05 August 2005

Your heart is pure, your cause is just, and you're still not qualified to start a nonprofit.

Good intentions are not enough.

If you're going to start your very own nonprofit organization, you need these:
  • Skills
  • A strategy
  • Funding
  • Experience
  • Common sense
  • A lawyer
  • An accountant
The nonprofit sector is not a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movie, where you can decide on the spur of the moment to put on a show.

Sustainability is a key word here. If you're starting something that you can't sustain, then you are about to waste a lot of money, good will, time, and energy that could otherwise be used to make real progress in the cause that you care about.

5 comments:

Alan said...

amen to that

Anonymous said...

Right on! But don't forget -- you may have the best of intentions... but somebody else probably already has them, too. The world is glutted with nonprofits, so its soooooo important that anything new meets a function that's not already being served.

Anonymous said...

What about replacing another that has Founder's Syndrome, suspect the Owner of using the funds for their own benefit and it is NOT doing anything to help the cause?

Anonymous said...

Amen. I coach a lot of nonprofits and it amazes me how many new non-profits do not have a sustainability plans championed by the BOARD. Too often what we see is founder-it is where the amazing and compelling vision of one or two founders /staff becomes the assumed strategy. When the founders want or need to move on... the board is just not ready to carry on and sustain the momentum - especially in revenue generation. It is a too-common and very sad story.

Anonymous said...

Generally, the world does not need more nonprofits. The world does need better nonprofits. With the inane, clunky, and often-mindless firey hoops one must go through for sustainable funding, it's logical to determine how one can best have an impact before just lurching ahead to create yet another 501c3 or NGO competing for the same money.