Leverage assets. As a consultant to foundations and corporations, I always (OK– more often than not) suggest they leverage their human and financial assets as a part of building capacity for nonprofits. The workshops-classes I conduct for GCN are always packed. One program I developed for a giving circle made it mandatory for participants/grantees to attend 1 per quarter. They came, they learned. All around it works.

I am not as skeptical about nonprofits intentions to just build relations. Face it – you figure out quickly who the smoozers are and seem to be fewer than those that actually do their job and do it well-with the most sincere intentions.

You are dead on, and have good ideas. Fly with them. Trust me, no small children will loose lives if some things simply don’t work out.

Maggie F. Keenan, Ed.D.

To address your points:

I have experienced all of what you are bringing up, including nonprofits who want to participate in non-grant activities just for building relationships, too many volunteers to actually make efficient use of them, etc. I did not mean to say that a grant is equal in support to other non-grant activities. What I will maintain, though, is that providing monetary grants should not be the ONLY activity of foundations. For example, we have put on a series of free training events this year for nonprofits on Communicating in the Age of New Media. Of course there have been participants who were there only to try to build a relationship with us (despite the fact that no program officers were involved in these events’ facilitation), but, the number of participants there to learn greatly outweighed them. The feedback we have received does point to the value trainings like these have for nonprofits and reaffirms that if staff have experience, skills, or other non-monetary offerings AND the foundation is in a place to facilitate and provide for outreach, it should be incorporated into the general practice of the organization.

Thanks again for the great comment; I really appreciate it.

Here are the issues with what you say, as I see them:

1. The non-monetary things you describe (labor, expertise, etc.) can very often be bought – and at a level of quality and headache-saving hassle that donated time/services simply can’t compare to. Anecdotally, I believe that most nonprofits have a glut of volunteers (who generally can do very little that’s actually mission critical, no matter how good their intentions – here I am speaking from experience); a glut of advice; and a shortage of money.

Why do they take so many volunteers, then? Because volunteers often become donors. Bringing me to my second point:

2. You can’t assume that charities’ reactions to your “help” is genuine at all. My experience is that charities always do everything they can to play nice with their funders – because it strengthens a relationship that may lead to money.

Basically, you need an incredible level of confidence in your own intelligence to think that your advice/consulting/expertise is consistently as valuable as money to charities – since (a) you don’t know as much about their activities as they do, not even close (b) their receptiveness is not evidence that your advice is valuable.

Bottom line, you know your funding is valuable; I don’t know how you can assess that your other services are, except perhaps by charging for them and seeing whether the interest is still there.