Articulating Your Nonprofit’s Value Through a Theory of Change

If you want to raise more money, chart a strategic direction, make your nonprofit more effective, get your board engaged, and achieve your mission, you need a theory of change. A theory of change is basically an argument for how your nonprofit turns community resources (money, volunteers, clients, staff, materials) into positive change in the community. Articulating this simple argument can dramatically increase your nonprofit’s effectiveness and financial sustainability. In order to help your nonprofit create a theory of change, I’m delighted to announce that we are releasing today our newest Step-by-Step Guide, Creating a Theory of Change.

More and more donors and board members want to understand how the nonprofit they are involved with creates social change. A theory of change helps your nonprofit do that.

A theory of change can strengthen your nonprofit in many ways:

• As the backbone of a case for support or other fundraising collateral. With a theory of change, you can articulate the impact you are working to achieve, in a compelling way.
• To revise the vision and mission of your organization, making them stronger and more compelling.
• As a filter for new opportunities as they arise. Do new opportunities fit within your theory of change? If not, perhaps you should not pursue them.
• To guide your strategic planning process. If you understand the organization’s overall theory of change and what you exist to do, it is much easier to chart a future course.
• To get board members and other volunteers, friends and supporters engaged, committed, and excited about your work. If people understand the bigger picture, they will be more inclined to give more time, energy, and other resources to the work.
• To help staff understand how their individual roles and responsibilities fit into the larger vision of the organization. This can increase staff morale, productivity, communication and overall commitment to the organization.

The Creating a Theory of Change Guide is organized around the parts of a Theory of Change. In each of the 8 sections of this guide there is a series of questions, which you will answer. Your answers to these questions become the basis for your final theory of change.

The sections of the guide are:

1. Community Need
2. Inputs
3. Activities
4. Outputs
5. Outcomes
6. Impact
7. Final Theory of Change
8. Next Steps

You can find out more about the Creating a Theory of Change guide here. And for information on our other Step-by-Step Guides, like the Revenue Plan Guide, Business Plan Guide, Case for Support Guide, check our Tools page.

Tags: logic model, nonprofit case for support, nonprofit evaluation, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit outcomes, nonprofit outputs, nonprofit strategic plan, Social Velocity Step-by-Step Guides, theory of change

Raising Money to Grow On: Putting the Strategic Plan in Place

Last May I launched a new ongoing blog series that profiles Social Velocity’s work with Charlotte Chamber Music, a small performing arts organization that has a big vision, but lacks the capital to get there. Charlotte Chamber Music enlisted Social Velocity’s help last Spring to create a strategic plan and a capacity capital pitch to raise the money to execute on their big plan. You can read the whole series here.

Capacity capital (or “philanthropic equity”) is the money so many nonprofits desperately need. Capacity capital is dramatically different from the day-to-day operating revenue for which nonprofits are always fundraising. Capacity capital doesn’t fund delivery of nonprofit services (beds for a homeless shelter, new productions in an opera house, books for an after-school program). Rather, capacity capital builds the organizational infrastructure of the nonprofit (technology, systems, administrative or fundraising staff, materials) that allows the organization to become more effective or grow. But you cannot simply go out and ask for capacity capital. First, you must develop a compelling, inspiring, actionable and measurable plan for what you would do with the capacity capital.

After several months of working with Charlotte Chamber Music we had a strategic plan that staff and board were excited about and invested in. But it’s not enough to have a great strategic direction and goals and objectives to get there. You have to make the plan operational. That means you have to tie the big plan to the day-to-day activity of the organization and the price tag need to get there.

The next step in the process was to develop:

1. An annual operational plan built from the strategic plan, and
2. A budget

To do this, Executive Director Elaine Spallone needed to create milestones for each year of the plan. She needed to articulate what had to be accomplished in each year of the plan. This allowed her to start to break the big 3-year plan into annual chunks. Once she was happy with those milestones, she created a laundry list of activities that had to be accomplished in the first year in order to hit the first milestone. Once she was happy with that comprehensive list of activities, she tied each activity to a deliverable, a deadline and a person responsible.

As Elaine said:

Creating the operational plan was intense in the time investment and level of detail required, but worth every minute spent in its creation. It is especially gratifying to check off items and see the progress made. To be fair, it can also be frustrating to realize what is not moving forward. But the good news there is that those issues are clear, and can be articulated, shared and modified.

At the same time, she needed to project revenue and expenses over the period of the strategic plan. It’s not enough to have big goals, you need to understand the price tag associated with those goals (expenses) and how the money (revenue) will flow into the organization to meet those expenses. So Elaine created a 3-year revenue and expense projection that was tied to the goals and objectives of the plan.

Once she had these two key pieces in place (annual operational plan and 3-year budget) she could begin to put some key monitoring pieces in place to ensure that the strategic plan was being executed on. These monitoring pieces are:

• Each monthly staff meeting is tied to the deliverables of the operational plan that are due that month
• Each monthly board meeting includes a dashboard report on the status of the goals of the plan
• At the end of each fiscal year, Elaine will create the next year’s annual operational plan tied to the strategic plan
• Annual employee evaluations will be tied to an employee’s performance on their part of the operational plan
• Each annual budget will be tied to the costs of the annual operational plan

So now that Charlotte Chamber Music had an inspiring, investable strategic plan and a budget and operational plan to ensure that the plan would actually come to fruition, they were ready to go out and raise the capacity capital they needed.

In the next post in this series, we’ll talk about how we created a capacity capital pitch and a strategy for going after prospective funders.

Tags: capacity capital, Charlotte Chamber Music, Elaine Spallone, nonprofit budget, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit infrastructure, nonprofit overhead, nonprofit strategic plan, philanthropic equity, raising money for nonprofit organization, Social Velocity

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

Raising Money to Grow On: Creating The Plan

In May I launched a new ongoing blog series that profiles Social Velocity’s work with Charlotte Chamber Music, a small performing arts organization that has a big vision, but lacks the capital to get there. Charlotte Chamber Music enlisted Social Velocity’s help last Spring to create a strategic plan and a capacity capital pitch to raise the money to execute on that plan. You can read the first post in this series that details what gave Charlotte Chamber Music the desire to raise capacity capital.

Today I describe how we developed a strategic plan for Charlotte Chamber Music, which is the very necessary first step in raising capacity capital.

But first, let’s review. Capacity capital (or “philanthropic equity”) is the money so many nonprofits desperately need. Capacity capital is dramatically different from the day-to-day operating revenue that nonprofits are always fundraising for. Capacity capital doesn’t fund delivery of nonprofit services (beds for a homeless shelter, new productions in an opera house, books for an after-school program). Rather, capacity capital builds the organizational infrastructure of the nonprofit (technology, system, administrative or fundraising staff, materials) that allows the organization to become more effective or grow. The vast majority of nonprofit organizations don’t have access to this kind of money because:

1. Funders are hesitant to fund “overhead,” and
2. Nonprofits don’t know how to make the case for why this kind of money is so critical to their ability to deliver impact.

But you cannot simply go out and ask for capacity capital. First, you must develop a compelling, inspiring, actionable and measurable plan for what you would do with the capacity capital. And this is where we started with Charlotte Chamber Music.

Over a period of almost 6 months, Elaine Spallone, the Charlotte Chamber Music Executive Director, and I went through the strategic planning process:

Analyze the Internal Situation: We developed SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)  and core competency analyses. We also created an organization logic model, which helps the organization articulate how they take community resources ($, people, artists) and turn them into social change. Then Elaine took those 3 elements and “shopped them around” to board members, funders, staff, and other constituents to refine what we had developed.

Analyze the External Environment: Elaine and her board and staff then researched their competitors (those providing similar services in the community) and consumers (funders and clients) in order to understand trends, how their core competencies related to community needs, and the competing forces working to address those needs.

Refine Vision and Mission: Several month prior to working with Social Velocity CM had created a new vision and mission statements. But they were very internally focused.  Now, with all of the above data, analysis and feedback in hand, Elaine, her staff and board reviewed their current vision and mission and refined them to better reflect their new understanding of the value CCM brings the Charlotte community. As Elaine observed:

Working with Nell on the mission and vision was critical. We as an organization had in fact addressed them several months earlier and created something we felt good about. But Nell helped us understand that we created something that talked about us as an organization, and not about the way we were going to change our community. It is a critical distinction. It made all the difference and paved the way for our “aha” moment.

So, their new and improved vision and mission statements became:

• New Vision: Charlotte becomes the cultural center of the Southeast through the vibrant engagement of its citizens, connected to their humanity, history and each other.
• New Mission: To stimulate, animate and connect Carolinians to each other and their region through the presentation of curated chamber music performances.

Develop Goals and Objectives: With their new vision and mission statements as the guiding elements and filters of the strategic plan, CCM developed a strategic direction. What was really interesting about defining their strategic direction is that the final direction was much different than what they had thought it would be. Before our strategic planning process started, Elaine and her board thought their ultimate goal was “to become a top tier arts organization,” in essence to mirror the largest, most successful, most well-funded performing arts organizations in the city.

However, what they realized in a key “a-ha” moment was that that direction didn’t fit with their core competencies or their place in the external environment. There are countless arts organizations vying to be “top tier.” But CCM’s strength is it’s scrappiness–it’s ability to easily adapt to the changing environment and experiment because they don’t have an expensive staff or infrastructure that needs to be slowly moved. Thus, CCM came up with this strategic direction:

By 2020, through an expansion of venues and channels, Charlotte Chamber Music becomes a new model for engaging people in broader and deeper ways with the cultural arts community

CCM made a very strategic decision: they want to be a new, innovative model that connects people in their community through the cultural arts. They want to draw on their assets of ingenuity, flexibility, innovation and the inherent qualities in chamber music that are so good at connecting people to each other in its intimacy, engagement and accessibility. With their new strategic direction in place, they developed 5 broad goals, and the objectives to get to each of them, for the next 3 years.

With this exciting new strategic plan in hand, Elaine remarked:

A year ago, before we met Social Velocity, we held an informal board and staff retreat. At one point, the board chair called on each board member to share what they felt was the most critical issue we faced as an organization. Overwhelmingly the response was: “What are the measurements for our mission and vision, what are the goals?” and “No clear understanding of where we are going”. I am excited a year later to know all these questions have been answered, and we have a completely new  trajectory in which we have set ourselves upon!

CCM’s new strategic plan has begun to dramatically shift the culture of the organization. CCM now has an exciting, compelling long-term vision (and a detailed plan to execute toward that vision) that is getting staff, board and funders excited for the future.

In the next post in this series, we’ll talk about how we created the day-to-day operational plan to execute on this strategic direction, the 3-year budget to get there, and a system for monitoring the plan going forward.

Photo Credit: laura padgett

Tags: Charlotte Chamber Music, nonprofit capacity building, nonprofit case study, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit vision and mission, philanthropic equity

4 Things Every Nonprofit Needs

If the leaders of a nonprofit organization are really serious about creating change, there are some things they must have in place. I spend my days talking with a variety of nonprofit organizations, and the problems that bring them to Social Velocity all fall into these broad categories:

• An inability to raise enough money
• A lack of strategic direction
• An inability to “move the needle” on a social problem
• A disconnected, disengaged, ineffective board of directors
• Lack of sufficient organization infrastructure

In my mind, the solution is so simple. If every nonprofit had 4 key things in place, those problems would go away. Here’s what I think every nonprofit has to put in place:

1. A theory of change. Nonprofit organizations exist to meet some sort of social need or problem. Unlike for-profit organizations, nonprofits can’t simply use their financial bottom line as a barometer of success. Rather, a nonprofit must articulate what they exist to do. A theory of change, or logic model, allows a nonprofit to state (to internal board and staff, and to external funders, volunteers, supporters) how they take community resources and turn them into social change. Without a theory of change, a nonprofit cannot convince anyone to be part of their work, let alone measure whether that work is actually resulting in anything.

2. A strategic plan. And I don’t mean a “pretend” strategic plan where board and staff went through the motions to create something they could show to funders and put up on their walls. I mean a real strategic plan that is built on the logic model and guides the day-to-day work of the organization, is compelling and inspiring, and results in real solutions to social problems. A good strategic plan allows a nonprofit organization to understand and articulate their contribution to a larger community marketplace and then craft organization goals around that knowledge. Without a good strategic plan a nonprofit is just twisting in the wind, probably doing a lot of work, but to what end?

3. A financing plan. It is not enough to have big goals and  a plan for the future, a nonprofit must understand the price tag associated with their strategic plan and how they are going to bring enough money in the door to finance that plan. And a good financing plan analyzes all potential sources of money, lays out a clear road map for bringing that money in the door, and fully integrates the securing of money into the other work of the organization.

4. A pitch for capital. Capital is money to build the nonprofit organization infrastructure, as opposed to revenue which helps the nonprofit provide more services. Most nonprofits simply go out and raise revenue, but few go out and raise money to build a stronger, more effective and efficient organization. This kind of money is capacity capital. If more nonprofits put together a pitch to convince funders to invest in organization building we would start to see many more effective solutions to social problems grow. In the for-profit world we understand that you can’t just sell widgets. You need an infrastructure behind those widgets (staff, technology, systems, sales, etc), but in the nonprofit sector we insist on starving organizations and forcing them to spend every last dime on services, with no money for infrastructure. With a compelling pitch for capacity capital, that can change.

I don’t think I’m oversimplifying things. The nonprofits that will emerge from this recession stronger, more effective, and better able to really tackle and solve the many problems facing us are those organizations that have taken a step back and put in place the building blocks that will move them forward.

Photo Credit: 5mal5

Tags: capacity capital, change capital, funder pitch, logic model, nonprofit strategic plan, philanthropic equity, theory of change

A Tool Box to Make Your Nonprofit Bigger, Better, Stronger

I wrote a few months ago that we are hard at work at Social Velocity creating tools to help smaller nonprofits do things bigger, better, more effectively and sustainably. And we got some great suggestions via the blog, Facebook and Twitter of the kinds of tools nonprofit leaders were looking for.

Well, I’m happy to announce that today we are releasing our first new tools. We have revamped the Tools page of our website and added a lot of new content. Our plan is to release additional tools every month.

I’m most excited about our new tip sheets. These are one-page, user friendly guides to help your staff and board start moving in a new direction. You can download our first three tip sheets here:

• “How to Get Your Board Fundraising”
• “Is Your Nonprofit Ready for a Strategic Plan?”
  
• Strengthen Your Nonprofit Through a Theory of Change

But we also have whitepapers, podcasts, blog series, and other articles on the Tools page that are very hands-on and can help you, your board, staff and donors see things in a new way, try a different approach, employ a more innovative model and so on.

Social Velocity exists to help those small and medium-size nonprofits who want to be more entrepreneurial, grow their programs, get their board engaged and invested, raise money to build their organization, or break out of the starvation cycle. I’m very passionate about the fact that nonprofits need help to become stronger, better, more effective and sustainable at creating social impact.

Over the next several months we will continue to add to these tool categories, but also create new categories of tools such as webinars, e-books, guides, worksheets, and templates. So keep your eye on our evolving Tools page, and please continue to give us your thoughts and feedback about these tools and other tools you would like to see.

Tags: get board fundraising, how to get board fundraising, is your nonprofit ready for a strategic plan?, nonprofit fundraising tools, nonprofit logic model, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit theory of change, Social Velocity tools

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