5 Foundations for Building a Nonprofit That Changes the World
Why Nonprofits Fail, Part 2: Your Charity is a Business, not a Passion Project
Your nonprofit is a business. If you started your nonprofit, then you are an entrepreneur.
This is true whether you want to admit it or not. It’s important to re-orient your thinking about your charity because if you see your organization as anything other than what it is, you will struggle in many of the following areas as well as others:
- Never have enough money (revenue)
- Struggle to retain good help (employees and volunteers)
- Not engage long term donor relationships (repeat customers)
- Presume people care (sloppy marketing)
- Be plagued with internal disagreements (undefined mission)
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at a nonprofit that disappeared a few years ago. They had a vague and confusing name, and appear to have spent a lot of time and effort on graphic design, a common mistake of nonprofits who don’t start out with a clearly defined mission and an understanding of what they are – a business.
Your nonprofit is a business, and you are either the owner or a critically important employee.
And as a business, what matters most if you want to survive, grow, and thrive?
Income.
Without income, you can’t pay your staff, serve your clients, lobby for laws, travel to speaking events, promote advocacy online, and all the other things that give your other mission a public face. It all costs money.
Your other mission, the one your donors care about, is in business terms your product or service. You are ‘selling’ your external mission to your donors, who pay you for the privilege of making an impact in the world.
But your primary mission is to get donors.
If you resist this reality and believe that good intentions, “focusing on the positive,” and other intangible platitudes will get your mission accomplished, you’ll find yourself struggling for years. I’ve seen it happen.
For newer and small nonprofits, the sooner you get this, the quicker you’ll position yourself for long term success, growth, and impact – whether local or global.
My Perspective – Teacher Turned Fundraiser
I’ve been on both sides of the business coin. I worked as a teacher for many years, and now I own a business. As a teacher, you work really hard. But your livelihood doesn’t directly depend on how hard you work or the outcomes of your labors. You aren’t part of an entity whose survival depends upon customers or donors. In this sense, most government jobs appeal to people who want income security.
At really big companies, too many employees misunderstand their own roles in this same way. They erroneously assume that because they work for a huge company it will be here forever, so let’s complain about how busy it is, how hard I have to work, and of course, my salary.
Well, go tell that to now former employees of Sears, Toys R Us, K Mart, and many other “big” companies who are now gone or in serious decline. The income withered, and the business died.
A business employee who complains about having too many customers would be like a nonprofit worker complaining about having too many donors.
Picture a nonprofit employee who is tasked with calling and thanking 30 mid-level donors a day for two weeks. This is hard work, but crucial. Can you imagine this person complaining about having to call all these people? These 300 people who give their money to your cause and get nothing in return?
Your donors are your lifeblood. Without them, you die. Just like a business without customers.
You are a business owner. You change the world through your donors, not because you have “passion.”
5 Keys to Building a Nonprofit with Lasting Influence
So, now that you have a more accurate picture of what your nonprofit is, here are five keys to building your nonprofit business so it grows and surpasses the impact you currently envision.
1. Have a Plan and Stick to It
You can’t be all things to all people. The more focused and zeroed in your entire nonprofit is on its core mission, the more successful you will be.
This means not flying by the seat of your pants and hoping some fad like crowdfunding or social media will save the day when you really need the cash. (Why do you need cash? Because you’re a business).
Fundraising is and always will be about relationships. Sure you can get lucky sometimes with big windfalls from unexpected places. Just like when billionaire Mark Cuban served ice cream to us ‘common folk’ at a Dairy Queen for a day some years back. Who doesn’t want to be served by a billionaire? The line went out the door and around the block. But you can’t replicate that kind of event.
What you want is steady and persistent growth that you can manage. Programs that grow along with your skill levels and staff. You should have a one-year, two-year, and five-year plan, and unless something very unexpected and positive pulls you in a different direction, you should do everything you can to stick to it as much as possible.
Who is doing what?
When are they doing it by?
What’s their budget?
What happens if extra money comes in?
What happens if not enough comes in?
What’s the website doing?
Who’s in charge of social media?
What are you communicating, and how often?
Do you have a functioning story-to-donor pipeline?
Equally important to having a good plan is getting complete agreement and unity about implementing it from your board and key personnel. Expectations that aren’t agreed to are just words.
2. Create Board Expectations, and Enforce Them
I’ve seen what happens when a board member isn’t invested in the mission. Missed meetings. Not completing tasks. Showing up unprepared. But then, because they’re on the board, all the people who’ve been doing the work still have to listen to their uninformed nonsense and vague visions with no plans or deadlines when they do finally make a meeting.
Before you bring on a new board member, you need a clear set of expectations, with clearly detailed processes for what happens if they aren’t meant. This is your nonprofit, not the board’s. They are here to serve you, not the other way around.
An involved, informed, and motivated board member is a priceless asset. When all the board shares those traits, gets along, and has a common vision, you’re in a great spot.
If your board is dysfunctional, part of the blame falls on you for letting them in the door without a clearer set of enforceable expectations.
3. Don’t Confuse People with Muddled Messages
Have you ever pondered how many nonprofits can use the word ‘hope’ in their marketing? Hope by itself is a muddled message. You must tell your donors what the hope they’re producing in people is for. Get specific.
Mission statements and taglines have their purposes, but in most cases those purposes are internal. There are exceptions to this. If your nonprofit has an unclear or confusing name but it’s too late to change it, I suggested in Part 1 of Why Nonprofits Fail that you should create a clarifying tagline and put it next to your name and in your logo everywhere you go.
So sometimes, these internal tools can help.
But for the most part, donors don’t care about that stuff. They don’t care about processes or internal milestones (“it’s our 16th anniversary since we moved to our new building!”).
They need clear and consistent messages, reinforcing what their money is accomplishing in the world.
4. Message, Market, Media – the Dan Kennedy Triangle
I’ve learned a lot from Dan Kennedy. He’s the highest paid direct response copywriter in the world probably, has written a ton of books, and markets his expertise to other marketers like me. That’s him with me in the photo. ProActive Content is also a Dan Kennedy certified copywriter for info-marketers*, one of only about 100 in the world.
Kennedy isn’t a fundraiser, but one of his timeless axioms is that “your business is not different.”
The great majority of what works for marketing in one business will work in any other, with occasional exceptions which are usually related to legal issues, not effectiveness.
Your nonprofit is a business, so what he says works for you too.
One of Kennedy’s foundational teachings expresses the balance between Message, Market, and Media. Here’s the gist: Marketing is about delivering the right message to the right market using the right media. It goes in that order.
You create the message first. Your message is what you say. You can say it with email, direct mail, Facebook, Google Ads, television, or Youtube videos. More on that in a bit.
Nonprofit Audience Targeting
But you also need the market. That’s your target audience. It does little good for a pro-life nonprofit to send ads targeting San Francisco, or an anti-gun organization to target Wyoming. That’s a message/market disconnect, and it will waste your money, even if your marketing message was written by the best marketing writer in all of history.
The best possible marketing fails if it’s sent to the wrong market.
Third, you need to use the right media. In fundraising, this is critical, and it’s the source of much wasted expense. Who gives the most money to nonprofits? Elderly and retired people. Which form of media to elderly and retired people consume the most?
Television and print. NOT social media.
So if your mission aligns with retired donors, you won’t find them if you try to do all your fundraising on social media. You’ll waste your money. Right message, right market, wrong media.
Your audience may not be retired people. It might be people of a particular political persuasion. Or it’s ageless, defined more by passion for a particular issue or people group. But once you know your target markets, you must find out what media they consume and respond to most frequently.
See how that works? Message, market, media.
Build your fundraising around that foundation, and you will avoid countless numbers of wasted hours and lost money.
5. Honesty, Transparency, and Good Leadership
This is just a blog, and we could expound in much greater depth on all five of these keys to growth and success.
But dishonesty and secrecy among board members and key employees, and even in your fundraising, will in the end bring division, internal dysfunction, and a muted impact.
Some businesses have been accused of making up testimonials. Likewise, some nonprofits get accused of making up or embellishing stories of impact (not to mention financials).
In the end, this kind of foolishness always, always, always comes back to bite you. You can’t compromise on honesty, and honesty springs from good leadership. Cutting small corners now will lead to big corners later. And someday, you’ll get found out, and the end will come swiftly.
Don’t hide anything. If something appears misleading to an observer or donor, investigate it and communicate honestly to them. Demand the same level of transparency from your staff. You can’t afford to blow your chance at changing the world because of ethical sloppiness. (And, it makes the work that much harder for all the other nonprofits too!)
Building a Nonprofit That Turns Your Vision Into Reality
Nonprofits begin to fail when they abandon or neglect one or more of these five foundations. Here they are again, and here’s what you should do:
Write them down, post them somewhere you will see every day, and then start building.
- Have a Plan and Stick to It
- Create Board Expectations, and Enforce Them
- Don’t Confuse People with Muddled Messages
- Message, Market, Media – the Dan Kennedy Triangle
- Honesty, Transparency, and Good Leadership
* The Dan Kennedy Copywriter for Info-Marketers Certification is awarded to professional copywriters who have successfully completed a course of study of preparation for such copywriting.
Want more content? Get weekly nonprofit fundraising and copywriting tips, strategies, and motivations in the ProActive Insights newsletter.
