Last Updated on August 11, 2022 by hassan abbas
A recent report found that about 30% of all nonprofit organizations in the country fail after 10 years. That’s a lot considering that these organizations often have very low overheads. There are some cases when nonprofits fail due to reasons out of their control, but in most cases, it’s because they’re doing something fundamentally wrong. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why so many nonprofit organizations fail.
Not Running Your Nonprofit Like a Business
While nonprofits are meant to help first and foremost, you still have to market and manage them like a business. Mastering marketing techniques and grasping core marketing principles is very important in this field, and yet, so many nonprofit owners don’t know how to formulate a proper call to action or don’t even know what key performance indicators are.
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are not only for fortune 500 companies with huge marketing departments. They should be used by every nonprofit organization on the planet and if you don’t have any right now or don’t know what they are, you need to start learning about them and use them right away.
Some of the key performance indicators you should look for include donor retention rate and donor lifetime value, but there are many others. If you want to learn more about KPIs you can check out this page on fundraising KPIs and nonprofit marketing terms that you should know about.
Not Understanding the Power of Inbound Marketing
So many organizations spend way too much time trying to get to their prospects’ pockets and not enough time walking them through a carefully crafted content funnel. If you have a content creation strategy in place, it is carefully crafted to reel people in and move them gradually towards the ultimate goal of getting a donation. That’s referred to as inbound marketing in the online marketing world and is one of the most efficient ways to get new donors.
You first introduce prospective donors to your cause, present solutions, and show how you can and have implemented these solutions on the ground. This is how you bring awareness to a cause and ask for donations without raising suspicion or coming off as needy.
Focusing on the Name First when Picking Board Members
A lot of nonprofits make the mistake of hiring people because they have a high-profile name and worked for prestigious organizations in the past. Just because someone was a CEO or CFO for a big corporation, doesn’t mean that they have the skills or disposition to run a nonprofit.
Nonprofit organizations are about the people first and someone who is too profit-oriented might come across as too tactical and uncaring. This could be an instant turn-off for certain donors. So, make sure that you pick people who have experience filing the type of role you are hiring them for first.
These are just some of the reasons why so many nonprofit organizations are unable to stay afloat. If you are running one right now, make sure that you avoid these mistakes and work hard on being as efficient and consistent with your efforts as possible.
