"Strategic Planning? What's THAT!?"

I remember very well the first interview I had with one particular board that was calling in a consultant because they were in fundraising trouble. The members of the board all agreed that while they knew what they should have been doing, they hadn't done it. What did they want the consultant to do? Tell them what they already knew; and presumably infuse some kind of new motivation into them that would compel them to take the steps they knew very well had to be done; and hold their feet to the fire while they took those steps.

So what do we have here? Three strategic mistakes. First is the fact that the founder/executive did not test to see if there was a significant groundswell of community support that would provide many years of continuing support from individuals, corporations and foundations.

The second mistake was that the board of directors was hastily put together by the founder/executive from a relatively small pool of friends and acquaintances and people he/she could control.

The third mistake was that there was no early investment in fundraising infrastructure that would support and lead directly to a multi-faceted fundraising program headed by a solid major gifts effort among individual donors.

In previous posts we have dealt with the matter of how the board should be recruited and structured, given a written job description and performance standards, and allowed to really be the governors of the organization. Now let's deal with lack of financial support – the way these start-ups get into financial trouble within approximately 5 years of their having been founded.

The root of the problem as I see it lies in the fact that when the nonprofit was just starting up, it was the idea of the founder, but not a pressing and urgent need felt by the community at large; there was no groundswell of community perception and desire for this need to be addressed. Consequently, here we have a service being performed, but few people to support it.

This has resulted, in my view, in a lot of "boutique" or "niche" charities coming into being to address specific needs that are generally unsupported by the communities in which they exist. This means that the funding available to each of them is relatively limited and, most likely, will not last for years to come. What are these founders thinking of? Obviously they're not thinking of the long-term practicality of running a fully functioning nonprofit.

The problem is exacerbated by the tendency of the founder/executive to eschew investment in fundraising infrastructure, however elementary, and further developed with the decision to forego solicitation of individuals on a regular, persistent and consistent basis early in the game.

But you may ask, "Why are you being so hard on the founder? What do individual donors have to do with a start-up charity?" Well, individuals give over 75% of the money gathered by nonprofits in this country every year. Corporations give about 5%, foundations give about 8 to 11%. So the "easy" money, if indeed that's what people think it is, goes quickly. The mainstay of a nonprofit is going to be its individual donors.

So my question to start-up founders is "Why don't you go spend time and resources where the money really is?" And a second question: "Why don't you start with strategic planning, and make that activity a regular involvement throughout the life of the nonprofit, right from the start?"

We'll continue on this thread in a bit. But now we have to deal with an email response on this topic. We'll do that tomorrow.