Step One in Assessing Sustainability of Your Nonprofit Business Model

​Assessing the sustainability of your nonprofit organization’s business model has two key aspects for associations and nonprofits. The first is assessing how much each of your programs and services are moving your organization’s mission forward.  The second is how the program or initiative is contributing to your organization’s bottom line. Is the program profitable? Break-even? Burning through considerable resources? Mission-driven organizations often fall into the trap of considering one or the other of these two key factors rather than looking at how they intersect.

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Is it moving your mission forward?

​Let’s dig into the first of these. How are your programs and initiatives contributing to your organization’s mission? This moves beyond an impact program evaluation.  A program evaluation looks at an individual program and tries to establish whether and how it is achieving its desired impact.  The impact assessment as part of an organizational sustainability assessment looks at all your programs and evaluates them with common criteria.  Thus you are able to get a comparative look across initiatives for how they are contributing to your organization’s mission.

Defining Assessment Criteria

​Deciding on the criteria you will use is key.  This is a useful step to widen the circle and involve key stakeholders to define what criteria you will apply.  According Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka and Steve Zimmerman in the book Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decision for Financial Viability, there are seven benchmarks that are useful to consider in this process:

7 Benchmarks

1. Alignment with Core Mission – This is the most basic and fundamental standard. How well is the program or initiative aligned with your organization’s core mission?
2. Excellence in Execution – How well does the program or initiative do? Is it a core competency of your organization? Is the program past its prime? Are there other organizations in your space that do this type of program better?
3. Scale/Volume – How many people are impacted by the program? How many participants do you have? Are the numbers growing or declining?
4. Depth – How deeply are people impacted? Does it engage an important or influential market?  Many programs that are more intimate have more depth but do not involve high numbers.
5. Filling an important gap – Think about whether this is filling a gap in the market place – not just any gap – but a gap important to your mission.
6. Community Building – Does the program or initiative create connection? Build engagement? Does it provide a compelling experience?
7. Leverage – Does the program build connection for future engagement? Does it have a marquee value for organizational branding? Does the initiative create tools that can be repurposed or used in other programs?

You will likely have other criteria that are important in your context. This list gives you a starting point for thinking about how to assess the mission impact of your programs and initiatives.

Next Steps

Download Four Things to Consider before an Organizational Sustainability Audit.
Learn more by listening to my webinar on Organizational Sustainability.

Want to talk about how you might apply this at your organization? Book a coaching session.