Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive? 178
helios17 writes "Non-Profits like this have traditionally gotten started from the money grants provide. Most grants award vehicles, computers, and even pay for organization rental and utility costs. The problem fledgling and even established non-profits are encountering is the dwindling number of grants allowing for Operating or General Support costs. What good is a vehicle received via grant if you can't afford to put fuel in it? With the number of Operating or General Support grants shrinking and those available funds competed for heavily, should we be looking on line for help? Can efforts like this be a better way to approach it?"
Kickstarter. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lobbying is obsolete.
Wellcome to the world of non-profits! (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you have some kind of revenue stream, you are going to be relying on donations and volunteers just like a community clothes closet for the homeless. Sounds like now that the gravy train of easy money is drying up these tech non-profits are being forced to demonstrate how they benefit the public good. I'm sure that there are many worthy causes, but now their in the wild competing for the same dollars and mind-share as food pantries, elder advocacy groups, and animal shelters.
Why should you survive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why should your non-profit survive when compared to any of the others? The overwhelming majority are staffed with good people with good intentions who work for very little money. The problem is one over-saturation for the market and a donation fatigue from a public that is burned out. There are hundreds of thousands of non-profits in the US alone and every single one of them thinks that /they/ are the most important.
When a business starts to think that they 'deserve' our money we accuse them of entitlement (e.g. Circuit City) and vilify them. A non-profit really isn't any different in that they serve a function that costs money and in order to survive need to take in money. Like a business they can merge, be bought or go bankrupt.
Frankly if more non-profits started to merge it would enable greater economies of scale and efficiencies, just like a business. It would also enable them to spend more money on their mission and less money on overhead. Services from secretarial to bandwidth to phone banks could be shared at greater efficiency across more organizations.
Perhaps my answer seems callous, but the bottom line is that no organization is entitled to survive. Non-profits need to embrace what the business world has done and go through a series of mergers for the greater good. Are your clients better served by your merging with another organization because you are stretched so thin that you are no longer effective?
People typically start and run non-profits because their ego tells them that they can do better than the person already running a like kind service. Society as a whole would benefit enormously if non-profits put their missions before their egos. These warm hearted organizations need some cold blooded business acumen.
Re:More important: Why are they drying up? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are the grants drying up?
In many cases, it's not that the money is drying up; it's that the money is increasingly 'focused' on projects rather than administration.
There's a popular conception among donors that the best way to keep NGOs from existing for their own sake (and growing fat and complacent) is to cease providing core funding, instead providing money for individual initiatives. As a happy coincidence, this also keeps NGOs on the string, having to justify every single little thing they do, which makes it easier to ensure that NGOs don't do anything that might make the donors uncomfortable, like speak their mind, or have a conscience or tell the truth.
The 'no core funding' argument has some merits, I'll grant (heh) you, as there have been NGOs who got caught up in navel-gazing, who got lazy and spent more time feathering their respective nests than actually, you know, doing good. That is absolutely something to be guarded against. But this move toward project funding has the unfortunate effect of keeping some NGOs on the fringe, struggling to stay alive. This applies particularly to those who challenge the status quo.
And as noted here, it has a knock-on effect on all NGOs, who find they can obtain salaries and meet project expenses, but can't own any fixed assets or even keep a vehicle running. Perversely, this increases their operating costs, which have to be met somehow. And that results in bigger grant applications for project funding.
Obligatory software analogy: This is similar to tech companies who see design, tech support, permanent staffing and even updates as cost centres and therefore areas to starve as much as possible. This can all too easily lead to more friction in the gears, longer ramp-up times, slower release schedules, reduced quality and sales, and yes, higher development costs, once everything's factored in.
Re:Run your non-profit as a for-profit (Score:2, Interesting)
Partially correct. There are no caps on the amount of untaxed income your non-profit can have as long as it they are associated with its purpose, but there is a cap on the amount of tax-free income that can be earned from unrelated activities. Even in that case, you can typically continue to operate as a non-profit as long as the appropriate taxes are paid on the unrelated activities. However, your last point is 100% correct, and the most important: talk to a lawyer.