The quest for funding.

This post is my public thought process on nonprofit funding in the current environment. I’ve written the majority of it in the abstract, so it may be applicable to other nonprofits, but it’s hard to tell.

I’ve been working really hard on figuring out how to get the Open Forum Foundation funded, and frankly – it’s a struggle. It’s not so much from failure of my attempts, as it is with discomfort with the options I see available, and a lack of clarity around what to do about it.

So check this out:

The average person doesn’t like being asked for money. It’s irritating if there’s no definite personal reward in it, it distances people, and makes them wary of you. While money is not really a dirty subject, it’s taboo in strange ways. Generally speaking, people don’t like to talk about it, and the worst part of a meal out with a group of friends is frequently the part when the check arrives.
Large donors are hard to find. This is intentional, of course. If you’re going to give away money, you don’t want everyone asking you about it. You want to make those choices on your own time and make sure they are good ones that support the things that are important to you. Unfortunately, this creates a sort of sneaky, research-and-network-with-the-specific-intention-of-meeting-high-profile-individuals mode of operations that I am just not well suited for.
Foundations are difficult. I know, also by design. They tend to be insular with two options for approaching them: run the application gauntlet where you’re being judged on your ability to write effectively; or get to know them personally, where you’re being judged (primarily) on your personality. Finally, if you do get a grant, it normally comes with all sorts of limitations on what you can do with it. Difficult. Time-consuming. Rarely collaborative.
Corporations – I’m not even sure what to say. From a corporate perspective, there are two reasons to give money: PR, or supporting something that’s good for your business (there’s also the passion-of-the-CEO reason, but let’s lump that in with option 2 above). Is accomplishment of our mission good for business? Depends on which company I suppose, but in large part the companies with money to throw around are rather fond of the status quo. This can also introduce concerns about conflicts of interest, which is particularly relevant in the government space.

So if I don’t like the available options, where does that leave me?

Let’s start with an ideal world – if I could create my own model of engagement with potential donors, what would that look like?

Well first of all, I don’t think I’d call it fundraising (I wrote previously about friend raising, but really! While the idea is sound, the name is awful). The reality is that it’s not just about raising money. It’s about building a community of people that understand the importance of what you’re doing and are willing to participate in seeing it come to fruition. Donating money is only a piece of this.
Everyone that participates should get more out of it than they put into it. They should participate in whatever way they are comfortable with, and always see the value that their contribution is making in the bigger picture.
The organization should touch enough lives and create enough difference that it can sustain itself on the contributions of individual, small donors.
New initiatives may require larger donations, eg from foundations, corporations, or large donors in order to get off the ground and prove their worth.

So what we’re talking about here is a model of engagement that we are well-positioned to move on. Our reputation in the government communication space is that we are committed to forwarding the space and not to benefitting ourselves and we already have a couple of great projects underway (most prominently GovLuv and CongressCamp) that could benefit from additional participation, if we open up to it up and make it easy for people to engage.

Let’s look at the basic building blocks of doing this:

Build trust. Before people will commit to participating, they need to understand where we’re going, how we plan to get there, why we’re the right people for the job, and THEN: how they can be involved.
Gain recognition. The next piece of the puzzle is to reach out to enough people. The rule on web content is that 90% of people will read it, 9% will comment on it, and 1% will create it. If we’re only going to get 1% actively participating, we need a big number to be that 100%.
Find evangelists. This helps with the previous item by duplicating our efforts multi-fold. It’s not enough to reach out to all of our friends; we must excite, encourage, and engage them in our vision, so that they reach out to their friends and so on, spreading the word and finding more participants.

That doesn’t sound so bad. I mean it’s not easy, but what did you expect? Is anything worth doing ever easy until after you’ve accomplished it?

So then, what are the steps to creating a fully funded non-profit that can stand on its own?

Mission. It needs to appeal to the people that you want to get involved. It should touch them in a personal way. Seth Godin often writes about the value of niche marketing. You don’t need everyone to be involved in what you’re doing, you just need the people who are passionate about it. And once you’ve gotten all of them, then you can focus on impassioning the rest of the world.
Oh yeah – and you have to mean it! You have to live by your mission. Everything the organization does, what it stands for, and how it conducts itself all need to align with the change you are promoting to the outside world. To create real change, become that shiny castle on the hill!
Activities. What do you want people to do? How are they going to participate? Different people are ready for different levels of commitment, so don’t forget that . Maybe you need people to follow your activities (email, twitter, facebook, …), get connected to you and one another, offer their expertise, contribute time or effort or money. Whatever it is, be prepared and have a plan. If 100 people showed up at your door right now and wanted to help, what would you have them do?
Find the audience. How you do this will depend on the audience that you currently have the ear of and the audience that you are attempting to connect with. Use your networks, both online and off. Reach out to them. Tell them what you’re doing. Tell them what you need. Tell them why it’s important. And this may just be my personal perspective, but try to avoid use of the word help. I think people are tired of being asked to help nonprofits. This only serves to further the idea that nonprofits are powerless entities that require YOU to save them, when this isn’t the case. As nonprofits, we are servants. We don’t NEED help, we provide it. We are leaders who are pursuing visions of a better world, each in our way. We are often the experts at what we do, and there is no viable business model for accomplishing our vision, or we would have taken that easier path in the first place. Lead with your strengths, target your niche, reach your audience.
Keep them engaged. As people begin to show up, there is another level that you need to be prepared for. How do you keep them coming back? How do you keep them informed? Do you make it easy for them to contribute in ways that you haven’t even thought of? Is there space for them to be creative, to take responsibility, to excel each in their own way? What are you offering that they can’t get anywhere else? It’s not enough just to reach out to people today. Once you’ve awoken that passion for your issue, you need to do something with it. You should have an idea of what this is before they start arriving. Participation should last until the issue is resolved or their passion for it wanes due to reasons beyond your control.

Wow. So those are the basics. Pretty succinct, and I would even argue: doable.

But here’s the real point of this post: What does this mean for me? Here’s my proposition:

Empowering responsive government is about citizens having their voices heard. Our job at the Open Forum Foundation is to provide vision, direction, organization, connections, and consistent leadership that can bring this to fruition. We need to live by our mission and repeatedly show our ability to accomplish projects that move this vision forward.

In terms of a plan of action, these are my next steps:

Mission. While the wording is still being worked out, I realized at the last board meeting (thanks, Noel!) that the mission of the Open Forum Foundation is only communication-oriented in terms of our activities, and that the actual vision that we’re pursuing is ‘responsive government’. I need to get that further clarified and finished up. There are also a few things that should be publicly available on the website that I just haven’t been able to get put up so that we can live by our creed of transparency and responsiveness.
Activities. There are a number of activities that I could use help with. Why don’t I have them listed on the website? Why don’t I have an entire page dedicated to how to get involved? I will soon! And one of the activities is donating. For some people, it will be the only activity they participate in. For others, it will be part of the mix. Creating this page will be invigorating for me. It will establish a series of goals that I need to accomplish: Step 3.
Find the participants. How do I find the right people to complete all of the activities on that page? I’m really looking forward to this. I have wanted to reach out to the community that I’ve been building, but never knew what to reach out to them about. Depending on the individual, I’ll use Twitter, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, phone calls, and face to face meetings. How exciting!
Keep them engaged. This piece then becomes about keeping everything and everyone up to date. We have a website, a blog, several Twitter accounts, and email lists. Different people will require different information on different schedules and in different ways. I may even start a weekly conference call or web meeting to go over what we’ve accomplished in the last week.

Good. Done. Thank you.

If you have comments, I’m open to them. I know that I have a lot left to learn.

Blog Posts, Front Page
Wayne Moses Burke
October 30th, 2009 7:37 pm
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