How Nonprofits Get Really Big

How Nonprofits Get Really Big
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Squeezed around a conference table
designed for eight people, 12 leaders
of a highly regarded
nonprofit
discuss how to fund the organization’s
growth. With the support of a large
national
foundation
, several family foundations,
a few major individual donors
and many smaller ones, a handful of
government
agencies and corporations,
and even an earned-income venture, the
organization has grown significantly, if
erratically, to reach about $3 million in
annual revenues.
The group’s programs bring young
people from the inner city together with
their peers from the suburbs to engage
in leadership activities. Now, a decade
after the organization’s founding, the
board and staff are eager to grow. The
problem is, some
board
and staff members
fear, that their funders are nearing
the limits of what they can or will contribute.
And without increased
funding
the organization will not be able to
expand. Has the organization hit a funding
wall? Where should it turn for additional
money?
One board member makes the case
for additional government funding.
Another sees enormous potential in a
direct mail campaign. The executive
director and staff maintain that the organization
can secure funding from one
more large national foundation.
Without any clear path, no idea is a
bad one. As the conversation winds
down, the leaders identify the most
promising funding sources, divide
responsibilities, and put the next steps
into motion. They do not know the odds
of success, but their hopes are high.
Funding Growth Is Difficult
As the number of nonprofits and the
scope of their ambitions explode, conversations
such as this one have become
commonplace in nonprofit board meetings
across the U.S. Almost to a person,
all of the nonprofit leaders with whom
the
Bridgespan Group
has worked want
to increase their organization’s reach.
In a recent study of the most dynamic,
midsized youth-serving nonprofits in the
country, the people we talked to repeatedly asked, “How do we
get really big?”
The answers to this question are anything but obvious. And
examples of nonprofits to imitate do not readily come to mind.
The average founding year of the 10 largest U.S. nonprofits is
1903.
What can younger nonprofits learn from organizations
that began before the First World War?
Moreover, figuring out how dollars flow within the nonprofit
sector is infamously difficult. The nonprofit “capital
markets” are often irrational. Some donors strictly limit the
number of years that they will provide support, and they
often meet increased efficiencies with decreased funding.
Many of the most successful nonprofit leaders have their
hands full simply keeping existing funders engaged, let alone
planning for major growth. When funding breakthroughs do
occur, they seem idiosyncratic – due more to luck or personal
charisma than to planning.
To discover whether there is logic hidden in the haze,
Bridgespan identified and studied nonprofit organizations and
networks founded in the U.S. in or since 1970 that had achieved
$50 million or more in annual revenue by 2003. (Hospitals and
colleges, where sources of major funding are well understood,
were not included in the study.) Our hope was that we might
discover some rules of the road for nonprofits that want to jump
to the next level and get really big.
Our findings contradict some of the conventional wisdom
about nonprofit growth. First and foremost, although it may be
hard to get really big in today’s environment, it is not impossible
– nor is it simply luck and connections that help a nonprofit
make the jump. Greater numbers of nonprofits achieve substantial
growth than is generally perceived.
Bridgespan identified 144 nonprofits that have gone from
founding to at least $50 million in revenue since 1970. Some of
these organizations, like Habitat for Humanity International,
America’s Second Harvest, and the Make-a-Wish Foundation
of America, are household names. Most, like Youth Villages,
Communities in Schools, and the National Wild Turkey
Federation (NWTF), are not – at least not yet.
Further, the way funding flows to organizations this large
is neither completely random nor illogical. On the contrary, we
identified three important practices common among nonprofits
that succeeded in building large-scale funding models: (1) They
developed funding in one concentrated source rather than
across diverse sources; (2) they found a funding source that
was a natural match to their mission and beneficiaries; and (3)
they built a professional organization and structure around this
funding model.
Getting big is not the right choice for every nonprofit, of
course. Securing large-scale funding generally involves some programmatic
trade-offs. And large sources of funding appear to
be more readily available for – and appropriate to – some missions
than others.
Admittedly, using revenue as the metric for growth has its
limitations. It does not necessarily capture all the elements of
an organization’s “scale” (for example, volunteer hours). But revenue
does allow comparison across organizations, and it is the
central constraint that prevents many nonprofits from growing.
For those nonprofits that do want to grow their revenues,
understanding the paths that others have blazed over the past
three decades will increase their odds of success.
The Myth of Diversification
Many leaders of aspiring nonprofits state that their No. 1 funding
objective is diversification. It seems sensible. When government
funding stalls, why not try to raise money from individual
donations? When corporate money dries up, why not try
to replace it with foundation grants? And isn’t having a wide array
of funding sources a good way to mitigate the risk of losing any
single source of money?
Diversification may seem like a good idea, but in practice
most of the organizations that have gotten really big over the
past three decades did so by concentrating on one type of funding
source, not by diversifying across several sources of funding.
Bridgespan obtained solid financial data for 110 of the 144
high-growth nonprofits we identified. Of the 110, roughly 90
percent had a single dominant source of funding – such as government,
individual donations, or corporate gifts. And on average,
that dominant funding source accounted for just over 90
percent of the organization’s total funding.
To better understand this finding, we conducted in-depth
interviews with leaders of 21 of these 110 organizations. We
found that more than two-thirds of them had not only a dominant
source of funding, but also a specialization within that area:
for example, not just government funding but also state government
funding; not just individual donations but also small
individual donations; and not just corporate donations but also
in-kind corporate donations.
Only a few of the 21 interviewees knew from the start
where they would find their most promising funding sources.
Often, they were uncertain about which source was most
promising. But as these organizations pursued their growth, they
realized which sources of funding seemed most promising and
were willing to concentrate their efforts on that source, recruiting
people and creating organizations that could best pursue that
funding source.
Consider the example of the American Kidney Fund (AKF),
which helps low-income people with kidney disease. From its
founding in 1971 until the mid-1990s, the AKF was a relatively
small organization, never surpassing $6 million in revenue and
relying on a mix of funding including a large number of small
individual donations. In 1996, changes in federal law made it illegal
for medical providers to assist low-income patients by subsidizing
the roughly 20 percent of dialysis expenses that Medicare
did not cover – effectively cutting patients off from treatment.
To cover these expenses and restore care to low-income patients,
the AKF set up a major initiative to raise donations from corporations.
The AKF became highly skilled at this work and the
organization grew rapidly, passing the $20 million mark in 2000
and reaching nearly $70 million in 2004. “Switching our emphasis
to corporate partners was the real turning point in our organization,”
says Chief Financial Officer Don Roy.
Previous Bridgespan research suggests that the AKF’s experience
is not idiosyncratic.
In multiple nonprofit domains
(such as environmental advocacy and youth services) there are
distinct breakpoints at which the number of nonprofits
decreases dramatically from one revenue category to the next.
After each of these breakpoints, both the average level of
diversification and the mix of funding change.
Take the examples of youth services and environmental
advocacy. When nonprofits in these domains are small, they typically
have a diverse set of funding sources, with a large percentage
of the money coming from foundations. As these organizations
grow to $3 million and $10 million in size, respectively,
they diversify their funding sources even more. But as they get
larger these organizations increasingly rely on a single funding
source – in these cases, government and individual support,
respectively. As they reach $50 million or more in size, the concentration
of funding from one source increases even more.
This concentration by funding source does not replace the
need for diversification and risk management. The leaders we
interviewed were quite focused on minimizing funding risk.
Although most relied on a single source for the bulk of their funding,
they did not rely on a single payer. Organizations achieved
diversification and mitigated their funding risk by securing
multiple payers of the same type to support their work. Youth
Villages, for example, receives more than 90 percent of its funding
from state government contracts, but it has minimized its
risk by tapping a number of government departments in a
number of states. Similarly, when Population Services International
(PSI) had roughly $4 million in revenues, it received
more than 90 percent of its funding from the U.S. Agency for
International Development. Now, with revenues in excess of
$200 million, PSI still receives the large majority of its funding
from government agencies focused on international development
– but its supporters include the governments of Germany,
the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, as well as the
United Nations.
Although dominant funding sources fuel nonprofit expansion,
secondary sources are still important. Of the 101 organizations
that have a dominant funding source, more than 20 percent
have a secondary source that accounted for 10 percent or
more of their revenue. Even when secondary funding sources
account for a smaller percentage of total revenue, they can be
quite valuable for furthering the mission. The Metropolitan
Boston Housing Partnership, for example, receives less than 1
percent of its funding from unrestricted foundation and corporate
donations. But according to Executive Director Julia
Kehoe, those funds “allow us to do critical prevention work that
is not currently funded by government programs.”
Finding the Right Match
When nonprofits are small, they often raise money from a
wide variety of sources. That’s because there are many potential
donors who are able to give small amounts of money, and
because a particularly inspiring executive director can stand
out from the crowd and convince these small donors to give.
But when very large sums of money are involved, the picture
changes. Sizable funding sources are fewer, and their goals are
more developed. As a result, the funders’ interests matter more
than does the executive director’s charisma.
The NWTF is one organization that found a funding source
– hunters – aligned with its mission. The NWTF aims to preserve
and expand wild turkey habitats. Since its founding in 1973,
the NWTF has helped increase the U.S. wild turkey population
from 1.3 million to more than 7 million birds. The NWTF is also
a financial success: Its revenues in 2003 totaled some $87 million,
with the lion’s share coming from 2,000 local chapters made
up of more than 500,000 members. Hunters, who tend to make
a sharp distinction between conservation and environmentalism,
are the primary donors. The organization raises about 80
percent of its annual revenues by sponsoring more than 2,000
fundraisers each year, generating large numbers of individual
contributions and event-related purchases. Local chapters run
the fundraisers with assistance from national headquarters,
and then funnel the proceeds back to the national organization.
Many nonprofits never find a dominant funding source,
while others hesitantly drift toward it. This need not be the case.
There are natural matches between many organizations and
particular funding sources. Nonprofit leaders need to identify
and target those funding sources that are most likely to be a
natural match with their organizations. Far from being random,
large funders’ interests often fall into distinct categories. Corporations
almost always offer in-kind support focused on
hunger or health issues. And individuals tend to give to issues
that cross socioeconomic boundaries – like environmental
advocacy – and to organizations that have clear, compelling,
and simple messages.
We have broken funding sources into
five categories – government, service fees, corporate, individuals,
and foundations – and describe what we have learned
about their general areas of interest. (See the table beginning
on p. 48 for a list of all 144 organizations and their principal funding
source, and visit www.bridgespan.org for profiles of 21 of
the organizations.)
Government.
Government is by far the most important
source of funding for the high-growth nonprofits in our study.
It provided most of the money for 40 percent of the organizations.
In most cases, government-funded nonprofits address
needs that easily fall within a particular government agency’s
set of responsibilities. Federal agencies, for example, are most
likely to support organizations in medical research, food, and
foreign affairs. State and local governments are most likely to
support human services, employment development, and education
organizations. Government also provides most of the
financial support for nonprofits that address the needs of lowincome
Americans. The major exceptions are food banks,
which receive large amounts of in-kind corporate contributions,
and Habitat for Humanity, which relies for the most part on individual
donations.
Many people talk about the government getting out of the
social sector, but available data tell a different story. Not only
our findings, but also national data show that government
funding of the nonprofit sector is growing faster than the
nation’s GDP.
People may perceive reduced government funding because
of the devastating and often public impacts of reductions in particular
services, or because of increases in what nonprofits are
expected to accomplish with each dollar. The perception of
reduced government funding is not accurate, however, and
could be harmful if it leads nonprofits to forgo government funding,
or if it reduces the public’s attention to government’s role
as the primary funder of social services.
Service Fees.
Program service fees are the second most
important source of funding for high-growth nonprofits, providing
most of the money for 33 percent of the organizations
in our study. Service fees are also the second most important
source of funding in the nonprofit sector as a whole.
Community
health clinics, student loan providers, and employment
agencies for the disabled are likely to depend on program service
fees as their dominant source of funding.
Many of the human services organizations (such as Vinfen
Corporation, which serves people with mental illness, mental
retardation, or behavioral health disabilities) contract with the
government to provide services. In healthcare, several large
community health clinics earn a large portion of their fees
from Medicaid reimbursements. The 12 student and housing
loan organizations in our study likewise rely on fees and interest
income.
Analyzing service fees is notoriously difficult because nonprofits
have wide latitude in what they report as program service
fees. Funding from the same source could be treated as government
support by one nonprofit and as program service
fees by another nonprofit. Adding to the confusion is the fact
that program service fees are often equated with earned-income
and social enterprise ventures. Contrary to the current buzz over
social enterprises, free-market commercial ventures are not
the major generators of program service fees for nonprofits in
this study.
10
Instead, in 90 percent of the cases for which we have
detailed information, the fees had some government connection
(for example, government guarantees of student loans or
favorable contracting rules for those employing the disabled),
further emphasizing the important role of government in the
nonprofit sector.
Corporate.
Corporate giving represents a relatively small
share of total charitable giving in the nonprofit sector, but it
is a prominent source of funding among these high-growth nonprofits.
Corporations are the primary funders of 19 percent of
the nonprofits we surveyed. The vast majority of corporate support
is in-kind donations, not cash. Every food bank and about
half of the international development nonprofits, for example,
rely on in-kind corporate gifts of food and medical supplies.
In the small number of cases when corporate cash fuels a
nonprofit’s growth, the corporation usually has both an altruistic
and a financial motive for the support. Nonprofits often garner
corporate cash when a real market exists for their products
or service, but laws or public opinion prevent corporations
from entering the market. For example, there is a real market
for blood, bone marrow, and other human body parts, but by
and large, corporations do not enter this market, and instead fund
the nonprofit organizations that handle these transactions.
Individuals.
Individuals are the primary funders of only 6
percent of the high-growth nonprofits in our study. Interestingly,
small gifts power all of the surveyed high-growth nonprofits in
this category, even though major gifts account for a large majority
of individual giving in the U.S.
11, 12
Although some organizations
develop major donors as a significant secondary source
of funds, small donations seem to fuel the broadest expansions.
This may be because major gifts require greater personal
involvement or because the kinds of techniques that generate
smaller donations (direct mail and special events, for
example) are easier to scale up.
Issues that directly touch middle-class Americans, such as the
environment and health, tend to secure broad individual support.
In some cases, as with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation,
they involve a benefit that will accrue to society in the
future. In others, the benefit is more personal and immediate,
as with the NWTF. Organizations that receive strong support
from individual donors typically have a clear and basic message.
Paul Velaski, vice president and chief financial officer of the
Make-a-Wish Foundation of America, states that the top reason
for their growth is “the purity and simplicity of our message.
We cannot muddy it up.” A clear message also helps build
a strong brand that resonates with individual donors, as in the
case of Habitat for Humanity.
Foundations.
The least frequent source of funding for highgrowth
nonprofits is foundations, which are the primary funders
for only two of the organizations in our study, or 2 percent
of the high-growth nonprofits. These two organizations are both
in healthcare: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health;
and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, which employs
nearly 300 people and researches ways to prevent and cure
genetic diseases. The only other organization that comes close
to this level of foundation funding is Conservation International,
which aims to protect the 2.3 percent of land that contains over
half of the Earth’s biodiversity. In the case of the Stowers Institute
and Conservation International, the pathways to solving
their target issues are relatively clear, though very expensive. (This
is in contrast to other issues, like education reform, where the
pathway itself is still a matter of debate.)
Though it is impossible to draw conclusions from so few
examples, it seems plausible that foundations become dominant
funders only when sufficient funding seems to be the major missing
ingredient from solving an enormous problem. In general,
foundations seem to be more focused on their traditional role
of starting new programs rather than supporting them at scale.
This may make sense, because foundations represent only 5 percent
of nonprofit funding for the domains that we studied.
13
Unlocking Growth
Finding the right funding source to scale an organization is
important, but it’s only the first step. The high-growth nonprofits
in our study also invested significant amounts of time and
money to develop their ability to attract and solicit the right kinds
of funding. The organizations that grew the most brought in
talent and built organizations that support a high-growth strategy.
As Catherine D’Amato, chief executive officer of the
Greater Boston Food Bank, states, “We started as a charity and
became a charitable business.”
For example, Help USA, a housing organization, created a
finance staff of more than 30 people to apply for and manage
complicated government contracts. The Oregon Food Bank built
a $10 million distribution center that can handle both fresh
and frozen food, which greatly expanded the range of food donations
it can accept. And Opportunity International cultivated a
sophisticated fundraising group that is on par with those of the
best universities and medical centers.
Many leaders of high-growth nonprofits experienced a
pivotal point when they needed to bring in new talent. Typically,
there was a strong tension between promoting internal,
often program-oriented employees and hiring external candidates
with deep experience in areas like marketing or logistics.
Introducing new blood into critical roles, though vital, is usually
trying. Similar tensions often arise when someone with a
greater focus on management takes over from a visionary
leader.
Bill Milliken, founder and vice chairman of Communities in
Schools, recently elevated a new president within the organization.
“The ’60s saw a lot of great movements that died,” he
says. “They were led by great frontier people who couldn’t
relate to the settlers. They wanted new ideas but didn’t build organizations.
Passion and professionalism keep them in balance.”
Many high-growth leaders also concluded that “virtuous and
poor” was not the best way to fulfill their missions. For organizations
built on the passion of committed program people,
this represented a real cultural shift. Focusing on dollars and
cents was not what brought them into the sector. And with so
many problems to address, the idea of reserving money to create
financial stability or to fund future capacity was often
deeply, even morally, uncomfortable. But they realized that to
fulfill their missions they needed to spend as much time, or
more, on margins.
When Patrick Lawler arrived at Youth Villages in 1980 as the
new chief executive officer, he was just 24 years old. “I’d been
a probation officer,” recalls Lawler. “I’d never seen a budget. I
didn’t know anything about management. What I knew about
was how to take care of tough kids. For my first two or three
years, I acted like we were a charity and we had to take in just
enough money to pay the bills. Around 1982, one of our board
members told me how we had to have margins or we couldn’t
run our business. Not a charity, a business. We were running on
extremely limited resources and raising money via yard sales,
car washes, and garage sales. That board member opened my
eyes to a broader future.”
In 1984, Youth Villages began focusing on its financial margins
and launched its first capital campaign. The money raised
was used to acquire land in the middle of Tennessee for a residential
facility. This helped Youth Villages grow from a western
Tennessee service provider to one that served the entire state.
Having identified the state as its dominant funding source,
Youth Villages proposed a contract structure that reduced the
state’s financial burden during a time of financial crisis. “We convinced
the state that they shouldn’t be buying beds. They should
buy outcomes, successful outcomes.” Youth Villages made sure
it was in the business of providing those outcomes – adding services,
such as family-based, in-home counseling, to do so. Today,
Youth Villages has over $70 million in revenue and has had an
annual growth rate of more than 20 percent since 1990.
Focusing on margins is not just about growing revenues. It
is also about controlling costs. Core to the success of the
NWTF’s special events is supplying auction items and gifts – what
it calls “banquet-in-a-box” – to each chapter that is having a
fundraising banquet. Originally, the national office had multiple
retailers ship their wares to each local event. Then they centralized
purchasing, built a warehouse, and shipped just one package
to each location. Now the organization orders many of its
banquet supplies (such as diamond bracelets, guns, and gas
grills) directly from the manufacturers, including some in China.
“We had been running it like a small business, but then we realized
we had grown far beyond that,” says Chief Financial Officer
James Sparks. These moves have reduced costs by more than
70 percent. As Sparks notes, “To save a dollar is as good as to
earn a dollar.”
Limits to Growth
Growth is not always the right choice, or even a possible choice,
for an organization. Some missions simply do not have many
(or any) natural large-scale funders. And when money is available,
it often comes with restrictions that can drive an organization
off course. Above all, it is important to remember just
how rare it is for a nonprofit to get big. These 144 high-growth
organizations, although greater in number than one might
expect, represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the nonprofits
founded since 1970. Knowing when not to pursue
growth is as important as knowing what may improve the odds
of success when you do try to grow.
Timing can have a major influence over a nonprofit’s ability
to raise money and to grow. Some nonprofits have the good
fortune of being founded during a period of heightened interest
in their mission. Take environmental and international aid
groups, for example. About 70 percent of all U.S. environmental
groups over $50 million in size were founded in or after
1970. And about 40 percent of all U.S. international aid groups
were founded since 1970. By contrast, only 15 percent of all educational
groups and 16 percent of all arts and culture organizations
of that size were founded during that period.
14
Before 1970, the environmental movement was still in its
infancy. Many experts point to the first Earth Day on April 22,
1970, as the real awakening of the movement. Hence, it isn’t surprising
that environmental groups starting in or after 1970 had
a better chance of growing rapidly during a period in which public
concern about the issue was also growing rapidly. Judith
Keefer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which was
established in 1970, explains: “The issues took off. It’s the macro
stuff.” International aid organizations seem to have experienced
similar growth after the Ethiopian famine of 1984.
Growth can also be limited by nonprofits’ missions and
activities. For instance, funding for services – be it from government,
individuals, or corporations – is more readily available
than funding for advocacy. Less than 5 percent of the organizations
in this study cite advocacy as their central activity. The
Oregon Food Bank provides a good illustration. Its mission is
to “eliminate hunger and its root causes, because no one should
be hungry.” In 2003, the organization was approximately $55
million in size, with more than two-thirds of that support coming
from in-kind corporate contributions of food. Although the
Oregon Food Bank cares deeply about policy issues and willingly
takes controversial stands on such issues as the minimum wage,
its primary program, the one that has received the most funding,
is providing food to people who need it.
Most of the nonprofits that we studied also report that
their programs or operations were restricted as a result of their
dominant funding source. Some organizations choose to give
up funding in order to avoid having to change their missions,
whereas others choose to make adjustments. In housing, for
example, government funding now favors giving housing
directly to individuals rather than developing facilities, and so
Help USA has had to modify its programs to accommodate that
shift. Likewise, federal testing objectives have narrowed schools’
focus to very specific reading objectives, forcing Success for All
to modify its programs.
PSI has developed a creative way to manage these tensions.
PSI receives funding from a wide range of federal and international
bodies, each of which carries some restrictions. PSI has
developed terms to identify activities that are off-mission (the
“mush”) and those that are on-mission but inefficient (the
“yuck”). At times PSI must conduct activities that are mush or
yuck to satisfy the interests of important funders. Nevertheless,
its leadership is always cognizant of the percentage of its work
that falls into these two categories.
Finding the Right Path
The fact that so many nonprofits have gotten big in recent
decades is encouraging. It demonstrates that organizations
tackling solutions to social problems can grow to large scale. But
not all paths and practices are equal. As is the case in business,
nonprofit leaders must consider the best long-term path for their
organizations, whether that is choosing to stay small or trying
to grow.
The good news is that nonprofit executives and board members
pursuing expansion do not have to resort to guessing or hoping.
With large-scale funding, there are rules to the game, even
if at times they may seem unfair or opaque. If nonprofit leaders
become more systematic in evaluating how (and whether)
to pursue large-scale growth, boardroom conversations could
become more productive, greater numbers of those in need
could receive help, and scarce social resources could be better
deployed.
Read more stories by
William Foster
Gail Fine
Cite
Foster, W., & Fine, G. (2007). How Nonprofits Get Really Big.
Stanford Social Innovation Review
(2), 46–55. https://doi.org/10.48558/FD5G-HC38
Download RIS File
Squeezed around a conference table
designed for eight people, 12 leaders
of a highly regarded
nonprofit
discuss how to fund the organization’s
growth. With the support of a large
national
foundation
, several family foundations,
a few major individual donors
and many smaller ones, a handful of
government
agencies and corporations,
and even an earned-income venture, the
organization has grown significantly, if
erratically, to reach about $3 million in
annual revenues.
The group’s programs bring young
people from the inner city together with
their peers from the suburbs to engage
in leadership activities. Now, a decade
after the organization’s founding, the
board and staff are eager to grow. The
problem is, some
board
and staff members
fear, that their funders are nearing
the limits of what they can or will contribute.
And without increased
funding
the organization will not be able to
expand. Has the organization hit a funding…
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