What does it take to thrive?
Every day, a new article crosses my inbox declaring: COVID has thrown nonprofits into a scramble to survive.
The reality is that most were in survival mode long before this crisis.
For much of their history, nonprofits have started with lofty goals and soon gotten stuck in the vicious cycle of scrambling for the next dollar, hustling to put on the next fundraising event, and eking every last ounce of work out of an exhausted workforce. Much of the reason stems back to how we think about nonprofits and how they should work as businesses.
We created Aperio because we were alarmed by the impact of this ‘survival mode’ on the organizations, people, and missions we care about. We noticed it first among fundraising teams—in endless clutter, crippling siloes, short-term thinking, and millions of dollars left on the table each year. And then we saw that the cost is lost opportunities for impact.
The COVID crisis has made it clear that it doesn’t only matter that nonprofits survive. It matters that they get out of ‘survival mode.’ It matters that they thrive.
How do organizations get there? Fundraising leaders must pool their resources, work together, and invest in the people, the business model, and the culture that it takes to realize their fundraising potential—to fund every compelling idea they have for their missions.
Why does it matter if we thrive?
Nonprofit leaders we meet have been in ‘survival mode’ for so long, they’re exhausted. They struggle to find the space and time to zoom out from the day-to-day and imagine the full potential of their mission. Rather than focusing on the next program or the next fundraiser, asking: What is our role in our community, our country, or the world? And how do we live out that role to the fullest extent?
When they do, the answers to those questions are impressive. It becomes clear that nonprofits are not a ‘nice-to-have’. They’re a ‘need-to-have’.
In every country around the world, there is a significant gap between what governments and companies provide in our lives and what we—as individuals and communities—need. There is a space that can only be filled by people—people helping people, people inspiring people, people advocating for people, people creating with people. That is the space nonprofits occupy.
For our country, facing crisis on top of crisis, that has never been more true. If ever we needed the extra safety net, the creative spaces, the mutual support, the problem-solving, and the wellness that nonprofits provide, it is now. The challenges we are facing cannot be solved by governments or companies alone. Our sector must have a seat at the table—and we must lead.
What is the cost of just surviving?
Before I entered the world of fundraising, I studied political and economic development (of communities and countries). At the time, a driving question was: How do we know when we’ve arrived?
Amartya Sen came up with a definition that I still think about all the time: Development is freedom. It is freedom to live the life you want to live. To have agency in your path. To face choices and be able to make the ones you want to make.
What makes poverty so nefarious, he argues, is not the lack of money itself. It’s the impact of that lack of money on the freedom of that individual. The ripple effects of poverty touch physical and mental health, safety, family life, childhood development, women’s rights, education, careers, you name it. And as soon as your choices have been constrained once, you face a spiral of other constraints.
Being in ‘survival mode’ is not about the money.
We see that in our nonprofit sector too. While nonprofits’ financial struggles certainly are not the same as extreme personal poverty, the spiral is the same. The longer we are in survival mode, the more our challenges multiply.
Survival mode forces us to:
Make choices based on short-term wins over long-term outcomes
Choose transactional fundraising over sustainable, strategic partnerships
Underinvest in human capital—in terms of salaries, but also in terms of support, development, and culture
Implement workarounds instead of investing in the essential solutions, undermining the fundamental capacity of our organizations
Become less resilient to shocks, small or large
The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund’s study Underdeveloped describes the vicious cycle that takes place in fundraising. The bottom line: survival mode has an incredible and lasting cost on the mission and everyone involved in it.
What does it look like when we thrive?
Every person and every organization has a unique definition of what it means to ‘thrive’. At Aperio, we define it as the freedom to become who you want to be. And more specifically for our sector, to have the impact on the world that you set out to have when your organization was created.
What does that look like?
As my colleague Laura Safran shared, it looks like leaders and teams who where they want to go—and having the space to dream up their boldest, most audacious goal. She argues that every nonprofit leader should be able to answer the question: “What would you do with $100 million?”
It looks like genuine relationships within our organizations and beyond them. As Courtney Forkum shared, that includes engaging authentically with donors.
Ensuring that everyone in and around our organizations can thrive. That means we need to urgently address racism in nonprofits, in fundraising, in philanthropy, and in ourselves. As Ellen Claycomb shared, that starts with doing our homework. But it doesn’t end there. It means working every day to dismantle racist systems, habits, thinking patterns, and cultures.
It looks like teams who fundraise proactively and strategically, instead of reactively and tactically. As Emily Hicks shared, that requires data-driven leadership, equipped with the line-the-sight they need to not only hope for revenue, but have the agency to drive their organizations toward sustainable, predictable growth.
What does it take to thrive?
Just as everyone has their own definition of what it means to thrive, everyone has a unique road toward thriving.
But in the decades that fundraising has been a profession, we’ve also learned lessons that can simplify the path to revenue growth today.
When we created Aperio, we started by listening. We listened to CEOs and Executive Directors, to CDOs and Directors of Development, to frontline fundraisers, to program staff, to finance staff, to marketing and communications professionals, to donors, to clients. We wanted to know: What does it really take to thrive? What’s standing in the way? Where are we making headway?
We then pooled our own resources, success stories, strategies, and experience with what industry leaders from nonprofits, large and small, across the country had shared.
Finally, we made like Marie Kondo and organized everything into a clear roadmap that any organization can follow to access sustainable, predictable revenue for their mission.
We identified three areas of investment that every nonprofit needs to make—and that will yield measurable returns.
People – Your people are your fundraising program. There is no more valuable asset than your human capital. When your staff and volunteers are the right people in the right roles with the right support, magic happens. Every investment you make in attracting, retaining, empowering, and growing talent will pay off. And the more of your talent that you invest in relationship-based fundraising (versus transactional fundraising), the higher your returns will be—up to 80-90% on every dollar you invest.
Business model – Sustained fundraising growth is not an accident. And it’s not just a lot of hard work. It’s smart work. It’s relying on all the strategies, processes, tools, and technologies developed by the fundraising and sales industries to create an exceptional experience for every donor, engaging the highest potential supporters in ways that propel strategic partnerships, and investing every minute of precious staff and volunteer time in the highest-return activities.
Culture – As people quote to us all the time, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If you believe that fundraising is the job of the fundraising team, you are leaving money on the table for your mission. Building a ‘culture of philanthropy’ sounds like a warm and fuzzy undertaking. In reality, it’s an existential endeavor. Your organization cannot thrive without it. Period.
We’re a long way from a thriving nonprofit sector and thriving fundraising teams, so this list of investment areas feels daunting. But it’s worth the efforts.
There has never been a more transformational moment for our sector. Our country is thinking in new ways, the people we serve are thinking in new ways, our donors are thinking in new ways, and our teams are thinking in new ways. It’s time that nonprofit leaders do the same—and lead the way to freedom.