Nonprofit Boardinghouse Reach

I ran into a nonprofit CEO today who told me something I don’t hear often: “We have as much money as it takes to do our program. We don’t have to fundraise.”

Why did that surprise me?

It wasn’t the economy, or the difficulty of going back to the well yet another time.

In fact, it wasn’t anything she was expressing about the hard slog of fundraising that startled me.

It was the fact that, for most nonprofit visionaries I know, their reach always exceeds their grasp.

Way back when, there was something called “Boardinghouse Reach.” As my uncle, who grew up in a large family that took in boarders during the Depression, explains it, it describes the way that boarders could reach all the way across the table, over other people and their plates, to get to the salt or the bowl of potatoes or the extra piece of pie. It means taking care of one’s own needs, reaching beyond right what is right in front of you, to grab what you want from afar.

It’s a funny term – it’s pejorative, implying a lack of manners; yet it’s also admiring, as in someone who knows what they want and goes for it.

There’s something of that in every nonprofit visionary.

They imagine what’s not there…they see a need to be filled…and their reach always exceeds their grasp.

Their vision precedes their funding and – almost always – exceeds it.

Which is what makes nonprofit visionaries so exciting to follow and so easy to fundraise for – and so important to fundraise around. Because there’s always a new need to fill or a new program to launch…and those take money. More than is easily at hand.

In essence, it takes that kind of audacious nonprofit vision to move people to engage in fundraising – an activity that’s often uncomfortable and awkward, at least at the beginning.

What gets people over the hump?

It’s boardinghouse reach – and the scramble to raise the resources to keep up with it.

You Get What You Measure

How often have we heard that?

So often, unfortunately, that something that profound has become, in fact, a bit trite.

But this maxim actually takes us to a deeper place in fundraising.

Because in this day and age, if we only measure dollar results – and only measure those after a fundraising campaign is over – we’re missing the boat…and the chance to have a deeper, richer, and (yes I’m going to say it) more robust funding base.

I was thinking about this lately at the Alliance for Nonprofit Management conference I just attended. On the one hand, Peter York of TCC was talking about after-the-fact evaluation for philanthropic purposes (did we achieve what we thought we were going to achieve, what we promised the funder we’d achieve?) – versus evaluation for strategic learning purposes (how deeply can we understand cause-and-effect, and thereby understand and shape the meaning of our work?). Okay, got that.

But then the next day there was a panel in which the importance of fundraising as capacity-building was roundly dissed. Was I steaming? Of course. But the deeper issue is, Cause Effective’s understanding of fundraising as fundamental community-building is not the universal paradigm, and it’s because of what is measured, reported on as gains, and generally defined as fundraising success.

The real institutional gains of building a robust funding base, to my mind, are an organization with a wide-ranging community of stake-holders who not only have advisorial programmatic input but are profoundly committed to its survival. Who are constantly out there bringing in resources – people – who will bring in ideas, connections, in-kind support, and, of course, dollars.

And access to more of the same through their networks.

You can see how once a nonprofit learns how to encourage (and support) such group resource-sharing, that it becomes a process which feeds on itself to become exponentially more rewarding over time. Dollars…follow commitment…follows antennae tuned towards opportunity.

This kind of a paradigm shift – from thinking of fundraising as dollars-focused vs. as an integral indicator and product of community commitment – is what all Cause Effective training drives toward. But we – the nonprofit community at large, and Cause Effective in particular – don’t do a good job of measuring and publicizing the full spectrum of results.

Sure, internally at Cause Effective we have a complex measurement tool that looks at factors such as diversity of askers, range of gifts, engagement in donor cultivation, etc. (as well as, of course, how much money was raised); and I like to think that once we’ve finished a consultancy, our clients understand these multiple facets of fundraising as well.

But to the nonprofit world at large, and the part of the world that is concerned with capacity-building, fundraising is still about the numbers on the check.

How can we change this paradigm?

Should we even bother? Our clients know what it’s about, and in fact, any nonprofit with a robust and multiplying fundraising program knows it as well.

Does it matter that the dominant view of fundraising as capacity-building is overly-simplistic, focused on the superficial byproduct (dollars – absolutely important but only obtained as the result of relationship-building, which is the real skill)…versus the deeper gain?

And if it does, what can we do about it?