No matter the mission, the most often repeated line in most
of my email is:
"If we just had more money we could (Fill in the
blank)."
There is no doubt that money greases the wheels of
philanthropy, but if you don't understand the
challenges of delivering your services, all the money in the world won't
help.
Take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. No shortage of
money there. Yet a reprint of a Seattle
Times article, posted January 3, 2015 in the Philanthropy News Digest,
tells us that even the commitment of a quarter of a billion dollars doesn't
guarantee success.
One interesting quote from the article mentions that the
Foundation underestimated the difficulty of achieving their desired results due
to the lack of even the most basic infrastructure in the areas they were trying
to serve, indicating that someone was a little short in planning skills.
On a much smaller scale, a charity working with domestic
violence victims was involved in a program to provide computer training, with
the desired end result being that the women wouldn't need to depend on their
abusers for income.
While they had some success, their program was only
graduating about 12% of its participants, and was having trouble attracting
funding after the initial $25,000 grant they received. The results just weren't
there to impress new funding sources with the program's effectiveness.
When they approached me to find them at least $100K in
funding for more computers and class space, I had to tell them that their
results just didn't justify asking for that kind of money. To their everlasting
credit, instead of firing me on the spot, they asked "why?"
The problem was that they had not anticipated that many of
these women had less than a tenth grade education, and for some of them, even that
education was over 20 years old.
While teaching them to use a keyboard was pretty easy (most
of them had cell phones and knew how to text) some of them couldn't read well
enough to understand the online help or even how to find it. All the classes
did for them was to reinforce the idea that they were losers, and they simply
quit coming to class.
It was like teaching someone how to use a hammer to drive a
nail, without any knowledge of what driving that nail actually did to build a
house.
It's easy to jump from "let's form a nonprofit" to
expecting that your program will immediately get to its desired end result.
Money doesn't necessarily fix the ills of the world. It
takes a lot of time and hard work, and sometimes more than a few false starts
before you begin to achieve results that can attract more funding.
In the case of the nonprofit illustrated above, they had to
back up, add a step, and focus on offering simple basic tutoring to improve
math, reading and comprehension skills, an approach that did net them about
another $20K in funding from their original grantor almost immediately.
As frustrating as it
was, in the end the ladies they wanted so desperately to help got a lot more
out of that approach, and many (81%) went on to successfully complete the
computer skills classes and get jobs.
This all goes back to understanding the process of being a
nonprofit. It's easy to see a problem, but a lot harder to plan a fully
designed and effective program that produces results worthy of continued funding.
The good thing about that problem is that you don't need
much money to solve it. You do need a solid organizational plan, a willingness
to learn to recognize and overcome obstacles and the patience to achieve it in
baby steps instead of giant leaps.
If you do your homework, you can actually outperform even
the Gates Foundation, and that's surely something you can be proud to report.
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