people at conferences, we go to events, we take meetings and phone calls, we visit people.  We are experimenting with other ways to source ideas.  We’ve had some success with open-source competitions, though the back end, taking a winning idea and creating a fundable project, takes time.  We are putting a lot of time and energy into social media right now as another way to build networks and find ideas.  Half of me wishes there was an easier way to find ideas, but I suspect that easier would also mean more passive on our part and passive is really boring.

Nell: You currently only invest in nonprofit projects, correct? Do you see the potential for investing in for-profit or hybrid organizations, through mission-related investing, down the road, particularly as social entrepreneurship grows and for-profit solutions to healthcare issues become more prevalent?

Paul: While the majority of our investments, our funding, are in the form of grants to nonprofit organizations, there is nothing that precludes us from supporting for-profit entities.  The largest award to come out of Pioneer to date—$15.6 million—went to a for-profit, Archimedes, Inc. However, before we can make an award to a for-profit, we need to clearly establish that RWJF’s dollars are going to fund an activity with a clear charitable purpose that relates to our mission.   This is just an additional test we need to meet.  The challenge we face on Pioneer is less about whether an entity is a nonprofit, a hybrid, or a for-profit.  Our challenge is whether that entity is doing work that isn’t merely an improvement, but is doing something unconventional, disruptive and future-facing and could produce breakthroughs in health and health care.  If we’re convinced the work meets that standard, we can usually figure out how to fund it.

Nell: What is holding philanthropy back from becoming more innovative and/or risk tolerant?

Paul: People who spend more time observing philanthropies are better suited to answer this question than I am.  That said, I think it’s hard to ask this question about philanthropy as a sector.  Philanthropies have a lot of latitude; you can’t assume they are fairly similar and that we can generalize our way to an answer.  In the same way there are differences between a business that employs 200 people and one with 20,000, there are big differences between a multi-billion-dollar philanthropy and a small community foundation.  Political contexts differ, staff sophistication differs (bigger isn’t always more sophisticated), boards and donors have varying levels of influence, so I think there’s a range of reasons — philanthropy by philanthropy — for being less risk-tolerant.

If I had to pick one reason, it would be that there’s no inherent reason for a philanthropy to be innovative and highly risk-tolerant.  A lot of good can come—and has come—from philanthropies that are cautious.  As I noted above, the decision at RWJF to have a portfolio that takes on more risk came from an institutional recognition of the long-term value to us—and to the field—of such investments.  So the niche-in-the-institutional-ecology point is important here. Also, frankly, our ecology is much larger than most, and so it can be more diverse.  Other philanthropies would need to work though their own reasons to embrace more risk-taking.

Nell: The nonprofit capital market overall is fairly immature compared to the capital market of the for-profit world. Do you see other foundations creating new giving programs or financial vehicles to expand the types of capital available to nonprofits?

Paul: There is a great discussion and a lot of effort being devoted to maturing the nonprofit capital market.  More money, philanthropic and otherwise, is examining and entering this space; and, more nonprofits are thinking about what they need to do to operate in this space.  It’s very exciting and I definitely think we’ll see more of that over time.  But I also think it will be years before we see a robust capital market for nonprofits.  As much interest as there is in moving into this space, the amount of money there and the portion of nonprofits positioned to take advantage of such a capital market is still relatively small compared with traditional ways of financing and operating.

Also, I think it will take a while to understand when it makes sense for nonprofits to access capital markets and when more traditional sources of philanthropic funding are more appropriate.  Philanthropies need to understand better—given what they’re trying to achieve—when a traditional grant makes the most sense and when some other financial vehicle does.

Nell: What do you think is the potential for greater partnerships between foundations and individual investors to bring more capital to social entrepreneurs, particularly in the healthcare sector?

Paul: Good question.  For large foundations such as RWJF, I think we need to consider carefully when looking at when individual investors as funding partners makes sense.  The projects we fund, by their nature, tend to be large.  The effort involved in soliciting individual investors might not be worth the result unless we are looking at folks who have considerable wealth at their disposal.  It’s a lift when you’re trying to aggregate a bunch of $100,000 contributions to reach $5 million; fundraising is not a core competency of ours.  I do think, though, that efforts such as the Social Impact Exchange, where individual dollars would flow directly to the organizations that need them, make a lot of sense.  So I think the opportunities for individual investors to participate as true funding partners on projects with RWJF are probably limited, though we are open to them if they make sense.  But there are definitely opportunities for foundations such as RWJF to help individual investors find groups that are worthy recipients.

Tags: Archimedes Inc, community foundation, grantmaking, Kaiser Permanente, nonprofit capital market, Paul Tarini, Philanthropy, Pioneer Portfolio, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Social Entrepreneurship, social impact exchange

Bringing Small Nonprofits to Scale

English at Work could be a poster child for social innovation in the nonprofit sector. An Echoing Green fellow, founder Maile Broccoli-Hickey is a social entrepreneur, but like most of them, she doesn’t even know it. Her tireless work to build an organization that can effectively and efficiently transform the English language skills of hotel and restaurant workers is a model to other nonprofits who have a great solution, but lack the capacity and strategy to grow it.

Maile started English at Work in 2004 when she was a waitress in an Austin, Texas restaurant. She realized that her co-workers needed customized English language instruction to ensure their and their employers’ success. Why not bring customized English classes to the workplace in a focused and systematic way? These courses, paid for largely by restaurant and hotel owners who see the value in having a more fluent workforce, get dramatic results. English at Work creates greater proficiency and fluency gains in a shorter amount than their closest ESL instruction rivals. The program works so well because it is a win-win. Students become more fluent and successful at work, paving the way for promotions and a way out of poverty. Employers get more productive, loyal and customer-service oriented employees.

But like most nonprofit organizations hit hard by the recession, a year ago English at Work was struggling to make ends meet. Although employers paid for the classes, those fees didn’t cover all organization costs. The additional necessary revenue came from individual donations and foundation grants, both hit hard by the recession. At the same time Maile knew that the program had the potential to transform the lives of so many more people. Despite financial troubles, she had big visions for growth.

With funding from a couple of key donors who understood the value of investing in infrastructure, capacity and planning, Maile enlisted Social Velocity to determine what was holding the organization back and to create a comprehensive revenue plan to get the organization on firm financial footing. Over the first two months of the engagement we interviewed board and staff members and reviewed all organization policies, by-laws, finances, collateral, plans and documents. We then created a detailed analysis of each area of the organization (strategy, program, finances, marketing, staffing, board, etc.) with recommendations in each area for how the organization could be more effective. Once completed, we worked closely with Maile over the next 3 months to create a detailed plan for increasing how money flowed to the organization from individuals, foundations, corporations and earned revenue. Finally, we trained English at Work staff and board on raising money.

Now that English at Work is on much firmer financial ground, they are ready to plan for growth, and so we are in the midst of creating a strategic plan for significant growth of the program. The hope is to take this great solution and bring it to scale.

English at Work is a great example of the many little-known nonprofit organizations that toil away under the radar. They may have a fabulous model for creating real change, but lack the infrastructure, capacity and strategy to grow their impact to scale. Although the Social Innovation Fund and other venture philanthropy funds that exist to bring solutions to scale are great, no ecosystem exists for the smaller nonprofits that may have equally important solutions. But there is a way. By combining a few key donors who understand the bigger picture, a smart strategy for growth and sustainability, and a determination to execute effectively, even the smallest nonprofits with a great solution and a vision for growth can get there.

Photo Credit: English at Work

Tags: Echoing Green, English at Work, Maile Broccoli-Hickey, nonprofit capacity building, nonprofit growth strategy, Social Innovation Fund, venture philanthropy funds

A New Kind of Nonprofit Leader

In his New York Times column this week Bob Herbert strongly criticized America and its leaders for not stepping up to the plate to guide us through these very troubling times.  As he put it:

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything.

Although his column is perhaps a bit too bleak, he does make the point that we have forgotten how to lead ourselves out of a mess, and the messes are getting larger and larger.

The messes of the American system are often cleaned up by the nonprofit sector. Nonprofits are usually borne out of some disequilibrium that the market creates (poverty, homelessness, poor education, lack of healthcare).

However, lately the messes have been too much for even the nonprofit sector to bear. And at the same time a deep recession, government’s increasing off-loading of social services to the sector, donors growing desire for measurement, and a more wired world are all combining to demand dramatic changes to how nonprofits operate. As a result, nonprofit leaders need to adapt.

The day has come for a new kind of nonprofit leader, one who has the confidence, ability, foresight, energy, and strength of will to really lead. This new nonprofit leader:

• Embraces the idea of a networked nonprofit and is willing and able to break down the walls of control and risk aversion and let the world in as fully engaged partners in the work they are doing.
• Works toward completely integrating money into the impact they are trying to create, understanding that big plans for impact are not enough, you also must finance them.
• Realizes that it is no longer enough to just “do good work.” They must find a way to measure, in some form, the work that they are doing and be able to demonstrate results to the external market.
• Looks to the social entrepreneurship movement for inspiration and new ideas for accelerating social impact.
• Recognizes the importance of strong infrastructure and works to recruit and keep top talent and create effective technology and systems by fundraising for those real operating costs every year.
• Refuses to play nice with funders who want to undermine the mission and impact of the organization, competitors who are providing an inferior service, and board members who won’t contribute.
• Maintains an external view on how their organization can continue to add value in the outside marketplace of community problems.
• Constantly forces themselves, and their high-performing team of board, staff, funders and volunteers to ask hard questions, make bold goals, push themselves harder, and deliver more and more impact.

It’s a tall order, but true leadership always is. We no longer have the luxury of so-so leaders. These times demand confident, capable, engaging leaders who are a beacon to a society whose mounting problems are overwhelming at best.

Photo Credit: 3n

Tags: Bob Herbert, networked nonprofit, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit leadership

Financing Not Fundraising: Aligning Money and Mission

In our ongoing series “Financing Not Fundraising,” we are exploring the argument that nonprofits need to stop fundraising and start financing social impact. The idea is that nonprofits have to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundation grants) will completely fund all of their activities.  Instead, they must work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change.

The previous posts in this series include an overview of the idea and how to create a financial plan.

The next piece of the puzzle is to create alignment in your nonprofit organization between mission (your reason for existing), core competencies (what you do better than anyone else in the world), and money (how you sustain yourself financially).

An organization in alignment looks like this:

The mission is supported by the organization’s core competencies which both feed into how it brings money in the door.

When one or two of these three elements are out of alignment, chaos can ensue.  For example:

Mission is misaligned: An organization that can generate money and operates great programs, but can’t bring it all together in a coherent single purpose, this is otherwise known as “mission creep.”

Core competencies are misaligned: An organization that has a great, clear idea of what they do (mission) and can raise money around it, but can’t deliver. This is reminiscent of the dot com era when there were countless businesses with fabulous ideas that successfully raised VC or angel money, but didn’t really have a core competency or product to deliver and eventually went bust.

Resource engine is misaligned: This final misalignment is the one nonprofits are most familiar with.  An organization has a great mission and can produce great results, but they can’t find a way to make the organization financially sustainable.

And it is this money misalignment where Financing Not Fundraising comes into play. Traditional nonprofit fundraising is often an example of money misalignment. It looks like this:

• The development staff (money) and program staff (mission) sit in separate parts of the building, rarely ever talk to each other, and make their respective decisions without consulting the other
• The board and non-fundraising staff disdain money and refuse to participate in bringing it in the door
• A nonprofit creates fundraising events that have nothing, or very little, to do with the mission of the organization
• A nonprofit raises money around gimmicks and donor benefits instead of around the mission and impact of the organization
• The organization’s strategic plan only contains goals for program delivery (mission), not how to finance that delivery (money)

And that’s just a beginning list. Shoving money to the side and ignoring it is the equivalent of a business owner saying they don’t need to pay attention to sales. “Nonprofit” means that individuals (private owners or shareholders) don’t gain financial benefit, it doesn’t mean that the entity doesn’t make money.

To get money back in alignment with mission and competencies nonprofits need to do several things:

1. Embrace the idea that money is not a necessary evil to your organization, but rather an equal and supportive partner to your mission
2. Train your entire board and staff on money in the nonprofit sector in general, and how money comes in the door at your specific organization
3. Make sure that your strategic plan has a realistic and thoughtful financial plan attached to it
4. Move fundraising activities and special events away from convoluted ways to extract money from people and towards celebrating and educating the community about the impact you are achieving
5. Be up front with board members, donors and staff about how much it costs to fund every aspect of the organization’s operations and the various ways that money offsets those costs

Instead of sequestering fundraising away from the “true work” of the organization, nonprofits must fully integrate financing into their mission. It’s the only real way to create social impact.