I’ve heard a few metaphors used to describe the delicate balance and skill required to secure, satisfy, and balance funding from multiple sources. Some describe it as a patchwork. Others describe it as a mobile, and if one side goes up or down, it unsettles the whole apparatus. Others describe it as juggling flaming batons. There are consequences to dropping or catching the wrong end of one. However you describe it, the reality is the same.
The Balance
Nonprofits struggle to patch together enough funding to deliver their services and to support them with the bare minimum infrastructure necessary. To do so often requires various sums from various funders who each define the target population, the services, and the outcomes they want to support in increasingly nuanced and specific ways.
While any one funder’s demands, in isolation, are often tenable, it’s the patchwork that can become back-breaking. Combined, all your funding requirements can overlap, diverge, or even conflict. Programming can become disjointed by what seem like artificial or arbitrary distinctions. Data can become fragmented or, worse yet, meaningless. Compliance and survival can become the primary motivators. Grant-writers and program managers can feel like they’re pulled in a dozen different directions at once and have to constantly make trade-offs and compromises.
How will your organization respond?
Nonprofits can respond in a few ways:
- Chase the dollars. Bend yourselves into pretzels to qualify for funding. Learn to juggle while chewing gum and weaving baskets, never-mind the mission. (Clearly, not my recommendation!)
- Understand your funders. Beyond just their eligibility requirements, learn about their motivations, goals, and desired roles so that you can seek meaningful alignment and a manageable relationship.
- Understand yourselves. Develop sound rationales for your programming and operational needs, so you can advocate for yourself in compelling ways and offer meaningful input to foundation strategy.
- Be more strategic in how you make and manage your promises to funders.
In this series, I’ll share my recommendations for how your organization can use each of these strategies (except the first!) to develop aligned, mutually beneficial, and manageable relationships with funders, so you can reduce the anxiety of juggling funder demands.
Next time, I’ll start with pulling back the curtain on funders to reveal why some funders do what they do.