by David Tandet
The other day I was talking with an old friend about the topic of raising money. My friend is a fundraising consultant – and she’s very good at it. Anyway, at one point I happened to make the supreme verbal boo-boo.
I referred to her work as “funding consultant.”
“It’s never ‘funding consultant’,” she said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Too commercial sounding,” she said.
As much as my friend knows about the subject – everything – well I still had to wonder: why not say exactly what that subject is?
Nonprofits need money, just as any other form of working concern, to do what they do.
Whether you call it resource development or something else, it all comes down to financing as fuel to keep things rolling.
It doesn’t make whatever that thing is any less worthy of support, or the people working at the nonprofit dedicated to a less than worthy cause.
Arts, education, healthcare – they all need money to do wonderful things.
And a successful grant is going to show why a particular agency is worthy of that money.
It doesn’t matter how coy the party requesting the money is in referring to it.
It’s about how well the agency is going to use the money it receives. There’s got to be a one-to-one connection between the desired funds and the purpose for which the nonprofit says its requesting the money.
That way every interested party can follow that money – on the receiving end – to every last useful result for every single dollar spent.
Could it be any simpler than that?