10 Most Popular Posts of 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, I wanted to provide a list of the ten most popular Social Velocity blog posts this year. Then I’m taking a break from the blog until January.

I hope you all find time over the holidays to relax, unwind and spend time with friends and family. Thank you all for reading and contributing to the Social Velocity blog this year. I really appreciate all of my readers and look forward to talking with you in the new year. Happy Holidays!

The 10 most popular Social Velocity blog posts of 2011 were:

1. 5 Lies to Stop Telling Donors
2. The Financing Not Fundraising Blog Series
3. 10 Great Social Innovation Reads: November
4. The Problem with Strategic Planning
5. 5 Nonprofit Trends to Watch in 2011
6. 4 Things Every Nonprofit Needs
7. What is Social Innovation?
8. A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Nonprofit Revenue Plan
9. 7 Things Board Members Can Do to Raise More Money
10. Why Nonprofit Overhead is Destructive

Photo Credit: Charline Tetiyevsky

Tags: financing not fundraising, nonprofit board fundraising, nonprofit donors, nonprofit overhead, nonprofit revenue, nonprofit strategic planning, social innovation

A New Approach to Nonprofit Funding: Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series

I’m delighted to unveil today our new Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series. In each of the last three months I held an overview Financing Not Fundraising webinar that explained the concept and how nonprofits should approach their money generating activities in a very different way. This webinar is based on our popular Financing Not Fundraising blog series. Because the overview webinar was so popular and there was such a demand for more in-depth, topic specific webinars, I decided to launch a webinar series beginning this coming January. This series will take the individual concepts within Financing Not Fundraising one-by-one.

Below are the first four webinars in this series. As the year progresses, we will add additional webinars. There will be one Financing Not Fundraising webinar each month. And if you missed the overview webinar, you can still view a recording of it here.

I hope you’ll join us for these webinars!

Financing Not Fundraising Overview-Recorded Webinar
This recorded webinar from December 2011 shows nonprofits what this broader approach to securing the overall financing necessary to create social change looks like, including:

•    How to align your nonprofit’s mission with the money needed to deliver on it
•    Why a message of impact results in more money
•    Understanding the critical difference between revenue and capital
•    Why overhead isn’t a dirty word anymore
•    How and why to calculate the net revenue of money raising activities
•    When to explore new revenue streams

Download the Webinar

Creating a Financing Plan
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
12:00 noon -1:00 pm Eastern

This webinar will help nonprofit leaders create an overall financing plan to bring money in the door. This interactive webinar will help nonprofit leaders develop a plan that includes:

•    All revenue streams flowing to the organization
•    A strategy for funding programs and operations
•    Opportunities to raise money for infrastructure
•    Tactical steps with activities, deliverables, people responsible
•    How to divide tasks by staff and board members
•    Ways to monitor the plan going forward

Register Now

Finding Individual Donors
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
12 noon-1:00pm Eastern

Individual donors make up 80% of the private money flowing to the nonprofit sector, yet many nonprofits don’t know how to find and communicate with individual donors. This webinar will give you tools and strategies to:

•    Engage your board in individual donor fundraising
•    Use social media to connect with individual supporters
•    Create events that resonate with individual donors
•    Identify prospects
•    Create a system for engaging individual donors
•    Launch a major donor campaign

Register Now

Creating a Message of Impact
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
12 noon – 1:00pm Eastern

No one likes to beg for money. And donors increasingly aren’t moved to give through the tin cup approach. A far more effective way to communicate with potential donors is to talk about the impact your nonprofit is having in the community. This webinar will help your nonprofit:

•    Differentiate between donations and investments
•    Talk about what your nonprofit does in the community
•    Create a compelling case for support
•    Target donors who care about your work
•    Get your board excited about asking for money
•    Articulate a social return on investment (SROI) for donors

Register Now

Raising Capacity Capital
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
12 noon – 1:00pm Eastern

Capacity capital is the money that nonprofits desperately need, but find so hard to raise. It is money for infrastructure and organization building. It supports things like revenue-generating staff, launch of an earned income business, technology and systems, evaluation, training and consulting. If you want to move your organization out of the starvation cycle, you have to learn how to raise capacity capital. This webinar will show you how to:

•    Talk about the importance of capacity capital to donors and your board
•    Create a budget for the capacity dollars you need
•    Develop a campaign goal
•    Break the goal into donor ask amounts
•    Identify prospective donors
•    Give your board a role in the campaign

Register Now

Tags: creating a fundraising plan, creating a message of impact, financing not fundraising, finding individual donors, fundraising webinar, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, raising capacity capital

Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series

Because of the popularity of the past two Financing Not Fundraising overview webinars in October and November, I’ve decided to launch a webinar series that breaks the Financing Not Fundraising concept into its various parts and expands on how to approach each element.

I will kick off this new webinar series in January with a new webinar each month. Some of the webinar topics will be:

• Creating a Financing Plan
• Finding Individual Donors
• Developing a Message of Social Impact
• Raising Capacity Capital
• Evaluating Earned Income
• Calculating the Cost of Fundraising
• Moving from Push to Pull
• Getting Your Board to Raise Money

If you want to find out when those webinars get scheduled in the new year, sign up for our the Social Velocity e-newsletter.

But in the meantime, if you want to get up to speed on the overall concept of Financing Not Fundraising, I’m doing one more overview Financing Not Fundraising webinar on December 6th.

This webinar, based on our popular Financing Not Fundraising ongoing blog series will show nonprofits what a broader approach to securing the overall financing necessary to create social change looks like, including:

• How to align your nonprofit’s mission with the money needed to deliver on it
• Why a message of impact results in more money
• Understanding the critical difference between revenue and capital
• Why overhead isn’t a dirty word anymore
• How and why to calculate the net revenue of money raising activities
• When to explore new revenue streams

If you’ve been following the Social Velocity Financing Not Fundraising blog series and you want to learn more, or if the series has brought up some burning questions that you’d like to have answered, join us for this interactive webinar.

If your staff, your board, and your donors are worn out, rest assured, there is a better way. Join this webinar to find out how. I hope to see you there!

Financing Not Fundraising: Rethinking How Nonprofits Bring Money in the Door
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (Eastern Time)
$40.00
Register Now

Tags: board fundraising, capacity capital, financing not fundraising, individual donors, nonprofit earned income, nonprofit fundraising, philanthropic equity, social impact

Financing Not Fundraising E-Book

I’m delighted to announce that, by popular demand, we are releasing today the Financing Not Fundraising, 2011 e-book. This 27-page e-book is a compilation and expansion on the 11 blog posts from 2011 in the Social Velocity Financing Not Fundraising blog series.

In the midst of an incredibly challenging economic situation that is not getting better any time soon, the Financing Not Fundraising, 2011 e-book outlines a new vision for how the nonprofit sector gets funded. Fundraising in its current form just doesn’t work anymore. Indeed, traditional fundraising is holding the sector back by keeping nonprofits in the starvation cycle of trying to do more and more with less and less.

What the sector needs is a financing strategy not a fundraising strategy. 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, nonprofits must work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change.

This 27-page e-book is a compilation and expansion of the Social Velocity blog series Financing Not Fundraising from 2011. The blog series is ongoing, with new posts added throughout each year. We’ll begin adding new posts to the series in the new year, but in the meantime, this e-book captures and expands on the posts from 2011 in one place.

The 12 chapters of the Financing Not Fundraising, 2011 e-book are:

1. What is Financing Not Fundraising?
2. Create A Financial Strategy
3. Align Money and Mission
4. Find Individual Donors
5. Develop a Message of Impact
6. Raise Money for Building Capacity
7. Explore New Types of Money
8. Evaluate Earned Income
9. Calculate Net Revenue
10. Move From Push to Pull
11. Stop Lying to Donors
12. Getting Started

You can download the Financing Not Fundraising, 2011 e-book here.

If you want to learn more about how to apply the concepts of Financing Not Fundraising to your nonprofit, check out our Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series

Tags: earned income, financing not fundraising, individual donors, nonprofit capacity, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit strategic plan, Philanthropy

Financing Not Fundraising: 5 Lies to Stop Telling Donors

In part 11 of our ongoing blog series, Financing Not Fundraising, we are talking about being brutally honest with your donors. If nonprofits are going to truly break free from the vicious fundraising cycle, they must find the courage to tell funders how it really is. And since board members are a nonprofit’s closest supporters and (I hope) donors, you need to stop telling them these lies as well.

If you are new to our Financing Not Fundraising blog series, the series is about how nonprofits must 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 create a broader, more strategic approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change. You can read the entire series here.

If you want to learn more about how to apply the concepts of Financing Not Fundraising to your nonprofit, check out our Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series

If you want to break free of the exhausting cycle of fundraising, a key step is to start being brutally honest with funders. Here are the top 5 lies you have to stop telling donors:

1. X% of your donation goes to the program
   The distinction between “program expenses” and “overhead” is, at best, meaningless and, at worst, destructive. You cannot have a program without staff, technology, space, systems, evaluation, research and development. It is magical thinking to say that you can separate money spent on programs from money spent on the support of programs. Donors need to understand, and you need to explain to them, that “overhead” is not a dirty word. A nonprofit exists to deliver programs. And everything the organization does helps to make those programs better, stronger, bigger, more effective.




2. We can do the same program with less money
   No you can’t. You know you can’t. You are already scraping by. Don’t accept a check from a donor who wants all the bells and whistles you explained in your pitch, but at a lower cost. Explain the true costs, including administrative costs, of getting results. Politely, but firmly, explain to them that an inferior investment will yield an inferior result. If they simply can’t afford the price tag, then encourage them to find fellow funders to co-invest with.




3. We can start a new program that doesn’t fit with our mission or strategy
   Yes that big, fat check a donor is holding in front of you looks very appealing. But if it takes your organization in a different direction than your strategy or your core competencies require, accepting it is a huge mistake. Nonprofits must constantly ensure that money and mission are aligned. Otherwise the organization will be scattered in countless directions with an exhausted staff and confused donor base. Don’t let a donor take you down that road.




4. We can grow without additional staff or other resources
   Nonprofit staff truly excel at working endless hours with very few resources. They have perfected the concept of doing more and more with less and less. But someday that road must end. Nonprofit leaders have to be honest with donors when their staff and resources are at capacity. Because eventually program results will suffer and the donor will receive little in return for their investment.




5. 100% of our board is committed to our organization
   If that’s true, then you are a true minority in the nonprofit sector. Every nonprofit board I know has some dead  wood. Members who ignore fundraising duties, don’t contribute to meetings, miss meetings, take the organization on tangents are always present. It’s a fact that funders want to see every board member contributing. But instead of perpetuating the myth that 100% is an achievable reality, be honest with funders. Tell them that you continually analyze each individual board member’s contributions (financial, intellectual, time) and have a clear plan for addressing deficiency, including: coaching, peer pressure, training, asking for resignations. Getting to 100% is probably never realistic, it is far better to demonstrate that you are tirelessly working toward 90%.

Stop the madness. We need to stop telling funders what they want to hear and then cursing them behind their backs when they set  unrealistic expectations. Funders must be made to understand the harsh realities of the nonprofit sector if they are ever to be expected to help bring change.

To download the 27-page Financing Not Fundraising e-book, click here.

Tags: being honest with funders, financing not fundraising, money and mission, nonprofit alignment, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit overhead, program expenses

Breaking Free of the Fundraising Handcuffs

If you’ve been a fan of our popular, ongoing blog series, Financing Not Fundraising, you’ll want to participate in our upcoming Financing Not Fundraising webinar. The webinar will give you the tactical steps for breaking free of the unrelenting fundraisng handcuffs and bringing more money in the door.

Fundraising in the nonprofit sector doesn’t work anymore. In fact, traditional fundraising is holding the sector back by keeping nonprofits in the starvation cycle of trying to do more and more with less and less. What nonprofits need is a financing strategy, not a fundraising strategy. That means 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, nonprofits must work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change.

This webinar will show nonprofits what this financing approach looks like, including:

• How to align your nonprofit’s mission with the money needed to deliver on it
• Why a message of impact results in more money
• How to understand the critical difference between revenue and capital
• Why overhead isn’t a dirty word anymore
• How and why to calculate the net revenue of money raising activities
• When to explore new revenue streams

If your staff, your board, and your donors are worn out, if you’ve been following the Social Velocity Financing Not Fundraising blog series and you want to learn more, or if you want to put this new approach in motion, join us for this interactive webinar.

I hope to see you there!

Financing Not Fundraising Live Webinar

Tags: calculating costs of fundraising, earned income, financing not fundraising, Fundraising, fundraising plan, individual donors, nonprofit fundraising strategy, nonprofit overhead

Talking About Rethinking Nonprofit Fundraising

Last Thursday I was a guest on Michael Chatman’s The Giving Show, a weekly radio show about philanthropy. I was delighted to talk with Michael and his listeners about how nonprofits need to rethink the ways they bring money in the door. If you missed the show, you can still listen to the podcast here.

Michael and I talk about:

• How nonprofits need to finance, not fundraise for, their social impact
• The difference between revenue and capital, and why it’s such an important distinction for nonprofits
• When earned income is right for a nonprofit
• The opportunity the recession poses for nonprofits
• Why nonprofits must let go of the status quo
• How to educate donors to be organization builders
• Where innovation is happening in the nonprofit sector
• The convergence of the nonprofit, for-profit and government sectors
• Why overhead is NOT a dirty word

And much more. You can listen here.

Tags: build not buy, Convergence, financing not fundraising, Michael Chatman, nonprofit capacity building, nonprofit earned income, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit overhead, Philanthropy, The Giving Show

This Week’s The Giving Show

I’m delighted to announce that I will be Michael Chatman’s guest on this week’s Giving Show. Michael was voted America’s Maverick Philanthropist and one of the nation’s leading authorities on new philanthropy. He heads the nation’s largest network of mission-related philanthropists giving up to $50,000 annually, The Association of Maverick Philanthropists.

Michael hosts a weekly radio show, called the Giving Show, the largest weekly audience devoted to the topic of philanthropy.

I’ll be Michael’s guest this week on Thursday, September 8th at 11:30am Eastern. You can click here to listen then.

We’ll be talking about Financing Not Fundraising, how to get your donors to be more effective, how philanthropy is changing, what the social entrepreneurship movement means for nonprofits and much more. I hope you’ll join us.

Click here to listen to the Giving Show on Thursday at 11:30am Eastern.

Tags: financing not fundraising, Michael Chatman, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit trends, Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurship, The Giving Show