A Not-for-Profit Organization’s Dilemma

NFP organizations all over the world have played critical and far-reaching roles in their respective societies. Every country has each evolve organizations that made meaningful and lasting impact on people’s lives.

You will see NFP organizations in far-flung and depressed areas of countries. You will meet volunteers of these organizations during calamities, in the heat of war, and even in the dark secret prisons of totalitarian states.

These dramatic experiences are not really the typical variety even in these organizations. The more common experiences are really those that concern routine tasks of getting services to beneficiaries or meet project schedules.

The Challenges of Contemporary NFP Organizations

The challenge of not-for-profit organizations today is that it must accomplish A goal or a mission, it demands leadership, it has to manage people to accomplish this, it has to provide its people with tools and resources, it needs to develop competence, it needs to coordinate projects, and it has to acquire money just like any business. What it cannot do very well is acquire profit.

This is not only a challenge but also an irony.

Admittedly, not-for-profit or NFP organizations by their operation or activities are for all intents and purposes run just like any enterprise. It requires the same amount and quality of talent, knowledge, skills, and labor costs but it is deployed not to gain profit but to accomplish an altruistic or supposedly noble goal.

I have volunteered my own personal time to help not-for-profit or non-government organizations (NGOs). Most of the time, I don’t help organizations raise funds. I help them prepare to receive and use them.

The difference may not be apparent but raising funds compared to being prepared to receive them are to me two distinct actions. The reason why I took the liberty of creating a distinction is for my own reference of accepting a consulting project pro bono or not.

Raising funds can be very controversial especially if you have very prominent community personalities running the fund-raising initiative.

Raising funds is getting money from someone and putting it in your hands or technically into the organization’s bank account if it has any. Helping organizations prepare to receive funds is about creating the process, systems and mechanisms to effectively use funds and monitor its flow from its infusion to its final payout to projects.

NFP or NGOs have almost the same likelihood of being recipients of funds. I mean funds of any kind and amount. What they don’t have in equal footing is the ability to use them.