1-Nonprofit Tips

All organisations need money to survive.

As a nonprofit, you need to think like a business and understand where your money is coming from. Many nonprofits receive about 70% of their income from individual grants. It is never a good idea to have most of your income coming from one source, because if that category of giver is unable to give, it directly affects your organisation’s bottomline.

It is important to look at the income you have received over the last year to assess what categories they fall under:

  • Individual Donations
  • Grants
  • Corporate Sponsorship
  • Membership Fee
  • Sales of Goods or Services
  • In-Kind Donations

Ideally, you want to increase the amount of income coming from earned revenue and membership fees (if applicable to your organisation) and reduce your dependence on grants.

If most of your funding comes from grants, you would have noticed that many grants available now are for projects that solve a problem closely linked to COVID-19. If your projects are providing relief in this pandemic or you are able to re-design your programmes to do so, that’s great. However if you are not so sure, then you really need to think through what types of products you can offer that meets peoples’ needs at this time.

Next time, we will look more closely into each type of income. If you are interested in signing-up a for course of mine on building a sustainable nonprofit organisation or social enterprise, which can withstand the vicissitudes of the economy, please drop a comment or send me a DM on my social media handles.