Calling All Donors
How many times have you heard this:
“I want all my donations to go to programs. Not one penny for administration.”
Maybe you’ve even said it yourself.
I wish I knew where this misassumption about working non-profits comes from. Yes, there are always high-profile cases in the news about people mismanaging non-profits, directing funds away from the intended users and into the wrong pockets. After all ,there are a lot of non-profits in the US. Care to take a guess at how many?
The answer: There are currently over 1.6 million registered non-profits in the US. I’m guessing you didn’t guess that high. There will always be occasional rotten applies in the non-profit barrel, and maybe you’ve encountered a few. If so, I’m sorry. In my own thirty-plus years of experience working with non-profits, I have not. Carelessness and mismanagement, yes. It happens everywhere. For the most part, people who work for non-profits are hardworking, unappreciated, and burning out by the thousands. Program people, and administrators both.
What I’ve never understood, and still don’t, is this idea that programs and administration, particularly fund-raising, should somehow be considered separately.
My first steps into the non-profit arena came in 1999, when I was looking for a non-profit partner to help me administer a program I wanted to create, called the Judith Dawn Memorial for the Arts. The purpose of the program was to provide funding for survivors of sexual violence who wished to pursue healing through artistic creation. I was fortunate enough to find the right people almost immediately. In my discussion with the organization’s Executive Director, I was asked to provide some additional funding, over and above the grants to the survivors, to cover administrative expenses. I was a little surprised, but since it didn’t amount to much, I was fine with the request.
I was working with someone at the Chicago Community Foundation at the time, who had helped me locate the non-profit, and she told me that request was the sign of a very good ED. It then surprised me later on, however, how the people I was working with described themselves. They were either ”Program,” or “Admin,” and the twain didn’t meet very often.
As always, when people’s jargon doesn’t make sense to me, I overlook it, and we did some very good work together. Over the next twelve years, we distributed over $100K in funds to between 90 and 100 survivors.
As a result of what I learned from this organization, when I began to make grants to other organizations, I limited myself to unrestricted grants. General operating support. It was what most people wanted and needed, so that’s what I did.
My thinking evolved a little after 2017, when my inheritance enabled me to make much larger grants to the organizations I was supporting. I was a little older and wiser by now, and I began to notice things that bothered me. For one thing, hardly anyone allocated grant money for fundraising, marketing, awareness building, or development. Over and over, I heard “no one wants to fund things like that.” It was always programs, programs, programs. How on earth are people expected to run programs if they can’t hire people, pay their rent, and keep the lights on?
No one was growing. Year after year, in their annual reports, I would see the statistics about the numbers of people they’d helped, and the length of their waiting lists. Even the largest and best organizations were unable to help more than 300-500 survivors a year. Compare this to current statistics that estimate the number of sexual violence survivors in this country at 42 million. In my mind, something was very, very wrong.
In my conversations and research, this idea came up again and again – funders, whether individuals, foundations, or corporations, were unwilling to fund initiatives that would help organizations grow and diversify their revenue streams. The number of restrictions on what non-profits can, or mostly CAN’T do, to improve their financial situation, is ridiculous. Do we tell organizations in the for-profit sector they’re not allowed to make money? Or that they shouldn’t devote time and resources to sales? Of course not. If we did, most of wouldn’t be able to afford to make any gifts at all!
I speak and write about this whenever I can find anyone willing to read or listen. I have also revised my granting guidelines, and currently my granting is focused on projects and initiatives that will help individual non-profits grow and diversify their revenues. However, I feel I am constantly swimming against an endless tide of misunderstandings –misunderstandings that end up crippling the very non-profits we are trying to help.
So I call on any committed donors, in any mission area, to educate themselves about the realities currently facing the non-profit sector, and get busy making grants. If you don’t, those organizations you care about may not be around in a few years when things will supposedly “be better.” This is the “rainy day” people save for. I see no sense in waiting for a flood.
