Financing Not Fundraising: Break Free From the Starvation Cycle

The other day I met with a nonprofit leader (let’s call her June) who has a great idea for an earned income venture that fits directly with her mission, but she doesn’t have the start-up capital to launch. When she explained this to me, she threw up her hands as if to say, “I’m powerless to move forward.”

But from my vantage point she has all the pieces necessary to raise the start-up capital and launch, she just isn’t putting them together. It’s a common refrain — nonprofit leaders complain about being in a catch-22 of not having enough money to raise enough money. But the answer is often right in front of you. To break free from the starvation cycle, assemble the assets you already have in order to raise capacity capital, which is the topic of today’s post in the ongoing Financing Not Fundraising blog series.

The nonprofit starvation cycle is one nonprofit leaders know only to well. Nonprofit organizations rarely have the technology, staff, and systems to function effectively. So they scrape by trying to wring one more drop out of a completely dry rock. But instead of waiting for funders to fix the situation, it is up to nonprofit leaders themselves to break free. And you break free by raising capacity capital.

Capacity capital is a one-time investment of significant money that can help build or strengthen a nonprofit organization so that it can create more social change. Capacity capital funds things like technology, systems, a program evaluation, revenue-generating staff, start-up costs for an earned income business. It is money that strengthens the organization so that it can do more.

But often nonprofit leaders, like June above, don’t recognize that everything they need to raise capacity capital and break free from the starvation cycle is in right in front of them.  Here are the necessary pieces:

A Plan. You know what you need in order to do more, so put together a change plan and figure out what elements you need (technology, systems, staffing) and what they will cost. Do your homework so you can speak intelligently about what it will take to get you from point A to point B. June has a great business plan for her venture and knows exactly how much she needs in start-up costs.

Donors Who Love You. When raising capacity capital you want to go after donors who already love what you are doing and want to see more. You must convince them that a one-time investment of capacity capital will enable you to do even more of what they already love. June has a great network of long-time donors, which she could convince to become capacity capital donors.

A Connection Between Capital and More Impact. Make a convincing argument to those donors that capacity capital will create more of what they already love. For example, having a great Development Director in place can bring hundreds of thousands of new dollars each year which means many more people will be touched by your organization.  Or explain how an evaluation of your program will allow you to focus your resources on highest impact activities. June could describe how a profitable earned income venture could increase financial sustainability while delivering more impact.

June has all of these pieces. She has a great plan for an earned income business that could significantly contribute to a more sustainable financial engine and thus allow her nonprofit to reach more people, a clear articulation of how much capital she needs and for what, and a committed group of donors who love the organization. For her, and for most nonprofits, it is simply a question of connecting the dots.

If you want to learn more about the power of capacity capital, download the Enormous Opportunity of Capacity Capital e-book, the Creating a Capacity Capital step-by-step guide or the Raising Capacity Capital webinar.

Photo Credit: PublicDomainPictures

Tags: capacity capital, convincing donors to give, development director, earned income, financing not fundraising, nonprofit donors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit starvation cycle, Philanthropy

Financing Not Fundraising: Find and Keep a Great Fundraiser

The news is not good lately about how effective the head fundraiser is at nonprofit organizations. A new study by CompassPoint reveals some startling realities about the fundraiser role in the nonprofit sector:

• 25% of executive directors fired their last development director
• 33% of executive directors are lukewarm about their current development director
• More than 50% of executive directors say they can’t find well-qualified fundraisers
• 50% of development directors plan to leave within the next two years
• And 40% plan to leave fundraising altogether

That sounds like a fundraising crisis to me. And it’s just another example of why fundraising in the nonprofit sector is broken. So in today’s installment of my regular Financing Not Fundraising blog series, I’m talking about how to find and keep a great fundraiser.

If you’re new to this series, Financing Not Fundraising recognizes that fundraising in the nonprofit sector just doesn’t work anymore. 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 and instead work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change. You can read the entire series here.

What I find most troubling about CompassPoint’s recent study is that it makes nonprofits sound so powerless to do anything about this deep dissatisfaction with fundraising performance. But I think it’s not staff, board or donors who are lacking, rather it’s the entire fundraising approach.

Here is how to go about finding and keeping a great fundraiser.

• Hire a Money Head. Don’t hire someone who can just write grants or someone who can just work with individual donors. Take a look at the entire financial engine of your organization and hire someone who can develop and execute a strategy for strengthening and growing ALL aspects of that financial engine. If you have significant government grants or earned income, make sure you have someone on board who understands and can work with those aspects as well as the private money that flows to the organization.




• Develop a Financing Plan. Don’t just expect to hire someone who will magically make money appear. Your head fundraiser has to be in charge of developing and executing an overall financing strategy for your organization. And that means that you need an overall financing strategy for your organization. Without a strategy, your chief fundraiser and your nonprofit are sunk.




• Pay a Real Salary. It amazes me how many nonprofits expect to entice a great fundraiser by offering a salary that is comparable to someone with only a few years of experience . If you don’t have the current budget to pay a market rate, raise capacity capital to fund the first 1-2 years of the position. Once you have a great fundraiser on board he will raise his own salary while growing your nonprofit’s overall revenue.




• Work WITH Them. It drives me crazy how many times a nonprofit’s lone fundraiser is trying to raise all the money by herself. If you are going to align mission and money, you have to make sure that EVERYONE in the organization (board and staff) understand their role in bringing money in the door. Create a culture of philanthropy among the staff so that even a staff member who doesn’t have dollar goals in her job description understands that talking to prospects and donors, giving tours, writing thank you notes are critical to keeping the organization going. And make sure the board is trained in fundraising, has a give/get requirement, and has specific individual and board money goals.




• Hire Enough Fundraisers. The rule of thumb is that it takes one full time person to raise $500K, including anyone who touches prospects and donors (database manager, prospect researcher, etc). If you are asking a single fundraiser to raise $1.5 million there is little wonder why she is (and you are) miserable.




• Give Them Tools. Don’t hire a great fundraiser and then fail to give him a donor database, an interactive website, marketing materials, prospect research, support. It does no good to hire someone with great ideas but no way to bring those ideas to fruition. If you don’t have the budget for additional support and tools, raise capacity capital to find it.




• Train Them. No one knows it all. In every other profession we expect to send employees to conferences, provide them classes, coach them along the way. Don’t expect that your fundraiser automatically knows all there is to know. Give him opportunities to gain new knowledge, meet others in the field, and continue to grow his skills.

If you want to attract and retain someone who will develop a sustainable financial engine for your nonprofit, don’t leave her out in the cold. Fully integrate your head fundraiser into your organization and give her the tools, support and resources necessary to succeed.

If you want to move your nonprofit from fundraising to financing, check out the Financing Not Fundraising page of our website with articles, e-books and webinars to get you started. Or if you’d like to find out more about how I could help your nonprofit develop a financing plan or coach your fundraising staff to greater success, send me an email at nell@socialvelocity.net.

Photo Credit: Sahaja 

Tags: board fundraising, board give/get requirement, capacity capital, chief fundraiser, CompassPoint, development director, financing not fundraising, financing strategy, fundraising dissatisfaction, fundraising strategy, hiring a fundraiser, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategy, Underdeveloped A National Study of Challenges Facing Fundraising

Financing Not Fundraising: The Critical Alliance Between Executive & Development Directors

In this month’s post in the on-going Financing Not Fundraising blog series I’m talking about creating a productive partnership between a nonprofit’s leader (the Executive Director or CEO) and a nonprofit’s chief revenue generator (typically the Development Director).  If your nonprofit is going to start financing instead of fundraising, you must work to forge an effective Executive Director and Development Director relationship.  If you are fully integrating money and mission, then your ED and DD should be planning, talking about, debating, and integrating their work on a daily basis. If that’s happening, the organization has a much better chance for long-term financial sustainability.

If you are new to the Financing Not Fundraising blog series, the series is about how nonprofits must break out of the FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundation grants) box and instead create a broader, more strategic approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change. You can read the entire series here.

If a nonprofit’s Executive Director can fully embrace, support and promote the work of the Development Director, the organization can become much more financially sustainable. There are several clues that a productive partnership between a nonprofit’s Executive Director and Development Director exists:

• The Executive Director charges the Development Director with leading all revenue activities that the organization pursues (public, private and earned income) instead of limiting the Development Director’s role to just private income streams (individual, foundation, corporate).




• The Executive Director asks the Development Director to create an ambitious, comprehensive annual financing plan in conjunction with the organization’s overall strategic plan and then to  monitor that plan to successful implementation.




• The Executive Director creates the organization’s revenue budget through an open and honest negotiation with the Development Director and based on the Development Director’s annual revenue plan, as opposed to simply telling the Development Director how much to raise.




• The Executive Director continually works to educate the entire board and staff about how critical money is to the work of the organization and how each member of the board and staff has a role to play, as opposed to leaving all revenue-generating efforts up to the Development Director.




• The Executive Director makes a constant and conscious effort to encourage the Program and Development Directors to work together, understand each other’s viewpoint, support each other’s goals and empathize with each other’s roadblocks. The Executive Director treats both positions, and both departments, as equally critical to the success of the organization.




• The Executive Director works closely with the board chair to make sure every board member is meeting their give/get requirement and doesn’t leave the Development Director to try to strong arm board members to contribute.




• The Executive Director encourages and helps secure funding for the Development Director’s requests for the additional infrastructure (donor database, staffing, materials, technology) required to deliver on the ambitious goals of their revenue plan.




• As with each member of their staff, the Executive Director evaluates the Development Director’s performance on an annual basis and sets performance goals for the Development Director for the coming year based on the overall strategic plan of the organization.

As the leader of a nonprofit organization it is up to the Executive Director to forge an effective partnership with their chief fundraiser. An ED that buries their head in the sand and leaves money up to their Development Director will eventually find their Development Director gone, their funding diminishing and their long-term financial outlook bleak.

If you want to learn more about applying the concepts of Financing Not Fundraising to your nonprofit, check out our Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series, or download the 27-page Financing Not Fundraising e-book.

Photo Credit: USAJFKSWCS

Tags: development director, development director job description, executive director, financing not fundraising, managing nonprofit staff, nonprofit capacity capital, nonprofit financial sustainability, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit staff evaluation

7 Things Board Members Can Do To Raise More Money

I am often asked by exhausted board members and executive directors what the board can do to raise more money. My answer, let me tell you right away, is NEVER to launch a new event.  Don’t get me started on my anti-events rant, that’s another post.

But there are other things that board members can do to raise significantly more money for their organization, in a much more effective way.  Here are 7 to get you started:

1. Invest. Make a significant financial investment in the organization.  This is so obvious, yet rarely does a nonprofit organization enjoy 100% giving from their board.  And those that do, often have several board members who are only making “token” gifts.  If the nonprofit on whose board you serve isn’t on the list of your top 3 nonprofits and you aren’t allocating your philanthropic dollars accordingly, then get off the board.




2. Open Doors. Open up your network to the organization. We all have friends, colleagues, co-workers, family members, neighbors.  They may not all be $10,000+ level givers, but you would be surprised at the capacity that probably does exist there.  If you really believe in the organization, then spread the word about your involvement to your network and encourage them to become involved.  If you’re uncomfortable doing this then perhaps you need to rethink how committed you are to the organization.




3. Get Strategic. Demand that your nonprofit create a strategic plan. Without an articulated direction and a strategy for getting there how are you going to get donors to invest? So many nonprofit organizations operate without a plan, and that’s probably why they struggle to raise funds. People donate to a cause, but they invest in a executable strategy for impact.  The former results in small gifts, the latter brings big dollars.




4. Expand the Revenue Model. Often nonprofit organizations take a narrow approach to thinking about bringing money in the door.  They may have a direct mail campaign, get some government and foundation grants and call it a day. Instead, take a bigger picture view of the business that you are in and the various ways you could finance, not fundraise for, the end goal. Executive and development directors are often so caught up in the day-to-day of funding operations that they don’t have the luxury of taking this big picture view, but that’s where the board can step in.




5. Fund Revenue-Generating Capacity. Make sure the organization invests in sufficient development capacity. Budget for and find a top-notch development director. Secure outside expertise to create a solid, executable development plan. Train the board on their role in fundraising. Don’t ask the organization to cut corners on development expenses, because you will just pay the price later.




6. Articulate Why Someone Should Give. It’s so obvious to you why you are involved in your nonprofit. But can you articulate that to others in a compelling way? Can you demonstrate how a significant community problem is being solved by your organization? Can you do it in 2 minutes? Can the other board members and the staff do it? If not, then you need to create a case for support.




7. Get the Board on Board. Once you’ve done all of these things, get your fellow board members on the boat. The nonprofit sector is structured to be led by consensus. So it isn’t enough for you as a sole board member to “see the light.”  You have a responsibility to convince your fellow board members that they can’t think small anymore. They have to invest, get strategic, open doors, and so on.  Once you are all on the same page, you will be a force to be reckoned with.

If you are interested in learning more about how to get your board raising money for your nonprofit, check out our Getting Your Board to Fundraise recorded webinar.

And if you want a roadmap for making your board more effective, download the “10 Traits of a Groundbreaking Board” e-book.

I promise you, there is an answer. It doesn’t have to be so hard. Board members can help their struggling nonprofits to find a path toward financial sustainability.

Tags: Board of Directors, case for support, development director, nonprofit, nonprofit events, raise more money