Build your nonprofit’s capacity with affordable expertise and infrastructure
This fall, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen Garten, founder and CEO of Charity Charge and producer/host of the Charity Charge podcast. This blog post contains highlights of our conversation, edited for flow and clarity. If you’re back to a regular commute, you can find all 102 episodes (and counting) of Stephen’s podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Through our own experiences as entrepreneurs, Stephen and I have faced many of the same challenges as the nonprofits we serve – how to shift from “survival mode” to “growth mode.” We share takeaways from our own experiences and dive into the staffing solution The More Than Giving Company offers to help nonprofits access expertise and add infrastructure in an affordable way.
Stephen: Vicki, I'd love it if you could give us a little bit of background on your career and what inspired you to create The More Than Giving Company.
Vicki: I have been in the nonprofit sector my entire professional life. I started in Alumni Relations and Development and worked my way up to a position as Vice President for Advancement at a medical school in the Philadelphia area. At one point the school was going through some mergers, and I had a two-, a four- and a six-year-old at home. I decided to pause and take on some small nonprofit clients for one-to-one consulting. When I was at the medical school, I had a staff of 100 people in advancement. The nonprofits I was now consulting with were struggling to afford just one professional to help steer and build their organizations. That observation really hit home with me, and I founded my business on the belief that all nonprofits deserve the opportunity to benefit from the knowledge of seasoned professionals. At The More Than Giving Company, we strive to offer high-level professional support to all the organizations we work with at an affordable and reasonable rate. We've been in business for 23 years now, and I believe we've been able to do that.
Stephen: To get to a 20+-year milestone is pretty incredible. There are so many challenges and struggles with creating something and then also having the long-time horizon of running it. Most small businesses fail within the first handful of years. This applies for nonprofits as well. And most businesses and organizations that make it past those infancy years, and are in still in operation three years later, five years later, ten years later, are barely making it. To give listeners some additional context, I started Charity Charge about seven years ago and it's only been within the past three years, probably honestly the past 18 months, that I really feel like I've gotten to a place of working ON the business instead of IN the business.
Vicki: I think the real pivot point for me, Stephen, was when I decided, “Is this going to be a small company that has one or two employees and is very reasonable to operate or do I really want to build this out so that I can make an impact?” And as I started to enter my third life – kids are through college out living on their own, don't need me – I could focus a lot of my time on the business. And since then, we've got 28 people working for The More Than Giving Company and 46 clients. I would be the first one to tell any entrepreneur who is building their business, or any nonprofit that is building and growing, that you need an infrastructure to do that. One of the toughest things for me right now, as I'm going through the expansion of More Than Giving, is to start to back away from client-facing commitments, because I have been an Executive Director of one organization or another, continuously, for the last 40 years. Moving out of that role, allowing others on my team take over, and really starting to look at the business. That's been a big move for me.
Stephen: I couldn't agree more. That has been a huge evolution for me too, to get out of the way and to also bring in great people. It's hard to find great people. I know you have a new white paper about a paradigm shift in nonprofit staffing. What can we learn and what are you hoping to accomplish with that new white paper?
Vicki: It's really a compilation of what I've learned over the last 40 years in working with nonprofits. What has always been very concerning to me, is that so many nonprofits are limiting their growth because they aren’t investing in their organizations. They aren’t feeding them. A big part of that is staffing: securing the right staff, with the right expertise, at the right time. One of the things I’ve written about in the white paper is how hard it is for nonprofit organizations to do that, because traditional staffing solutions just don’t make it affordable.
The More Than Giving Company works with all our clients virtually. We've been working in that capacity since long before the pandemic, and it allows us to bring a very different and more affordable staffing complement to nonprofits. As a supplement to a nonprofit’s FTE or volunteers, we can deliver one or more professionals, in a contracted fashion, who can provide the precise expertise the nonprofit needs, exactly when they need it. It’s also a more flexible option because nonprofits can engage skilled nonprofit professionals for as few or as many hours as needed – even as few as 10 hours a month – and scale that up or down over time.
For instance, you're a nonprofit looking to diversify your fundraising. You really need some high-level development counsel to help you build out different revenue generating forms. Perhaps you are doing well with individual major gifts, but you want to add some corporate partnerships. Not everybody has volunteer expertise in a specific area like this and not every organization has the dollars to hire an FTE. We can deliver a team that brings in a Nonprofit Fundraising Specialist and Nonprofit Virtual Assistant to implement a new program together. Quite quickly, a new program can be built out. We offer this same model of support in other areas too, like marketing and communications and board development.
Stephen: One of my most recent conversations was with an Executive Director we work with, and her organization is growing substantially. It’s impressive – her work ethic and capabilities – but she is still doing so many of the things that, as an executive director, at this stage, you should not be doing. However, it's just so challenging in today's economy and environment to raise the money and recruit and retain a full-time employee. And then you have all the risk that comes with that, including taxes, health care, labor laws, all those things.
Vicki: Our Nonprofit Virtual Assistant service was built to address just that need. I, myself, have been a typical, overworked nonprofit Executive Director who is trying to focus on the big picture, the strategic goals. Yet I was also constantly pulled into fixing meeting notes, scheduling meetings, etc. When you’re pulled away by those tactical, day-to-day things, you just can’t get traction on bigger goals. Great contract/temp/part-time support isn’t easy to find because nonprofits are just different than corporate America. We have different rules and regulations, financial and otherwise. Any administrative person must also be able to work with volunteers, and volunteer boards and volunteer committees. The More Than Giving Company has built a 12-module certification program that each of our Nonprofit Virtual Assistants go through. These are the skills I know they need to be of immediate help to their executive directors, their development directors, etc. There is a base of knowledge we give them, in fundraising, in finance, in the basic nonprofit structure – knowing the difference between a 501(c)3 and a 501(c)6. This basic nonprofit sector knowledge makes our Nonprofit Virtual Assistants different from any other virtual assistant you could bring in.
Stephen: Could you give us insight into some of the organizations that you're working with, what they're up to and why you're passionate about them?
Vicki: Well, I can tell you it has been an absolute honor to serve the nonprofit sector. I've had the opportunity to partner with many very dedicated, passionate people who are making a difference in our world. They're working on climate-related issues. They are helping women find resources in their breast cancer journey. They are helping the homeless find care, food, and shelter. I have been privileged to work with countless nonprofit organizations that are making an impact. And I always feel that what I do pales in comparison to the impact that these groups are making.
Based on all my years of experience working with such a wide range of nonprofits, there are four things that stand out to me as critical to their success.
The first is a strategic plan. It’s usually the first thing I ask about when I engage with a new client: Do you have a strategic plan?” I don't mean a strategic plan that you write and put on the shelf and look at once or twice a year. I mean a strategic plan that you actively use to navigate the direction and path of your nonprofit; you make decisions based on your plan; you address revenue generation and leadership succession based on your plan.
The second piece is the right board, and I intentionally use the word “right.” Nonprofits typically start with a founder’s board, a group that passionately embraces the cause and they're pulling together resources, doing the paperwork, getting the 501(c), really rolling up their sleeves and doing it all. After some years, this starts to meld into what I call a transition board. The founders, at this point, may actually be slowing progress because it’s hard to break the habit of being involved in everything and they feel so personally invested in every decision. The transition board allows you to start separating operations from corporate responsibility. It defines the role of the board and the board's committees a bit more, and what staff does. Ultimately, the transition board should eventually morph into a corporate board, focused on generating the revenue and resources the organization needs to succeed, making sure that the policies and procedures are in place so that risk is mitigated. An operational staff is now really running the day-to-day of what's going on. A founder’s board looks very different than a corporate board, and I think nonprofit organizations must be very thoughtful and spend time finding the right board members to move them forward.
The third piece, that we’ve talked a lot about today is building capacity. This gets back to our paradigm shift in staffing and being able to access the right expertise to adequately support the growth of the organization.
Fourth, is making sure you have the administrative and operational support you need, so that your professionals and your volunteers can focus on the work that only they can do. You want the head of Comcast, who's sitting on your board, making visits to prospective donors. You don't want this person doing light bookkeeping or sending out acknowledgement letters because you don’t have any other way to get those things done. That’s something organizations really must look at. If you get “this much” volunteer time, which is a lot less than we used to get, how can that best be used? And where can you fill in with some additional support, such as with a service like our nonprofit virtual assistants.
Steven: How long did it take you to crystallize this?
Vicki: Nothing can replace time served, as I say to my fellow professionals in the field. And fortunately, or unfortunately, I have served a long time. With experience, you begin to see patterns. I have spent an enormous amount of time talking with and working alongside nonprofits that come to me in distress, and I work with them to determine where the problem lies. I will tell you 99 times out of 100, what’s holding a nonprofit back is one of those four things.
Focusing on and working on these challenges brings results. More Than Giving works with a nonprofit, a national group focused on scholarships. When we began working with them 11 years ago, they had 19 state organizations and the national organization had just engaged with a funding partner that was very interested in making sure that the organization’s infrastructure was strong. Using our model and paradigm, they live their strategic plans (we’re working together on their fourth), we continuously work on finding and engaging the right board members to keep them moving forward, and they have embraced the idea that to expand capacity, an investment in infrastructure is essential. As of this year, the organization now has a presence in all 50 states.
Stephen: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, Vicki, and for being my guest.
Vicki: Thank you for having me, Stephen. It's been a pleasure.
To explore whether affordable infrastructure and specialized expertise from The More Than Giving Co. could help your nonprofit move forward, schedule a complimentary, 30-minute consultation with Vicki here.