The politics of funding – Is your program relevant to grantors?

The reality of nonprofit funding is that sometimes your mission isn't trendy enough to attract support.

Take the current interest of increasing participation in post-secondary education, and contrast it with the goal of helping low-income people get jobs.

One the one side you have millions being poured into missions supporting STEM education, such as instruction in how to access financial aid for college.

On the other hand you have more local nonprofits struggling to get enough funding to do things like improving access to the workplace for people who just need a steady paycheck.

One group with the latter mission focuses on providing decent clothes for interviewees and training to improve interviewing skills and focuses primarily on workers aged 40 and up, displaced from the job market during the recession. Typically they purchased clothing from local retailers and made it available to interviewees. The program budget was in the low five-figure range annually.

This group is starting to find that even jobs which shouldn't require any sort of post-secondary degree are suddenly being restricted or at least are preferential to college grads only.

An example of this is seen in an advertisement for seasonal employees for a major home improvement supplies retailer. The specific opening was for a seasonal week-end position assisting customers in the lumber department.

The ad reads as follows:

"Preferred Qualifications:  Associate's Degree in Business, Retail Management, Specialty related to department (e.g., design, appliances) or related field OR Certification in trade related occupation required."

Most potential applicant's never get past that sentence, although much further on in the ad it does say a minimum of one years experience is also acceptable.

The low-income-focused nonprofit had several people available who had actually done the job for other employers, or who have experience in other types of sales, but they don't have any of the paperwork required. No degrees, no certifications, just decades in the building material or building trades. Several of their people applied, but none were even interviewed.

That matters, because it lowers the impact, i.e. the provable results of their program, making their program appear less effective.

The aforementioned NPO working with the older jobseekers stated that most of their previous funding sources had switched over to what the frustrated ED called "more media-attractive" support. Their funding has dropped by over 50% since 2010, due to grantor mission realignment.

I suggested that perhaps they needed to incorporate programs that were more, shall we say, "funding-friendly" such as programs to get their people into some type of educational setting or training to make a complete career change.

His answer was that maybe funders need to start looking at the world his people lived in today.

He said "These are people with an excellent work ethic and fully marketable and useful skills, who have from another 15 to 25 years left in the labor force. They have families to support NOW. They have household expenses NOW. They haven't done a thing wrong except to become politically and socially irrelevant. Maybe by the time they can retire or die, we will all be replaced by robots, but that time isn't NOW"

Unfortunately that conundrum is the reality of funding. Sometimes, no matter how worthy or timely the cause, it doesn't resonate with grantors.

That reality will eventually impact your results, so getting a handle on a solution will definitely affect your future.

The answer is to either pursue a shift in your own focus or seek out new funding streams and new supporters, and continue to educate the public on the value and relevance of your mission.

In the end, we designed a campaign to appeal directly to individual donors, utilizing both direct clothing donations and a crowdfunding appeal that ultimately raised enough money to meet goal. Longer term, the NPO is seeking to develop relationships with new grantors.

If I can help you with funding solutions, drop me a line at rightwords@ida.net.