Strategies for Building Better Nonprofits

The blog fell into disuse while I was involved in other writing projects: starting a freelance Web writing business, studying screen writing, and job hunting. In addition, I found time to study grant writing and work on a couple of small grant proposals.

Now is the time to get a useful, daily blog running for nonprofit staff and social entrepreneurs who want to make their organizations more effective and efficient. I hope you will want to follow along, or at least review some old posts. The older posts dealt mainly with using various brainstorming and problem solving techniques to make nonprofit programs and projects more effective.

More of the same is coming up, but with more attention to marketing, fund raising, and earned income. The new focus reflects what I think are bigger issues, or bigger opportunities, for nonprofits. Building partnerships with businesses, other nonprofit, colleges and universities, and trade/professional associations seems like a good strategy in many cases. I'll have more to say about how to come up with partnership ideas.

Stay tuned for some more short posts focused on practical ideas and information

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Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...

Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy. The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT. Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts. SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social medi...

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