With our 501c3 charity, Grassroots.org, we are using a variety of strategies to grow and expand. In the same way as a business, we seek leverage, but instead of money, we will count how many people are positively affected by our actions. The more people we have helped, the better we’ve done.
One way we try to gain leverage is by encouraging individual volunteers and businesses to help us with their time and donations of services. In this way, Grassroots.org requires less cash to develop and can therefore help more people faster. In other words, we can successfully meet our “business” goals by “employing” volunteers, and instead of buying software and services, they are often donated.
We also sign people up for our newsletters, blogs and discussion forums to spread knowledge of our free resources and of the social messages that we put forth. Because we usually deliver our information electronically to a broad audience, we are able to reach a wide population immediately, for little money.
Once we have contacted our targets, we work to sign them up as new “members.” Since we have a mission that is compatible with many people’s personal interests, the individuals and businesses we target often have a positive predisposition towards our programs. Our prospective members essentially serve the same role as “sales prospects” to a traditional business.
To entice them further to be our members—and more importantly, so we can help them—we give away a variety of free, valuable services. In exchange, our friends and business partners are encouraged to link their web sites to ours. This helps to expand the ever-increasing network of visitors to our site and the number of people who continually see our logo, just like regular business branding.
The increasing traffic to our web site generates more people who can then sign up for our newsletters, post messages on our discussion forums, and volunteer to help our clients with their missions, which creates a virtuous business cycle that leads to success.
These same general processes can be applied to your business in order to gain a critical mass of prospects and customers for your products and services.
In short, businesses and charities should basically be run the same. The main differences are in how you manage money and how you count success.
