To Chase Or Not To Chase

One of the accepted truisms of non-profit management is "don't chase the money." You can find literally thousands of articles online advising non-profits to stay focused on their missions, and resist the urge to chase funds that would cause them to divert from that focus. Here are a few snippets:

Center for Participatory Change

DON'T "CHASE THE MONEY!" All too often, community organizations start by identifying a grant possibility, and only then make decisions and plans about their project. This practice can lead to a group running programs that they think will get funding, rather than the programs that their community actually needs. Trust your knowledge and understanding of your own community, and find money to fit your vision, rather than the other way around.

ACF Compassion Capital Fund

Identify the need for your proposed program and clarify your motivations for seeking funding. Ensure that the program you are considering is consistent with your mission. Let the needs of those you seek to serve drive your pursuit of dollars. Do not "chase the money."

Seems like simple logic, right? In many cases, this approach is probably the correct one. However, one study suggests that if you are fundraising for growth, chasing the money may actually be the correct approach ... with certain conditions, of course:

Stanford Social Innovation Review

In a recent study of the most dynamic, midsized youth-serving nonprofits in the country, the people we talked to repeatedly asked, “How do we get really big?” The answers to this question are anything but obvious.

[...]

(W)e identified three important practices common among nonprofits that succeeded in building large-scale funding models: (1) They developed funding in one concentrated source rather than across diverse sources; (2) they found a funding source that was a natural match to their mission and beneficiaries; and (3) they built a professional organization and structure around this funding model.

Getting big is not the right choice for every nonprofit, of course. Securing large-scale funding generally involves some programmatic trade-offs. And large sources of funding appear to be more readily available for – and appropriate to – some missions than others.

In essence, the message is "if you want to get big someday, create a mission that matches a funder." For established organizations with mission-committed donor bases, this advice may not be valuable. However, for young non-profits and those with the flexibility to choose multiple "mission pathways," chasing the money could be a profitable (metaphorically speaking, of course) approach.