Many of our readers pay no cost for our work, and we will always try to keep as much available for free as we can. But, in around two weeks, we will start a special six-part educational series we think you’ll want to buy—both for yourselves and for others in your organization.
This series fills a persistent gap in nonprofit management resources, in that it finally reveals the business models and practices that go with the most common sources of nonprofit revenue. Running a nonprofit organization that’s primarily funded by individual donations with a smattering of foundation funding takes a very different infrastructure and monitoring effort than one primarily funded through government contracts with a few social enterprises.
Many of us, if we’re lucky, learn the quirks of each revenue type through mentoring. I can vividly remember being patiently walked through the real mechanics and choices in running a canvassing operation in the ’70s by our outsourced accountant and a board member. Today, this sector needs to do better at laying down a base of business literacy to prepare us for the decisions we must make for our organizations—not only at an operations level, but at a strategic level. (That does not, by the way, mean we will no longer need those mentors.)
For years, NPQ has been thinking about this, talking with other well-known nonprofit financial experts about what would be needed for a grounded overview of how to manage according to the types of revenue that fuel your enterprise. In the end, we designed this fast-approaching, six-session series for a variety of learners:
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- Current and aspiring nonprofit executives
- Nonprofit CFOs
- Emerging leaders at all levels
- Grantmakers
- Nonprofit consultants
- Board members
Five of the sessions are specific to five common revenue types, but the whole series is a resource that can be used to:
- clarify how nonprofit business models differ fundamentally from for-profit models,
- clarify the elements of transaction related infrastructure needed for different revenue types,
- reduce financial risk by providing tips on the different types of monitoring needed for different revenue types,
…and much more.
Once you have purchased this series, you can go back to it over and over again—for instance, when you want to add a fee-based stream of revenue to a government-funded entity. It will help you answer questions about what capital you will need, what differences need to be implemented in monitoring and reporting, and what risks to the organization such an addition poses. We will also provide a forum for additional inquiry.
This program has been organized by Jeanne Bell, along with a group of practitioners who have deep knowledge of how money works in practice across different types and sizes of organizations. They include Hilda Polanco, Kate Barr, and Claire Knowlton, and they now join us as presenters of these sessions.
Don’t miss this opportunity! Our first session is on September 20th. You can find out more here.
