Let’s face it. Unless you are one of the lucky few organizations with more money than you know what to do with, there never seems to be enough resources available to adequately cover every need. Right!? The on-going struggle to properly resource can be quite overwhelming for CEO’s and boards trying to balance the need to seek revenue with the need to execute on strategies for which the revenue is provided. After all, it takes a lot of preparation to adequately position an organization in the marketplace to successfully raise additional funds.
We always work very closely with our clients to ensure they are in the best possible place to achieve their funding goals. Within this context, there are at least three very important house-cleaning actions that any non-profit can and should address to help ensure it is always in a good position to take that leap and seek new and increased funding.
First, seek 100% Board support of the organization’s mission. This means money as well as philosophy. After all, if your board “family” does not financially support your organization, why should anyone else?
Second, achieve board alignment around your organization’s key programming and initiatives as well organizational benchmarks and measurements. This will, at times, require very frank conversations around the board room table, but it is very important that your private and public sector leadership are “singing out of the same hymnal” when discussing your organization amongst their peers, and your potential future investors.
Third, design and implement a systematic approach to investor relations and education. Our Managing Principal, Rob Radcliff, discussed this at length in RDG’s last blog.
We like everyone to believe that raising revenue is rocket science — complex, challenging, and difficult to understand. But it’s really not! The bottom line…an informed and engaged investor is a happy and renewing investor. Ergo, organizations that embrace the three building blocks listed above are ahead of the curve when it comes to properly resourcing their projects and operations.
I’ll be the first to tell you that these three items are not always easy to accomplish, but all are critical to a strong organization and obtaining increases in investor revenue. Most importantly, when it comes to economic and community development there is a lot that you can’t control, but these are three things that you can!
Clint Nessmith is a Principal/Owner of Resource Development Group based out of our Georgia operation. He has managed projects generating over $100 million in operating revenue for our client organizations in over a decade with RDG. You can follow Clint on Twitter at @ClintNessmith.