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

Does Your Nonprofit Really Need a Strategic Plan?

I get it. The words “strategic plan” have been so abused in the nonprofit sector that they elicit a whole spectrum of negative responses from the bored eye roll to the destructive desire to forgo strategy altogether. But I am a firm believer that charting a future direction for your nonprofit, whatever you want to call it, is absolutely fundamental to success.

A  great strategy allows your nonprofit to:

• Connect mission and money
• Marshal ever-limited resources to their highest and best use
• Make board and staff more productive
• Articulate the value you provide your community
• Attract additional funding
• And, ultimately, create more social change

If you can’t, as an organization, describe your strategy for the future, how will you build the momentum and resources needed to get there?

This month’s Social Velocity webinar The Value of a Great Nonprofit Strategy will help you understand:

• Why strategy is so critical to building momentum and resources for your work
• What a great strategic planning process looks like
• How strategy can help you invest funders, engage your board, and make your staff more productive
• How to make your board more strategic
• The steps to get there

The Value of a Great Nonprofit Strategy
A Social Velocity Webinar
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
1:00-2:00pm Eastern

Register Now

And remember, even if you can’t make this date or time you can still register for the webinar and get access to the recording, slides and ability to ask follow up questions. I hope you’ll join us!

Photo Credit: jonrawlinson.com

Tags: nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, nonprofit webinars, social change

Stop Beating Your Head Against the Nonprofit Fundraising Wall

I was in Atlanta last week speaking at NeighborWorks America’s National Fundraising Symposium. I really love speaking to nonprofit staff and board members who are in the trenches trying to raise money for their organizations. The same thing that happened in Atlanta always happens. The group started out tired, uninspired, worn out with fundraising. But then I started to describe Financing and the light bulb went on. And for the rest of the day when I talked with attendees, or heard them talking to each other, they would try out this new word, this new concept, “Financing.”

But it’s not just semantics. Financing is a fundamentally different approach to every aspect of a nonprofit organization. For the group in Atlanta, I laid out the five main elements of it:

• Create A Financing Plan
  Nonprofits must create a comprehensive strategy for bringing enough, and the right kind of, money in the door to achieve their strategic goals. This includes revenue and capital, programs and infrastructure dollars, and all funding sources. Money must be understood and used as a tool, instead of feared and sequestered.




• Connect Mission & Money
  The financial woes of many nonprofit organizations often stem from a misalignment of mission and money. A nonprofit leader who creates a financial engine for her organization that is fully connected to and supportive of its mission (instead of detracting or isolated from it) will enjoy financial sustainability.




• Diversify Funding
  Relying on only one or two funding sources, particularly foundation grants which make up less than 2% of all the money flowing to the nonprofit sector, is a dangerous strategy in the nonprofit sector. It is far better to create a robust and diverse money mix that fits well with your nonprofit’s mission and competencies.




• Invest Supporters
  As mounting research demonstrates, donors are increasingly looking to become engaged in the nonprofits they support. And they are looking for impact, not just a place to write a check. In order to attract these donors, nonprofits must articulate their value and convince supporters to become a partner in creating social change.




• Find Money to Build
  The time for scraping by and never having enough money for the right technology, staff, and systems is over. Instead nonprofits must become savvy about capacity capital and start raising the money they need to build the organization their mission requires.

It is so inspiring to see people who are on the front lines of creating stronger schools, neighborhoods, communities in this country suddenly realize that it doesn’t have to be so hard. You can stop beating your head against the fundraising wall.

If you’d like to have me come speak to your event, group, board or staff about Financing not Fundraising, or any of the many topics I speak about, email info@socialvelocity.net.

Photo Credit: billaday

Tags: capacity capital, financing not fundraising, foundation grants, fundraising strategy, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit speakers, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, speaking to nonprofits, worn out with fundraising

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

What Does Your Nonprofit Struggle With?

I launched a Reader Questions series on the blog a little less than a year ago, but I have to admit I have been lazy about soliciting questions for it. The one time I asked for reader questions I got great ones and did a couple of blog posts responding to those questions here and here. But then I got busy and stopped soliciting questions.

So I want to reinvigorate the Reader Questions series now. I’d love to more consistently answer questions from readers and turn it into a much more regular series.

And I need your help. I’d love to hear about what issues are really tripping you up, what hurdles you encounter, what you’d like to learn more about.

So send me your questions about:

• Getting your board moving
• Being up front with donors
• Empowering your staff
• Raising capacity capital
• Developing a financing plan
• Finding new donors
• Creating a strategic plan
• Articulating your message
• Growing a nonprofit
• And anything else…

Whatever you struggle with and want to learn more about. Because the beauty of it is, if you are struggling with something, there are probably 100 other people who are as well, and they’d love to learn from your experience.

So if you start sending me your questions, I promise to be more consistent about the series. You can submit your questions on the Reader Questions blog page, in the comments of this blog post, on the Social Velocity Facebook page, or by sending an email to info@socialvelocity.net. And don’t worry, if your question is a sensitive one, you can ask to remain anonymous.

I can’t wait to hear your great questions. Thanks!

Tags: nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit challenges, nonprofit fundraising plan, nonprofit management, nonprofit questions, nonprofit roadblocks, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, overcoming hurdles, reader questions

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 5 Building Blocks of Nonprofit Success

There is a way off of the exhausting nonprofit hamster wheel of trying to do more and more with less and less. If your nonprofit can articulate the value you provide, strengthen your organization, develop a groundbreaking board, chart a strategic direction, and attract more support, you will set yourself up to achieve the holy grail of the nonprofit sector: lasting change to a social problem.

It’s a process where your nonprofit assembles 5 building blocks that each build on the next one:

1. Articulate Your Nonprofit’s Value
   It is no longer enough for nonprofits to do “good work.” Funders, policy makers, board members, and others are increasingly demanding that nonprofits explain what value they provide a community and what change they exist to create.




2. Strengthen Your Organization
   Once you know your value, you must build your organization. Nonprofits can no longer scrape by without the staff, infrastructure, technology and systems they need to deliver results-driven programs. They must create a plan to strengthen their organization and raise capacity capital to implement it.




3. Develop a Groundbreaking Board
   A strong organization requires a groundbreaking board to lead it. A nonprofit’s board of directors is absolutely critical. Without their leadership, investment and excitement it will be impossible to build community support and create change. A groundbreaking board provides strategic direction, brings money in the door, connects the organization to key decision makers and ultimately leads the organization to success.




4. Chart a Strategic Direction
   But without a clear future direction a nonprofit is living in the world of just doing good work. A nonprofit that puts together a thoughtful, comprehensive plan for the future will attract more support, increase staff and board investment, and ultimately create more social change.




5. Attract More Support
   Once these four elements are in place, a nonprofit is ready to attract more support. In an increasingly competitive funding environment it is more important than ever that nonprofits develop a long-term financing plan for their organization. A plan that determines how the organization will bring enough money in the door to achieve their mission.

These 5 elements build on each other and, once assembled, look like this:

The consulting services I provide are tailored to assist nonprofits wherever they are in this process. From developing a theory of change, to raising capacity capital, to revamping the board, to creating a strategic plan, to developing a financing plan. I help nonprofits make the leap from just getting by to creating sustainable social impact.

In order to help you determine where you are in this process and where you need help, we have organized the Consulting page of the Social Velocity website by this 5-stage process.

But there are also nonprofits that are so new or so small that they simply aren’t ready for outside help. Over the past two years I’ve been developing a whole suite of tools for these smaller, younger nonprofits. The e-books, webinars, and step-by-step guides on our Tools page all fit into this 5-stage process as well. So you can determine where you are in the process and what you need in order to move forward.

I hope you will explore the revamped Consulting and Tools pages of the website. And let me know if you have questions.

Photo Credit: Trey Ratcliff

Tags: capacity capital, fundraising planning, groundbreaking board, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit capacity, nonprofit consulting, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, nonprofit tools, theory of change

Coaching a Nonprofit Leader to Success

I’ve been talking about strategic planning a lot lately (here and here) because I think it is so critically important to the success of a nonprofit organization. But it’s not enough to create a great strategic plan on paper, you have to implement and monitor it. This is why I insist that the strategic plans I help create have a detailed, measurable operational plan that describes the day-to-day work that will bring the strategic plan to fruition.

But sometimes a strategic plan calls for so much change to a nonprofit organization that they need follow-up staff coaching to make the plan a reality. This was the case for one of my clients, ACE: A Community for Education.

ACE is an early childhood literacy tutoring program, with a proven model that really works to get children to grade level in reading by 3rd grade. The outcomes of the program were so impressive that they wanted to expand it to many more schools. But, the program was a well-kept secret. A small advisory board and limited external connections left the organization struggling to build the kind of community, funder, and school district support they need to dramatically grow.

ACE hired me to create a 3-year strategic plan for growth. ACE assembled a working group of staff, advisory board members, funders and other key stakeholders, and I led them through a 5-month process analyzing the internal and external environment, creating the goals and objectives of the strategic plan for growth, determining the projected budget required to get there, and creating a detailed annual operational plan to bring the plan to fruition.

But ACE realized that their strategic plan was so ambitious that they would need some guidance and regular coaching to make it a reality. So once the strategic plan was created and adopted by the advisory board and other stakeholders, ACE hired me to coach their staff on:

• Restructuring the advisory board to lend more strategic support and expand community connections to ACE
• Expanding their fundraising efforts in order to support the new goals of the strategic plan
• Growing the staff and program infrastructure to implement the plan

So over a 10-month period I met regularly with the Executive Director and the Development Director to coach them on:

• Restructuring the advisory board
• Creating a major donor fundraising campaign
• Implementing the strategic plan
• Using the strategic plan to filter future decisions
• Effectively using staff resources

The result is that ACE has moved quickly to grow their program. They plan to triple the number of students served by the program by 2016. They have already secured a significantly increased financial commitment from participating school districts to do so. They have also completely restructured their advisory board and expanded its membership. They have hired new staff positions to make growth a reality. They have begun involving the advisory board in their new major donor campaign efforts and have already enjoyed new and renewed interest from funders. Staff and advisory board are energized and focused on their plans for growth.

As ACE Executive Director Mary Ellen Isaacs put it recently:

“Our work with Nell has been critical to developing a viable growth strategy and plan for ACE. The process helped us clarify our core competencies, engage stakeholders, and articulate exactly how and why ACE should grow. As a result of Nell’s strategic planning and follow-up coaching, my staff and I, and our advisory board, have the tools and confidence to reach our larger vision for ACE. This was one of the best investments we have made in ACE!”

If you are interested in learning more about how I coach nonprofit staff to strengthen or grow their organizations, check out my Staff Coaching consulting service.

Photo Credit: VarsityLife
 

Tags: executive director coaching, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit coaching, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit growth, nonprofit strategic plan, strategic planning