Nonprofits must prove their worth

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Permalink Reply by Sabrina Smith on August 19, 2009 at 1:15pm

Hi Debbie, I am in the middle of starting a nonprofit and pretty excited about doing so. If I am looking to get a grant how can I prove my statics if I have notstarted it yet? I have spoken to a couple of people and have done my home on the kind of nonprofit and they think it's a good idea and the kind of nonprofit from my research is needed. Any idea's would be very much appretiated.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Griffin on August 20, 2009 at 10:42am

Sabrina:
You might want to look for an existing organization with a similar or complementary mission and partner with them, initially. St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center in Baltimore has provided incubator services to 6 different housing groups over the years. Most recently, we helped the Maryland Housing Counselors Network get started by offering them office space, phones, etc. and acted as a fiscal agent as they applied for grants. It took some time for them to build their infrastructure and get their 501 c 3 status from the IRS. Best of luck.

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Permalink Reply by Sabrina Smith on August 20, 2009 at 2:18pm

Great suggestion!
Thank you.

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Permalink Reply by Kurt Elder on August 19, 2009 at 5:11pm

From my own experience as a former neighborhood planner and now GIS analyst (e.g. non profits, county government and private sector) you either use existing data sources to tell your story or create/obtain the data you need. The former can come from police (crime stats), health (you name it, if it can be aggregated), fire (aggregated EMS calls), Building and Safety (Red tagged homes), Planning (comprehensive plans), Urban development (CDBG funding, HOME, PRIDE, etc stats and figures ... TIF) Public School (aggregated student achievement scores), Mortgage info (foreclosures, bank stress), the census (SF1, SF3) and the list goes on and on!

Concerning the later ... pretest and post test everything that you can. Then follow up with a delayed survey. Count, track and map (points, areas, addresses) your efforts. On a side note, quantifying the strength of social networks can be done (various methods) but documenting the transition from group member to social effication via a pathway can take some work.

Anyway, once you have enough data create a model, or create a logic model first and fill in the nodes with existing data sources and then see what is left to be collected.

Hope I haven’t rambled too much

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Permalink Reply by Sabrina Smith on August 19, 2009 at 10:02pm

Thank you very much Kurt.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Griffin on August 20, 2009 at 10:33am

Those are all great suggestions, Kurt. What a wonderful opportunity to build a nonprofit on a solid foundation instead of trying to back track to create success measures that fit the existing model.

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Permalink Reply by Debbie Wise on August 21, 2009 at 9:05am

Great information everyone...thanks for sharing!!

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Fernando Robbins on August 27, 2009 at 2:13pm

Karen, just as an example of what you said about the opportunity to build a non-profit on a solid foundation, Frontier Housing, Inc. has done just that. Our organization is celebrating it's 35 year. We are the largest non-profit lender, homebuilder, credit counselor, and homebuyer educator in our region of rural, eastern Kentucky. We have been offering safe, decent, and affordable site-built homes to customers in our service area for the past 35 years. We have enjoyed most recently the partnership we have shared with Clayton Homes, the largest producer of manufactured homes in the nation. We have been offering manufactured homes as an option for our customers for the past 5-6 years.

Any non-profit organization considering incorporating manufactured housing into their production line and looking for information on how to do so, I would encourage them to check us out on the web at our website as well as on Facebook. They can get some great information and for further assistance they can contact one of our staff. Rather than trying to create their own model, they can learn from our partnership and by-pass all the obstacles that we have already overcome. Our webaddress is http://www.frontierhousing.org or go on Facebook and type in Frontier Housing.
Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Austin on August 25, 2009 at 11:29am

This article talks about a useful tool for nonprofits offered by NeighborWorks Success Measures and has some relevant statistics about the tough environment:

In Tough Times, Success Measures Expands To Meet Growing Demand for Outcome Measurement
http://www.nw.org/network/newsroom/articles/netNews071609.asp

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Permalink Reply by Melissa Kaiza on August 31, 2009 at 5:03pm

Great point! Thank you for the article. I was just writing an email today to CounselorMax telling them that my head is spinning form all of the numbers we need to report each day to so many places. I had specifically asked what other organizations are doing to get these numbers reported, since you practically need a computer science degree these days in order to compile the data into reports.

How are other organizations coping with all of the reports in terms of computer skills?

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Permalink Reply by Jason Zavala on September 8, 2009 at 10:42pm

Proving your organization and its employees worth starts by omitting grants, donations, and charitable for the first layer of strategic planning. To get to the next stage, gathering statistics are no different than acting for profit minded. I think that's what I see in annual reports from Wall Street. Then they talk about the feel good after they show the success. Numbers (regardless of how vast or shallow) grounds us in a common dialog, ensures containment and attainability, and points of interest. Then we can qualitatively remask the quantitative.

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