Sitting in a regional meeting on a hot 2009 day on behalf of the Mayor’s Office with Pennsylvania community action agencies, I realize the driving force behind the creation of the 22,000 non-profit organizations in Philadelphia -FUNDING. Good men & women with an idea or desire to address a problem in the community run out and start a non-profit. Those in leadership are led, like dogs after a rabbit, by the change in focus of government & private funding sources. Did it occur to these do-gooders that if their focus was on being effective & building capacity …maybe the money would come to them??
Okay, those of you in non-profit leadership are cursing my name right now. But, before you send me to hell, answer this: why did you get into community service/advocacy? Do you (today) believe that you can be effective? What’s stopping you? My professional opinion is that capacity (the ability to effectively provide a service with measurable outcomes) is your greatest challenge due to insufficient funding. Why? Because your organization is one of many claiming to address the same issue. It may be a bit unpleasant to hear, but creating a duplication of an existing service does more harm than good:
- Funding/resources are diluted as they are divided among numerous “service providers,” placing them all in a position of being under-capitalized.
- “Service providers” are encouraged to report false information for the sake of maintaining their funding, keeping resources from the effective organizations who need those dollars most.
- The women & men in need of said services are left in their current condition, having received little more than eloquent lip service.
This is exemplified repeatedly throughout the community. In Philadelphia there are dozens of non-profits focused on ending violence, yet there has been no visible turn in the statistics until Commissioner Charles Ramsey went to work. There are even more organizations focused on literacy & education for “at-risk” youth, yet outside of Education Works & Philadelphia Academies who are actually having an impact as the drop-out rate stands at 38%, and the average reading level of our high school graduates is 7th grade. As a strategist, I would like you to journey with me for a moment as we look at this from the business perspective.
A fundamental rule in the venture capital community with regard to the vetting of new concepts is to ask ‘what is the need that this concept addresses?’ Every successful business is centered on addressing the needs of a specific market. The business plan notes what the market demand is, what percentage of that market the entrepreneur expects to capture as a customer base, what the competitive landscape is, how the business will profit by serving that market, and how the business plans to grow.
Now for the revolutionary idea: the same goes for non-profits. Identify who you wish to serve. Document: map out exactly how you plan to serve this demographic of the community. Identify who is already serving them effectively. Analyze the potential for collaboration of your concept with this effective organization (a Win/Win tactic ~note: this requires humility versus ego). In the absence of a potential collaboration, do your homework on what it would cost, and what the infrastructure needs are for you to be effective at addressing this issue. By then, having worked through these points, you will have a good idea of the funding required to make it happen. You would have freed yourself from the rat race of chasing today’s funding source. Instead, you would pursue funding solely on the basis of managing and growing your organization in the aim of effectively serving your market -the community.
My $0.02