This is a third article of an informal series on nonprofit revenue development. So far, we overviewed how a nonprofit revenue strategy must be built upon your organizational strengths; how expanding review streams must be intentional rather than opportunistic; and, in this article, we will outline a practical approach to creating a revenue strategy.

For most nonprofit agencies, and many for profit businesses, the starting place for strategic conversations about revenues is to get very clear about the strength of your existing revenue model and the challenges of resourcing the development of new revenue streams. By balancing what you do well, with what you aspire to develop will set up a useful conversation about allocating scarce resources.

In thinking about revenue planning, forward thinking nonprofits begin with maximizing their strengths. They invest strategy, time, money, human resources, and build systems to support strength. So ask yourself where is the strength in your organization’s revenues. Are you investing in that strength? Can you invest more?

Faced with the reality of our small local philanthropy box that unevenly allocates resources, I believe that nonprofits are being pushed into thinking about developing an intentional revenue strategy. Leading edge nonprofits are doing just that. They are investing the time, money and people power to ensure that they have, and can implement, a revenue strategy. Having a grant strategy allows you to intentionally move outside of the local philanthropy box.

Without strategy and intentional capacity building, successful grant writing is a significant challenge. So what does it take to build a nonprofit grant revenue strategy? I believe it takes five core competencies briefly detailed below.