Fundamentals of Nonprofit Financial Sustainability
Welcome to our collection of articles, tools, and templates designed to provide insights on structuring your approach to resourcing your mission-driven work. These materials include insights on funding models, fundraising, and cost management. You can also use the links above to jump to our other foundational content around strategy, leadership, and organizational effectiveness.
Finding Your Nonprofit's Funding Strategy
Developing a strategy for financial sustainability is key to any nonprofit’s growth. Yet, it may not be clear how to pinpoint a funding model that makes sense for the long term and to develop the capabilities to pursue it. This three step guide helps organizations identify and develop a funding strategy that can put them in the best position to achieve their goals.
Nonprofit Cost Analysis Toolkit
Although nonprofits generally have a good understanding of their revenues, knowledge about costs can sometimes be less robust. This is particularly the case when it comes to the true, all-in costs of providing services, running programs and otherwise operating the organization. Our toolkit can help.
Helping Nonprofit Networks Strengthen Their Fundraising Effectiveness
It’s common for large nonprofit networks to compare costs and revenues across sites. Yet, few have asked which sites are doing the best job of maximizing fundraising potential—what we call fundraising effectiveness. Share of wallet, an oft-used tool in the for-profit sector that measures the amount of customers’ total spending that a business captures, offers a novel approach to achieving fundraising effectiveness.
Making Sense of Uncertainty: Nonprofit Scenario Planning
Nonprofits can’t be sure how local, national, or even global events will affect society, the economy, or their own field six months or a year from now. But they can navigate the uncertainty with greater confidence by building scenario plans that can help them continue to pursue their missions.
Becoming Big Bettable
A nonprofit executive team's effectiveness is essential for an organization's success. Yet often these teams underperform for a variety of reasons. The five steps laid out here can help nonprofit executive teams move from underperforming to high-performing in their work to advance their organizations' missions.