Want To Start A Nonprofit? Think Again
That’s the advice from Kristin Ivie, writing in the invaluable blog, Social Citizens.
Says Kristin: "I googled ‘how to start a nonprofit’ and got 44 million returns. You people have to stop."
By "you people" she is referring in the first instance to her generation of Millennials, but her cautionary advice is relevant to anyone thinking of taking the founders leap!
Kristin opens her article, Want to start a nonprofit? Think Again, thusly:
"…there is something about my generation that actually kind of gets my goat. When a bright, passionate, innovative Millennial sees a problem, I don’t think starting a nonprofit should be the default solution. This might not be popular among my nonprofit-starting group of friends and peers, so I should say, not just for them, that sometimes starting your own nonprofit is the right choice…but often it’s not."
Here are the questions she suggests would-be founders ask before, as she says, "you start designing your new nonprofit’s logo" …
- Is another organization already doing something like this?
- If there are others doing something similar, and there almost always are, how would you do it differently?
- What can you do to support existing organizations?
- Do you have a real sense of how hard this is going to be?
- Why do you want to do this?
These questions seem like no-brainers, but Kristin’s discussion of each is well worth reading, and includes useful links. Plus, as you might imagine, her post kicked-off some spirited response.
We haven’t given out a raise in awhile, but Kristin you sure deserve one for this!
Tom
P.S. BTW, if you haven’t already, check out Social Citizen, sponsored by the Case Foundation. It’s a great resource. As they say: "This blog is for anyone who’s energetic and passionate about social causes; who brims with new approaches and ideas for problem-solving; who’s disposed toward sharing the responsibilities and rewards of affecting change in the world; and who’s equipped with the digital tools and people power to make it happen."
Thanks to Joanne Fritz at About.com for pointing me to Kristin’s post.
2 responses to “Want To Start A Nonprofit? Think Again”
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Thanks for the raise – I’ll take it! We’re glad to hear you find our discussions valuable, let alone, invaluable. It’s been really interesting to watch this conversation take shape, so I hope the debate can continue here as well.
It is a shame that Kristin didn’t do the search correctly. The way she did it, Google simply compiled a search of every site offering any of those words. If you want to see the correct number, you need to do it as a search string in quotes. That returns only 99,000 sites offering help in exactly those terms. But factually, neither of these searches get at the underlying issue that seems to bother her. There are a lot of nonprofits – but being upset about the Google-return on a string of words in not going to get at the issue. Perhaps a more constructive use of space would have been to focus on suggesting her generation begin to interact with other people before starting organizations.