A Contest to Help Your Nonprofit Raise More Money

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am leading a Financing Not Fundraising E-Course for nonprofit leaders who are ready to create a more sustainable financial engine for their nonprofit. I would like to give one nonprofit that can’t afford the registration fee the opportunity to participate in the class for free.

But because this E-Course requires not only a financial investment, but more importantly an investment of time and mind-share, I want to select a nonprofit leader who has a compelling case for why they are ready to move their nonprofit from fundraising to financing. So I am introducing this contest.

To recap, the Financing Not Fundraising E-Course will take a small group of nonprofit leaders who are ready to chart a more sustainable financial future for their nonprofit from fundraising to financing.

Over the course of two months under my guidance you will:

•    Undertake a comprehensive fundraising assessment of your nonprofit
•    Gain new money-raising ideas
•    Create a detailed financing plan
•    Hear from other nonprofit leaders in your shoes, and
•    Learn how to move your organization forward

To watch a video that describes the Financing Not Fundraising E-Course in more detail go here.

If you’d like to enter to win a free registration to the Financing Not Fundraising E-Course, fill out the form below. The nonprofit leader who makes the most compelling case for why they are ready to take their organization to the next level will be selected this Wednesday, May 1st. So submit your entry soon.

Update: A contest winner was selected so the contest is now closed. However, registration for the September-October 2013 E-Course is new open. You can register here.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Tags: contest for nonprofits, financing not fundraising, fundraising contest, fundraising plan, fundraising strategy, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit fundraising training, nonprofit webinars

Moving From Fundraising to Financing

I’ve had a lot of great questions about the upcoming Financing Not Fundraising E-Course for nonprofit leaders. So I created a video that breaks the e-course down and explains exactly how it will work.

The Financing Not Fundraising E-Course is an excellent opportunity for nonprofits stuck in the starvation cycle to figure out what they can do to more effectively raise money and then create a plan for a more sustainable financial engine. The registration fee is per organization, so if you would like your executive director, development director and a board member, for example, to participate, they all can for one fee. You will just simply appoint one person as representative of the organization to participate in the coaching calls, and the others are free to “listen in” and help you with each step along the way.

The total time commitment over the course of two months is approximately 10-15 hours, which includes the webinars, coaching calls, Google Hangouts and homework assignments.

This E-Course is truly an investment in the future of your organization. By making the investment of the time and cost you will transform the money engine of your organization and recoup that investment many, many times over.

Watch the video below (or click here) to learn more. And if you have additional questions about the E-course, don’t hesitate to send me an email at nell@socialvelocity.net.

Register for the Financing Not Fundraising E-Course here

I hope you can join us!

Tags: financing not fundraising, fundraising plan, fundraising planning, fundraising training, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit development director, nonprofit executive director, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit sustainability, nonprofit webinars, training for nonprofit leaders

Stop Rolling the Nonprofit Fundraising Dice

It happens all too often. A nonprofit executive director called me the other day because they have just completed a beautiful strategic plan with some exciting goals and a new direction for the organization, but they don’t know how to bring the money in the door to make the plan a reality. They don’t have a financing plan for their nonprofit, so they are just hoping for the best.

A financing plan galvanizes board and staff to bring enough of the right kinds of money in the door to make the organization’s goals a reality. It creates a sustainable financial model for the nonprofit so that it can survive and thrive. Instead of rolling the dice and hoping for the best, a financing plan puts your nonprofit’s financial destiny squarely in your control.

But very few nonprofits have a financing plan. Which is why I’m excited to be offering one of my most popular webinars again this month. In the April 24th Creating a Financing Plan webinar I will take you step-by-step through what a financing plan looks like and how to create one for your nonprofit. If you truly want to break free from the exhausting hamster wheel of fundraising and start bringing enough money in the door to achieve your goals, you need a financing plan.

The Creating a Financing webinar will help you create an overall financing plan for your nonprofit, which 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
• Ways to divide tasks by staff and board members
• A process for monitoring the plan going forward

Here’s what some past Creating a Financing Plan webinar participants have said:

“This session was one of the best on this topic I have seen…presented in an excellent and logical manner.”

“I loved the reframing of financing for desired results instead of funding for operations… your message to wed money to the mission was a big AHA moment and I am now figuring out how to bring this to life for staff and Board.”

Creating a Financing Plan Webinar
Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
1:00-2:00pm Eastern
Register Now

And remember, as with all of our webinars, if you can’t make this day and time, don’t worry. When you register for the webinar you will gain access to the slides and recording of the webinar which you can watch whenever you want.

I hope to see you there!

Photo Credit: jDevaun

Tags: financing not fundraising, fundraising plan, how to create a fundraising plan, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit financing plan, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy

New Guide: Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan

I’m delighted to announce the release of the newest Social Velocity step-by-step guide, Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan. This guide is designed to help you build a financing plan for your nonprofit and joins the growing list of Social Velocity tools available to nonprofits.

A financing plan, unlike a traditional fundraising plan, is an integrated, thoughtful, and strategic way to help a nonprofit raise enough money to achieve its programmatic and organizational goals. When you finance, instead of fundraise for, your nonprofit you are developing a long-term strategy for bringing enough money in the door to achieve your mission.

Financing means that instead of asking the question:

“How much can we accomplish with what we can raise?”

you start asking the question:

“How much should we raise to accomplish our goals?”

A financing plan differs from a fundraising plan in a number of ways. Unlike a fundraising plan, a financing plan:

• Raises all of the necessary revenue AND capital required to achieve the goals of your strategic plan
• Includes ALL activities that bring money in the door
• Supports the short AND long term goals of your nonprofit
• Funds your programs AND infrastructure
• Employs activities in line with your core competencies and mission

The Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan Guide walks you step-by-step through the process of creating your nonprofit’s financing plan and is divided into 8 sections:

1. Align Money, Mission and Competence
2. The Financing Plan Framework
3. Create Revenue Goals
4. Create A Capital Goal
5. Create A Fundraising Infrastructure Goal
6. Operationalize the Plan
7. Monitor the Plan
8. Next Steps

With a clear financing plan, your nonprofit will bring more money in the door, in a more sustainable way, ultimately bringing you closer to achieving your mission and creating change in your community.

Download the Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan Guide Now.

Tags: board fundraising, capacity capital, creating a fundraising plan, financing not fundraising, fundraising plan, fundraising tools, nonprofit budget, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy

New Consulting Video

One of my resolutions this new year is to add more video to the Social Velocity site. I love watching video, and I’d love to see more nonprofits using the medium, so I thought I should probably follow suit. A few months ago I created a Social Velocity YouTube channel and will continue to add video to it over the course of the year. I also plan to do some video blogging this year, which I’m pretty excited about.

But today I want to introduce my new consulting video. Here I discuss how I consult with nonprofit clients. If you are reading this in an email, you can see the video by clicking here. Take a look!

Tags: board development, Board of Directors, Fundraising, fundraising plan, fundraising strategy, nonprofit consulting, nonprofit management, nonprofit strategy, strategic planning

Webinars to Kick Start Your 2013 Fundraising Plan

With the new year comes new year’s resolutions and one I’d love to see more nonprofits embrace is getting smarter about raising money. Imagine if more nonprofit leaders were to take a big step back and develop an overall financing strategy for their organizations that integrates money with their mission and allows them to play on their assets. In so doing, we could move away from a sector that struggles to get by.

To help you along in developing a smarter way to raise money in 2013 I’m offering two webinars this month.

Creating an Earned Income Stream Webinar
Recorded
Download Now

This webinar builds on the earlier Financing Not Fundraising: Evaluating Earned Income webinar and is intended for those nonprofits that have a business idea and are ready to pursue an earned income stream. This webinar, complete with case studies of other nonprofits that have launched earned income businesses, will show participants how to:

• Pilot a new business idea
• Find customers
• Price products/services
• Project future business income and expenses
• Create goals for the business and monitor progress on them
• Report progress on the business to the board

Next is a repeat of November’s sold out “Creating a Financing Plan” webinar:

Creating a Financing Plan Webinar
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
1:00-2:00pm Eastern
Register Now

This webinar will help nonprofit leaders understand the steps to creating an overall financing plan for their organization that results in sustainable, long-term money coming in the door. Webinar participants will learn how to:

• Set goals for ALL revenue streams flowing to the organization
• Determine the infrastructure dollars they need to raise
• Tie their financing plan to their strategic plan
• Create tactical steps to make the plan a reality, with activities, deliverables, people responsible, timeline
• Divide tasks by staff and board members
• Develop ways to monitor and revise the plan going forward

And remember, all of our webinars are available as recordings right after the live webinar, so even if you can’t make the time of the live webinar, you can still register and have access to all of the content. The registration fee for any Social Velocity webinar will get you:

• Access to the live, interactive webinar
• A link to a recording of the webinar, which you can watch as many times as you like
• The PowerPoint slides from the webinar
• The ability to ask additional follow-up questions after the webinar

You can see the complete list of all Social Velocity webinars here.

I hope to see you at one of these webinars!

Photo Credit: sylvester

Tags: financing not fundraising, Fundraising, fundraising plan, nonprofit earned income, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit webinars

10 Most Popular Posts of 2012

As 2012 winds down I wanted to take a minute to thank you, the Social Velocity community, for an amazing year. You are an incredibly smart, innovative, inspiring group, and I’m honored that you take time to read, comment and engage with the Social Velocity blog.

As I did last year around this time, I want to provide a list of the ten most popular Social Velocity blog posts from this year in case you missed some of them. Then I’m taking a break from the blog until January, but I’ll be scheduling some archive posts while I’m out of the office.

I wish you all a fun and relaxing holiday season. I look forward to another year of interacting with the great Social Velocity community in 2013. Happy Holidays!

The 10 most popular Social Velocity blog posts of 2012 were:

1. 9 Ways Board Members Can Raise Money Without Fundraising
2. Why I Love Pinterest and Nonprofits Should Too
3. Jump Start Your Board
4. Tools to Build a Stronger Nonprofit Sector
5. How to Raise Money To Strengthen Your Nonprofit
6. How to Rebut Crazy Donor Demands
7. Connect Money to Your Strategic Plan
8. 4 Times When a Nonprofit Needs a Strategic Plan
9. 10 Traits of a Groundbreaking Nonprofit Board
10. 7 Mistakes in Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising Plan

Photo Credit: ccpixel.net

Tags: fundraising plan, nonprofit board, nonprofit capacity, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, nonprofit tools, nonprofits and Pinterest

The Power of a Single Board Member

Note: A version of this post appeared on the blog in February 2011.

If this recession has any silver lining it could be that it’s forcing nonprofits to completely re-evaluate how they use money. There is a tendency in the sector to shy away from, ignore, fear or dismiss money. But when there is less of it, you are forced to learn how to use it more effectively.

And it is up to the board, who has a legally-defined fiduciary duty, to step up to the plate and provide a strategy for how money is used in the organization. But because boards are such a bizarre mingling of volunteer strangers it can be difficult for the group as a whole to take a leadership role, especially in the taboo area of money. The solution lies in encouraging a single individual board member to rise up.

Nonprofit boards are often ineffective fiscal managers largely because of their group dynamics. Countless times have I seen a nonprofit board of directors suffer from group think, head off in tangents, or avoid difficult conversations.

The opportunity lies in getting a single board member to play a leadership role. A nonprofit’s executive director can be instrumental in encouraging this coup d’etat by finding an individual board member who:

• Is passionate about the cause and the organization
• Has the respect of the majority of the other board members
• Understands, or is willing to be educated about, the basics of financial management
• Is confident enough not to be easily dismissed or swayed

And what does it look like when an individual board member takes a stand to move the board towards better financial management?

• Interrupting the annual rubber-stamping budget approval meeting to ask how the budget fully finances the overall strategic plan of the organization
• Asking for, and ensuring creation of, monthly financial statements that are understandable
• Ensuring basic nonprofit financial management training for board and key staff so everyone speaks the same language and understands the key ratios they should be analyzing
• Standing up to board members and staff who dismiss or discourage deeper conversations about how the nonprofit budgets, uses financial vehicles, handles financial reporting
• Interjecting, cajoling, persuading, and inspiring fellow board members to USE money to strengthen the work of the organization

As David Bornstein said, social change is often driven by “one obsessive individual who sees a problem and envisions a new solution.” So, too, in the world of the sometimes intractable nonprofit board. It may require a single board member to stand up and demand that financial business as usual doesn’t work anymore. If it takes a recession to make money a true tool for social change, so be it.

If you want to learn more about moving your board forward, download our 10 Traits of a Groundbreaking Board E-book.

Photo Credit: loco’s photos

Tags: effect of recession on nonprofits, fundraising plan, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy