Perspective

Catapulting your favorite charities to resiliency

There’s one thing you can do that could both strengthen your giving portfolio and build up the charities and nonprofits you love. You could support a catalyzing organization and connect your favorite organizations to it. 

What is a catalyzing organization?

These organizations build capacity into the organizations they serve and, by doing so, catalyze young or emerging organizations into new places of maturity, sophistication, and establishment. 

Many catalyzers have the tools to strengthen organizational fiscal management, while at the same time fostering better communications, marketing, and reporting. By catalyzers, we mean accelerators, public-relations and storytelling firms, marketing firms, and financial education firms, many of whom are nonprofits themselves and serve nonprofits.

Some of these organizations may be familiar to you – like Praxis, in New York City, an accelerator of “redemptive entrepreneurship” both in non-profit and for-profit organizations. The organization supports founders through high-touch programming, robust content, spiritual formation, and an extensive network of Christian mentors, funders, and peers. Similar models can be found throughout the country, like Entrenuity in Chicago or OCEAN programs in Cincinnati, to name a few. And there are more of these kinds of organizations throughout the country and around the world.

Let’s look at the three reasons why you should consider investing in a catalyzer.

1. You will grow the appeal of the organizations you love

Larger, more institutional organizations – organizations with a broad follower base, economies of scale, and sophisticated processes – got to that place because they did the internal, soul-searching work necessary to build sustainable, highly resilient organizations. Who was their guide in this work? Often a catalyzer. Delving into the content and teaching what catalyzers offer, you will almost always find that they ask (or re-ask) organizational leaders seemingly rudimentary questions like:

  • What good are you looking to increase in your community?
  • Who is your community? Who are you called to serve, and how do you define them? 
  • Of all the ways you might serve this community, what are the best, most effective ways?
  • What resources will you need to accomplish this service, and how do you organize those resources? 

These questions can be tough to answer and the answers can be easy to lose sight of when you’re in the “weeds” of programmatic work. However, the clarity that comes from the answers to these questions (and others) leads to considering a compelling story or case for existence that, coupled with a honed stakeholder analysis and active cultivation, could be essential for recruiting additional funders to support the organization. 

Catalyzers catapult young organizations into resiliency and, hopefully, even increase their capacity to expand their work. 

2. You will build into the foundational lumbar required for long-term resiliency

Not only does investment in establishing an organization well lead to a clear, concise, and compelling story that attracts others, but when you invest in the underpinnings of an organization, you may be providing exactly what is required for long-term sustainability.

An organization with crystal clarity about why they do what they do and who they are designed to serve, as well as growing followership, will routinely pass a stress test. Catalyzers bolster the internal support beams of your favorite organizations, and they have an arsenal of tools to focus or refocus organizations on fundamentals and best practices. 

Catalyzers effect foundational change in those they serve by fundamentally (re)shaping how leadership thinks through risk, decision making, and how they share their story with others. 

I felt so strongly about the importance of storytelling for organizations that I founded one of them myself. We help organizations define their impact and map every aspect of their organizational life (including programs, processes, and procedures) toward those impact goals. Similarly, StratOp Paterson Center helps organizations figure out where they’re going by looking at where they are now and how they got there. The perspective gained by first looking back helps organizations deploy resources in a way that’s authentic to the lessons they’ve learned and the fabric of who they are.

COVID hit nonprofits hard (especially the smaller, local ones); and now, years later, many are still trying to recover. But those who care about nonprofit leaders can help them prepare for the next calamity by doing the catalyzing work that can mature and fortify your favorite organizations to thrive, should another such devastating time come.

3. Your investment will have a multiplying effect

Catalyzing organizations serve multiple other organizations and causes at one time. Contributing to them means that you’re contributing to multiple entities at one time.

In supporting a catalyzer you have opportunity to catapult a community of organizations into a stronger, more resilient space. Your initial investment, philanthropic or otherwise, in one catalyzing group can impact a whole chain-link of nonprofits that will be fiscally fortified for post-COVID norms and for the next storm. 

And connecting nonprofits that you support to these catalyzers also provides them with peer support that you can’t offer them any other way. Catalyzers often offer both subject-matter expertise to their clients as well as peer-to-peer mentorship – two sets of value feedback loops designed to sharpen organizations like the ones you support. 

With the right kind of help, a whole new crop of emergent organizations that are resilient in the face of the next calamity could be established.

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