Tips to Keep Your Fundraising Efforts Out of the ER

I received an email from the executive director of a small social-services nonprofit on the West Coast. She related to me an all-too-familiar tale of woe.

Despite the fact that her organization's mission is a worthy one and that good outcomes are being achieved, the organization has been, in her words, "going from acute condition to near crisis and back again." The driving force in this situation is the sudden — but not unexpected — revenue loss of about half of the operating budget.

The executive director points to the ending of a three-year grant along with an ongoing search for the proverbial funding "silver bullet." In her defense, she inherited this situation a little over a year ago.

The executive director continues on in her detailed description of the situation, and there is, indeed, a lot going on in the small nonprofit — too much to be addressed in a single article.

My initial response to her was focused on a couple of points:

• Funding from grants — private or public — is rarely, if ever, a workable strategy for creating a sustainable revenue stream.
• Extricating the organization from the downward spiral it appears to be in is possible but will likely require both a significant change in fundraising approach and a retrenchment in delivered services while fundraising program capacity is being expanded.

Building an ongoing, sustainable funding base takes both time and effort. There are simply no shortcuts. The principles of strategic fundraising are well-known, and although every situation has its own particulars, the effort of creating a stable level of funding will fall within these known fundraising truisms.

Getting an organization — especially such as this one, which reaches out to people in crises — to strategically retreat and regroup is very difficult. The metaphor I used in my response to this dedicated executive was the example of the flight attendant who instructs you to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping another should the cabin decompress. There's a reason for that. And it's life and death, for both you and the person you would help.