Beyond the Grant Application
A quick wide look at resources (too) many organizations never think to ask for
Ask any nonprofit or NGO leader around the July summertime mid-point how well development is going or what’s the status of their fundraising activity. From experience, I’ll usually hear that everyone’s waiting on a grant, expecting better responses on their donation campaigns, or planning their appeals for the busy end of year period.
What you often do not hear— unless you’re talking directly with development leads, grantwriters, or fundraising professionals— is how the actual plan itself is going. How well it’s performing. What’s working and not working. And how much time, energy and priority focus is given specifically to individual donations, major gifts, researching grants, etc. You might hear even less about donor research and prospecting, evaluating internal systems and processes, assessing new and emerging tools and platforms.
But you will most definitely hear concerns about the limited range of options. And the ever present pressure to do more with less. And the importance of investing time and effort into maintaining what’s gained so far this year. Yet full knowledge that grants alone, donations alone and even that big annual event or end of year campaign alone is never enough and will never be enough for the year to truly feel like a successful one.
Grants, donations, and events are what most leaders are trained, conditioned, and used to talking about most when it comes to development and fundraising. So every year, around summertime, if mid-year performance is being reviewed by leaders, teams, and boards— as they should be— the focus turns invariably to how many grants did we win versus how many we applied for, how many donors and how many donations did we get, and how many prospects for new grants and new donors do we have.
Good groups will focus more on retention than acquisition. Uncertain groups will start scrambling for every resource opportunity possible. What gets far less attention, during the inevitable summertime slump, is just how unpredictable every year is. And how routine that unpredictability becomes.
And still there are also resources, relationships, and additional revenue options that almost never get considered, explored or discussed by nonprofits and NGOs. Because leaders were never trained to consider them. Or because they don’t reinforce the traditional fundraising, grantwriting, and development specialist roles that baked into our present-day system of funding, charity, and philanthropy.
This is not an indictment of anybody or any organization. Nor is it a critique of established fundraising, which we know works for most contexts. But I am arguing, much as a I do ever year, to keep eyes, ears and doors open regarding a broader range of resource options for the second half of the year— if not all year-round.— in order to sustain, grow, and advance the good work done by good groups.
Start with earned revenue. It is easily the most underused resource category we have—and the one organizations are most reluctant to take seriously. There’s a lingering discomfort in parts of our sector with the very idea of a nonprofit or NGO charging money for anything. As though earning revenue somehow compromises the mission.
Part of the challenge is that many organizations still separate ‘fundraising’ from ‘revenue generation’ as though they are fundamentally different activities. In practice, both are about understanding what value an organization creates and how that value can sustain the work.
But if your group has developed real expertise—whether that’s a training curriculum, a proven program model, research capacity, or specialized knowledge that other institutions value—there is nothing inherently at odds between charging appropriately for that value and staying true to the mission.
Think about fee-for-service work. Licensing a curriculum to peer organizations. Offering paid consulting or training to institutions that lack your specific knowledge base. These are legitimate, self-sustaining revenue streams. And they are exactly the kinds of options that can diversify your organization away from total dependence on the unpredictability of grants and gifts.
The key—especially during a mid-year planning review—is vetting these opportunities carefully. Does the revenue model actually align with your mission? Does it require capacity you don’t currently have? Does it risk mission drift if it grows large enough to start shaping organizational priorities? Those questions deserve real scrutiny, not a reflexive yes or a reflexive no.
Corporate partnerships are another category that gets treated far too narrowly. Most leaders think of corporate support as sponsorship dollars attached to an event. A real, but fairly limited, version of what’s possible.
The mistake is often not that organizations consider corporate partnerships, but that they approach them without first defining what a healthy partnership looks like. Like any relationship involving resources and influence, the question is not simply what a company can provide. It is whether the relationship strengthens or complicates the mission.
Businesses can offer in-kind professional services—from legal counsel to marketing support to technology infrastructure—that would otherwise cost real money to procure. They can offer employee volunteer programs that provide labor capacity during those periods when your own staff is stretched thin. Or they can offer meeting space, printing capacity, and logistical support. Things that never show up as a cash gift, but meaningly reduce what you’d otherwise have to spend.
Vetting these relationships matters just as much as vetting a grant: understand what the business expects in return, whether that’s visibility, association, or influence over programming, and be clear-eyed about where the line sits between an appropriate partnership and a compromising one.
Then there is volunteer and pro bono capacity. It deserves its own serious, strategic consideration—not just treated as an informal, nice-to-have bonus when someone happens to show up.
The same principle applies here as it does with financial resources. Capacity that exists but remains invisible is still a missed opportunity. The issue is rarely whether people are willing to contribute. It is whether our organizations have built clear, meaningful ways for them to do so.
Every nonprofit and NGO has supporters, board members, or community members who have offered to help in ways that go far beyond writing a check. Yet, a striking number of those offers go completely untaken. Why? Because nobody built a simple process for accepting them.
Think about it. A retired accountant on your board might be entirely willing to review your financial systems—if asked directly, rather than assumed to be too busy. A former marketing executive who volunteers occasionally might take on a highly defined project—if given a real, limited scope, rather than vague encouragement to “help out sometime.”
This kind of capacity doesn’t replace paid staff. And it shouldn’t be treated as free labor to lean on indefinitely. But used thoughtfully, and with real boundaries, it can drastically extend what your organization is able to accomplish during a tight year.
We also need to talk about non-cash assets. It’s a category many smaller NGOs and nonprofits completely ignore, assuming it is reserved only for massive institutions with sophisticated donor-relations departments.
But think about what’s actually possible. Appreciated securities. Real property. In some regions, agricultural or business holdings. These can be given in ways that create a larger benefit for the organization—and a far better tax outcome for the donor—than an equivalent cash gift.
You don’t need a massive gift-planning team to start these conversations. You just need to know enough to recognize when a donor might benefit from exploring the option. And you need a working relationship with a local financial advisor or attorney who can help structure it properly. Even a modest, grassroots organization can plant this seed. Especially with a longtime donor who has supported you for years, but has simply never been asked the question.
Finally, there is the relationship infrastructure. It exists in every single organization, yet it is rarely mapped out deliberately. Think about the alumni of your programs. Former staff and volunteers who left with their goodwill completely intact. Diaspora or extended community networks connected to your mission, but never formally engaged.
These networks are especially valuable because they are built on trust that already exists. They are not cold prospects waiting to be converted. They are people who already understand some part of your organization’s story—and they may simply need a direct, meaningful invitation to reconnect.
Let’s be clear: these aren’t revenue sources in the traditional sense. They are bridges to revenue sources you haven’t reached yet. They are credible voices who can open doors that a direct appeal from your organization never could. Treating them as a real category worth investing time in—rather than an afterthought—is often the difference between a nonprofit or NGO that grows its base steadily, and one that keeps returning to the exact same, shrinking pool of known donors.
None of this replaces the fundamentals. Grants matter. Individual giving matters. But an organization that only knows how to ask in those two ways is operating with a fraction of the toolkit actually available to it. And in a year where the traditional paths feel more uncertain than usual, that wider view isn’t optional anymore. It’s the work.
The deeper shift is not about finding one more place to ask for money. It is about recognizing that our organizations are already surrounded by forms of support that can strengthen their work. The first challenge is simply learning to see them.
On BE4SI, we’re talking nonprofits/NGOs, social enterprise, philanthropy, civil society, and social impact— filtered through U.S. and Central/Eastern European lenses. As a reader-supported publication, we’d be honored to have you as a subscriber.
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We in fundraising should remember that we can combine strategies: leverage a Giving Day, whether it's regional or national, to launch a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign where our champion is working for a company with an employer matching gift program. Or do a #HalfMyDAF push on a Giving Day.
We did the former several years ago with a donor who worked at Microsoft, and she brought in a whole bunch of new donors whose gifts were also matched as hers were. The beautiful part is that her own monthly giving to our organization doubled because she felt more engaged.