The Key to Abundant Income: Where Mission & Community Meet

You care about your mission—deeply. Look around you. You see the passion of others. You hear it in the comments of staff, board members, and volunteers. Yet, funding your mission continues to challenge you. What’s the answer? For every cause near and dear to people, the answer is to gather more people with a similar passion for joining you—and act. This sounds simple. It is. However, it’s not easy. Finding that community from amongst the seven billion people on the planet will take effort. Getting them to act will take even more. First, to start, believe that people with a passion for your mission can be gathered into communities.

Several years ago, CharityChannel Press published 7 Nonprofit Income Streams: Open the Floodgates to Sustainability! The book helps people understand the seven streams of nonprofit income and how to use them to create sustainability. In this series of articles, I share insights from writing it.

Today’s insight: The key to increasing income lies in opportunities where mission and community overlap.

I recently spoke with a regional group of executive directors. Each leads to a similar sensory loss organization. They readily agreed that they had inadequate income. They wanted me to understand that their cause wasn’t popular, like cute puppies and kittens. Since the sensory was often invisible, most people didn’t recognize the needs of the population. Many of the people who experienced the challenge were low income. Collectively, the leaders doubted that communities around their mission could be built. Yet, the population they serve is enormous. Thirteen percent of the United States’ population of 41 million people, including two percent of all children, experience the sensory challenge.

Contrast them with the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association (USA). This rare genetic syndrome causes life-threatening obesity in children, with a prevalence of around 1:15,000 or less than 25,000 people in the United States. Over its nearly 40-year history, the association has grown support for its work one family at a time. With support from the Association, parents transform into advocates, board members, and donors. “Over 40 percent of the association’s funding is raised in grassroots events sponsored across North America by relatives and friends,” shares Ken Smith, the executive director.

While we need to be careful drawing comparisons between two groups, my point is that if a group can find a community in .0001 percent of the population, surely multiple communities can be found around a cause that impacts 13 percent. To obtain abundant income, believe that potential communities exist around your mission. Continue to believe the facts, not your emotions, when little has worked to date. Once the population is found, leaders must find ways to gather and engage them as donors or consumers of mission products. Visually, this looks like the illustration above.

The illustration reminds us:

• Somewhere in the population are people who are passionate about your mission.
• You will need many people to give you money, either via a donation or in exchange for a service or product.
• You’ll earn the most money by providing mission-related results.
• Therefore, seek and create communities with people who have a passion for your mission, invite them to join your community, and encourage them to act.
• Persist in this work to find abundant income.

There are 500 steps to this process.

1. Decide that such a community exists.

2 through 500. Find, create, and engage it.

The key to increasing income lies in opportunities where mission and community overlap.

For more read:

Do You Know the Difference Between Philanthropy, Development, and Fundraising?

For more answers, check out this Nonprofit  CEO Library.

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