Nonprofit CEOs: You need to be comfortable spending more money to raise more money

Aug 2

We know each other well enough for me to say something blunt here, right?

💣If your development team kinda raises the same amount of money every year and you rarely have enough unrestricted cash to build your reserve, you don’t need more fundraising activities.

Really - no new grant, appeal, event, board member, or even a shout-out from Oprah.

What do you need?

You need more gas in the engine.

You need to know you’re spending enough money. Enough money that generates the dollars you need to even think about fulfilling your strategic plan.

In one word, OVERHEAD.

You see, in 2022, most leaders come to me when they want to 2X, 3X, even 5X their unrestricted revenue. And, they’re always surprised where we start our work.

We start with a math equation.

Because it’s only when you’ve created a true, needs-based budget that INCLUDES the staff, infrastructure, and overhead resources you NEED to grow...that you can create a real FINANCING plan to fund it.

Full stop.

Most skip this step. You can't skip this step if you want to scale and grow.

Recently an amazing nonprofit CEO came to me and said we want to grow by 25% every year for the next five years, but we don’t have enough money to hire more development staff.

I knew exactly what was wrong.

❌They were spending way too much on programs.
❌They weren’t investing enough on fundraising staff or overhead.

It wasn’t her fault. Despite being an astute business person, she’s never scaled a fundraising department before.

And that coupled with all the ‘should-do’s and ‘don’t-do’s’ in the #nonprofit sector when it comes to spending on overhead, you can imagine how confusing this can be for someone out of corporate.

So, what did we do?

🌟 Analyzed the expenses needed for the growth year by year
🌟 Created a Financing Plan to meet these goals
🌟 Designed a Funding Model to support the true need (including overhead)
🌟 Created an org chart with metric-based goals that empowered the org to meet these goals
🌟 Hired the right people who knew how to reach those goals for the new roles

You see, they did have the money to hire.

My clients, who’ve made consistent revenue leaps as a result of our work together?

--> They are completely comfortable spending more money to raise more money because they have the numbers to back up their decisions. They know the exact spend they must incur when staffing and resourcing their development department to raise the money they need to grow.

If you've just started your fiscal year and are wondering if you have the exact numbers and path to back up your growth plans, we should talk. Links are below in the P.S.

Whenever you’re ready, here are THREE things you can do next:

👣 Follow me on LinkedIn where I share the same lessons I teach my clients about attracting larger gen-ops dollars so they can scale.

🍎 Read my GUIDE! THE TRUTH ABOUT GIVE/GETS :: Top 5 Reasons Your Board’s Give/Get Is Leaving Thousands (Sometimes Millions) on the Table. See how limiting board members to the Give/Get model keeps your staff from reaching their full fundraising potential. Here to get it.

📈 Work with me to fund your organization’s Strategic Plan and scale your budget by 2 - 5X // If you’re a business-minded CEO already raising MILLIONS but still need more general-operating revenue to invest in growth, you can apply to work with me here.

Sherry Quam Taylor

Sherry Quam Taylor works with growth-minded Nonprofit CEOs who are scaling their organizations but still need larger amounts of general operating support to truly grow. She breaks their teams free from the limitations of transactional fundraising and helps them reimagine their entire approach to revenue generation.

The high-performing leaders Sherry works with want to find and secure more unrestricted revenue from investment-level donors. They simply need more funding to do what’s in their Strategic Plan. To achieve this, she transforms their teams and boards into high-ROI revenue generators - revealing how they can align every hour they spend fundraising with new principles that double and triple donation sizes.

As a result of learning her methodology, Sherry’s clients regularly add 7-figures of gen-ops revenue to their bottom line by learning how to attract investment-level donors that WANT to fund their work. But the biggest transformation they experience is knowing the exact strategy, path, and team that will propel them to generate the 2-10X dollars their strategic plans require.

Sherry attributes the success of her business to her passion for modeling radical confidence to the future CEOs in her house - her two teenage daughters.

https://www.QuamTaylor.com