Functional and Funded

Securing Your Nonprofit's Assets From The Inside Out

Harvey B. Chess

• Publisher: Harvey Chess, Author
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780996314732
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

You'rea staff member, board trustee, community volunteer or consultant doingthe hard work to rai$e money so your nonprofit can keep going, keep pursuing its mission.

Maybe you're thinking about chasing after grants, scattering proposals around, or trying to figure out whether you should set up that crowdfunding campaign, or...

Whatever you're up to, it's not getting any easier out there with all the other groups competing for attention and money.

This is where Harvey Chess comes into your picture. His ongoing work is in and around nonprofits, including grant makers.He's best known as a seasoned trainer delivering highly regarded funding proposal development workshops for years. He fully understands the challenges you confront in trying to support your organization - and has distilled his experienceinto a one-of-a-kindbook for you, Functional and Funded, Securing Your Nonprofit's Assets From The Inside Out.

His book concentrates on helping you overcome resource development and sustainability challenges.You'llhave the opportunity to front and center tactics thatseparate your nonprofit from the crowd by distinguishing it as substantial, enterprising and resilient.

Putting aside much of what passes for conventional wisdom infundraising, you're presented with a potent alternative - business as unusual - when making the case for financially supporting your nonprofit. Everyone reading and then applying the uncommonly strong strategy at the heart of this book will upgrade skills to secure assets for their nonprofit while strengthening the organization at the same time.

How?

• Flip typical proposal development on its head while throwing in a healthy dose of common sense when it's time to reach out for needed funding.
• Most important, replacethe customary passion for w hat we do in nonprofits with why we do it.

Still not convinced?Read on.

First, the days of only seeking grants are over! The book's Nonprofit Engine contains the diversified componentsof financial assistance your organization must now seek out to keep running. You'll be offered the tools to develop absolute clarity in building the sharp core funding proposal to use and refine to tell your nonprofit's story every time you reach out for funding.

At the same time, you will discover - or rediscover - that the characteristics of astrong nonprofit organization and a strong funding proposal share common ground. You'll come away from business as unusual witha strong nonprofit inside; a strong proposal outside. You want nothing less when it comes to competing for resources.

The book includes three real life funding proposal variations, along with comments about what makes senseand what doesn't in each.

A chapter, The Funding Marketplace, details how and where to locate sources of potential financial support f

CHAPTER ONE

WHERE TO
BEGIN

Putting the Why before the How — centering your mission on impact, not projects

The spirit of this book is derived from the time-honored value of nonprofit organizations helping people respond to challenges to the quality of their lives—especially those organizations whose people take seriously the principles articulated in the following article from the Industrial Areas Foundation, titled Standing for the Whole:

“We believe in what we call the iron rule: never do for others what they can do for themselves. Never. This rule, difficult to practice consistently, sometimes violated, is central to our view of the nature of education, of leadership, of effective organizing. This cuts against the grain of some social workers and program peddlers who try to reduce people and families to clients, who probe for needs and lacks and weaknesses, not strength and drive, not vision and values, not democratic and entrepreneurial initiative. The iron rule implies that the most valuable and enduring form of development—intellectual, social, political—is the development people freely choose and fully own.”

These values are no less important when nonprofit organizations engage in the ever-present necessity of pursuing diversified resources to allow them to keep on keeping on. Discussing this in detail forms the substance of this book, but before getting to this, let’s consider a couple of persistent traits among nonprofit organizations that prop up a perverse form of business as usual. And, as you will see, this book is not about business as usual.

To begin, when attempting to convince others to support our organizations we, in effect, convey that they should do so because we run excellent programs.

As reasonable as this might appear, there is a damning corollary that accompanies such an approach. Rather than focusing on the people for whom our organization was created in the first place, we emphasize an array of proposed activities. A mania for process, emblematic of a busy organization, replaces a proper concern for the quality of people’s lives, the marker of a legitimate organization.

Another enduring characteristic of this form of nonprofit business-as-usual also contributes to the obsession with program delivery. This is the tendency for nonprofits to botch their mission statements. The basis for this assertion is unassailable when bearing in mind that nonprofits are often described as public benefit organizations. So, the only legitimate mission for a such a nonprofit is its own version of the public benefit of helping people improve the quality of their lives. Period.

But, against this standard, a seemingly unending procession of statements emerges describing the activities an organization carries out as its mission, or, at best, activities proposed to lead up to some form of impact. Once again process overrides payoff. Take a look at three real-life examples.

Our mission is to provide effective educational and supportive services to maximize the strengths of individuals and build resilient communities.

Our mission is to build local collaborations to support local arts organizations.

Our mission is to deliver highest quality healthcare services.

THINK ABOUT

Why Your Organization Exists

In every instance we find an organization asserting that its purpose is, first and foremost, to be active rather than effective. Even when impact is specified, as in the second example, the proposed activities precede it as the essence of the mission. Small wonder, with mission statements such as these, that so many nonprofits base their arguments for continuing on an inward-looking devotion to program delivery.

The end result of what has to be considered a myopic approach to front and center a nonprofit organization is akin to a stale sense of stasis. This is typified by the many proposals that request support to an ongoing program, that is, funding more of the same, with perhaps the insinuation of more neediness thrown into the mix. It need not be this way, nor should it be.

So, changing an organization’s mission statement to emphasize external impact rather than internal process is a step in the right direction. Let’s recast the previous examples accordingly.

Our mission is to help individuals maximize their strengths and to contribute to building resilient communities by providing them with effective educational and supportive services.

Our mission is to help local arts organizations thrive as community resources by building local coalitions.

Our mission is to achieve optimal community health and save lives by delivering highest quality healthcare services.

Making these simple twists is profoundly important because each one represents shifting an organization’s emphasis to that of fostering success among its folks before describing how to do this.

The ultimate measure of any nonprofit’s relevance and the basis by which it should be evaluated is the extent to which it can document the impact of its work rather than simply having carried it out. Think about it.

And think about this simple but profound shift as setting up and leading into business as unusual when you seek assets for your nonprofit organization. This leads to the potent tactics and strategies of such an approach that follow. Make these your own, and you’ll be able to represent your organization as enterprising, resilient and respectable—along with presenting far more convincing proposals for its support in a crowded, competitive marketplace for resources. Equally important, you will strengthen your organization by virtue of the way you develop these proposals.

Effective
mission
statements
elevate
PEOPLE
OVER
PROJECTS

CHAPTER TWO

THREE GUIDING CONCEPTS

How to realize the full potential of funding proposals

•Proposals as craft

•Storytelling that adapts

•Progress through broader focus

Even when approaching the business of resource development from a different angle, business as unusual we’re calling it, the written funding proposal remains fundamentally and incontestably prominent. As such, here are three critical factors to consider as they relate to your grasp of creating and using your own proposal.

1. Proposals as craft

First, my own efforts writing proposals and my work with nonprofit proposal writers for years confirm that the skills needed to write effectively and successfully remain elusive. This predicament alone is enough to suggest why you have this book in front of you. As you read, dog-ear and re-read it, you’ll discover how to strengthen the way you visualize, develop and use these skills.

We need to embrace such skills here and now. We need to improve the quality of our work in that teeming resource marketplace when reaching out to fortify the pursuit of our organizations’ missions. This in itself constitutes a substantial challenge, but it doesn’t stop there—there is even more complexity to consider when pursuing resources to energize our nonprofits.

2. Storytelling that adapts

This becomes clear as the second factor to influence your work when you realize that what was formerly largely confined to grantseeking presently amounts to much more. The best word to describe what confronts the resource-seeking nonprofit is flux, as the following diagram to guide your efforts to build organizational assets illustrates.

FIGURE 1

YOUR NONPROFIT’S ENGINE

Each component can generate the assets to fuel your mission.

Take a look at the broad possibilities that surface within your Nonprofit’s Engine (FIG. 1). You might find yourself with the opportunity to create any number of the following options within your organization:

•The well-planned proposal out-the-door, or the hastily conceived one when you learn of an imminent funder deadline

•The occasional opportunity to follow up the proposal you submitted with a sit-down meeting with funder reps

•The materials needed to respond to a social media funding opportunity

•The details to develop and submit your business plan, and/or your organization’s long-range strategy

•The specifics to develop and embrace your organization’s fundraising strategy

•The prospect of contemplating and preparing for a possible collaboration with another organization

•Copy for your direct mail solicitation

•Your part in a planned, face-to-face meeting with a prospective donor

•A presentation to convince one of the many civic organizations that spread resources around your community to include your nonprofit

•Impact during a chance meeting with a few moments to serve up your version of what is often called the elevator pitch

•A compelling story when interacting with media outlets to get the...