Tools to Build Smaller Nonprofits

I started Social Velocity because I saw a real hole in the nonprofit sector. Small and medium nonprofits working on social change lacked access to expertise and resources to strengthen and grow their solutions. The Teach for Americas of the world were building impressive organizations and replicating their solution far and wide. But they were doing so with the help of venture philanthropy funds, national consulting firms and broad and deep networks of experts and money. They were the lucky ones.

But there are some equally impressive solutions housed in much smaller, less resourced nonprofit organizations that aren’t really seeing the light of day.  Because these organizations don’t know how to put a growth plan together, figure out how to finance the impact they want to have, or create a compelling ask for money to build, their solutions are not reaching as far as they could.

Social Velocity exists to help those small and medium-size nonprofits who want to be entrepreneurial, who want to grow their programs, who want to get their board engaged and invested, who want to raise money to build their organization, who want to break out of the starvation cycle. I’m very passionate (and opinionated) about the fact that the bottom 80% of nonprofits need help to become stronger, better, more effective and sustainable at creating social impact.

So in order to reach more nonprofits, Social Velocity has a growth plan ourselves. And that growth plan involves creating tools, trainings, e-books, guides, worksheets, templates and other things that nonprofits can download in order to start thinking and doing things differently.

We’ve already made our step-by-step guides available for download, and our blog often has tips and tools to get started, but we want to do more. Some of our initial ideas for tools include:

• A sample pitch for growth capital
• An earned income analysis worksheet
• A step-by-step tip sheet to get your board fundraising
• A financial plan outline
• An exercise to understand your nonprofit’s place in the external market
• Sample language to start messaging around impact
• Questions to guide your case for support creation
• An investment range chart to break down a growth capital fundraising goal

But I want your input. How can we help you take social innovation ideas and put them into action? What kinds of tools would help you go from wanting to grow your programs to starting to put the plan in place?  What guides would allow you to move from being intrigued by the idea of philanthropic equity to putting together your own fundraising campaign to raise money to hire more staff, buy more computers, etc.?  What’s holding you back from being able to do things differently and move out of the starvation cycle?

Let me know what tools you’d like to see, either below in the comments, or on our Facebook site. Thanks for your help!

Tags: building nonprofit capacity, nonprofit board fundraising, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit growth plan, nonprofit starvation cycle, philanthropic equity, Teach for America, tools to strengthen nonprofits