Nonprofit Builder: gathering feedback from NGOs

In June this year I joined the Nonprofit Builder team. I really liked the idea of working on a digital tool that will help non-profit organizations become more sustainable and effective while connecting them with consultants and donors. With lots of potential, NGOs often lack expertise and knowledge in many areas to reach their full capacity and become strong and impactful. Having worked in the nonprofit sector in Ukraine, Germany, France and Belgium, I think this project is timely, innovative and needed.

Thus, after the discussion with Daniel D’Esposito, whom I knew from my internship at the human rights NGO, I have joined the small team of two dedicated specialists, Daniel and Mike.

My role currently focuses mainly on gathering feedback from NGOs around the world about their past organizational development (OD) experience and future plans in order to outline best practices and benchmarks. We are gathering this data because we believe this will help to create the online tool — Nonprofit Builder.

Nonprofit Builder is a platform where NGOs can find great consultants that help them solve OD problems quickly at affordable price; where high-quality consultants can intervene and help NGOs succeed in the long-term; where donors can support financially these interventions and monitor the impact.

We collect the feedback from Skype interviews with NGOs and until now we have interviewed more than ten. Here are some of the questions we ask: Do you have a specific OD goal/s for the next 12 months? What are your priority areas for improving your organization’s capacity? What kind of support will be most useful to achieve this and similar goals? What experience do you already have, working with consultants on your organizational development? How does price influence your decisions to pay for consultants or trainings?

The purpose is to verify two of our core assumptions for this project:

1. If we make it easier and more efficient for nonprofits to find trustworthy and high quality consultants and trainings, then these nonprofits will invest more in their organisational development.
2. If we make consultants and trainings more affordable for nonprofits, then these nonprofits will make more use of their services and opt for better quality providers.

And here’s what we have learnt so far:

• Most nonprofits have clear-cut capacity building goals they want to work on over the next 12 months. Actually, none of them had no goals at all.
• These goals involve: strategy, fundraising diversification, communication strategy, managing board relation, better use of technology, security practices, monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Those with the most pressing need for support, and offering the greatest potential for dramatic transformation, are those with inexperienced first-time executive directors (less than 2 years on the job), who are open to learn. They are the ones most likely to make an extensive use of the Nonprofit Builder provided they can afford it.
• Experienced nonprofit are likely to make a “niche” use of the Nonprofit Builder, for example legal advice on a change of statutes, or facilitation of a strategy retreat.
• Most nonprofits have strategic goals or policies to support the development of their staff. However they are ad hoc , poorly financed, and depend on the initiative of employee to find and request a course, rather than a structured training program. Nonprofits would use the Builder to find good quality training courses to send staff to. There are so many courses out there, how to know which ones are worthwhile?
• Nonprofits will appreciate to have peer reviews of consultants or courses in order to take informed decisions and descriptions of interventions so they can picture what is involved and whether it is a fit for their need.
• One interviewee requested some form of initial guidance, even if it has digital, so they could figure out their need and match it with the right solution. Not to be confronted with a wide array of choices without any tool to help them choose.
• In addition to consulting and trainings, interviewees suggested facilitating peer to peer connections (example: discussions on monitoring) and regular newsletters with interesting articles about fundraising or strategy.

These learnings help us better understand the needs of NGOs and how we could possibly with the Nonprofit builder make the whole organizational development process more efficient and less expensive. All NGOs confirmed that the existence of such tool would be valuable and will help them in their capacity building. Finding a reliable consultant that would help organizations succeed in the long term and getting financial support from a donor to cover the fee is what all NGOs would like to see.

Funding and costs

The cost of capacity building support and lack of funding are key obstacles that are holding NGOs back from investing into building their capacity :

• There is a large price gap between what an NGO is willing to pay and what a consultant or service provider needs in order to thrive. For example, an NGO would be reluctant to pay more than 1500$ for a 5-day training course.
• As capacity building investments are not covered by project grants, they need to come out of the core funding or financial reserves of the organisation. The NGO’s board may have to be involved in the decision, and may be reluctant to do so, preferring to defer the expense.
• NGOs will negotiate price downwards, or look for pro bono support, through the networks of their board members for example.
• NGOs will be reluctant to use its core funding for large organisational development investments, and will rather seek to fundraise for them separately, which will delay implementation.
• Capacity building involves direct costs, such as consultant fees, but also indirect costs, such costs of workshops and staff time to support the process.

With Nonprofit Builder we want to make capacity building interventions less expensive for nonprofits by getting support from donors via the subsidy system — and thus help organizations grow stronger and more effective.

We are continuing our interviews with NGOs, with a focus on understanding the impact of capacity building work. We’ll be interviewing a selection of NGOs who have received capacity building support from Oak Foundation as well as many who our team have previously worked with — I will update you on our learnings from this in my next post.

Would you have interesting experiences to share with us? Would you recommend we speak to an NGO or anyone who is working on a similar initiative? Get in touch below or with me directly marina at nonprofitbuilder.org