Chapter 3 of the Forces for Good allowed me to reflect on how non-profits are technically managed. Usually, I can determine that there are distinct differences between non-profits and for profit organizations. Sure, most of us probably feel that for profit businesses for the most part are greedy, and sometimes do very little to serve the community. On the other hand, non-profits tend to focus on serving the community while enhancing their mission. However, in order to improve efficiency, and increase revenues, should non-profits be run more like a for profit business?
Maybe not completely changing business strategies is the best thing to do but rather partnering with a business is. (p. 60) To me, this is almost like advocacy. Some of us stated in class yesterday that some non-profits may not have the capacity to advocate. However, partnering with a business in terms of accessing corporate donations and volunteers to create more sponsorships, in a way is a form of advocating, except the for profit business is doing the advocating. It sort of seems like an easy way to advocate.
We certainly have talked enough about non-profits in class thus far. I think it is very important to recognize how powerful for profit businesses can be. Since starting in the MPA program, I have always felt there has been a bold line drawn between the two types of organizations. It may be time to start crossing that line. Locally, I truly believe there are is a handful of very powerful for-profit businesses. They have the means, and the capacity to help our local non-profits succeed by establishing partnerships.
I like the idea of running a business-like nonprofit, not in the level of mission and orientation, but in the level of operating daily tasks and promoting the organization itself.
ReplyDeleteSince the goal of for-profit organizations are purer than nonprofit—— to get money, all their efforts are concentrate directly on the question: Does this effort finally help us to get more money? However, when it turns to nonprofit organizations, the procedure is much more complicated, there are many things to be taken into consideration: How will this decision affect our beneficiaries? To what extend does this decision meet our mission? Will this decision affect our impacts? The answers to all these questions sometimes conflict with each other.
But let’s don’t go so far in this topic. Just raise social media as an example, business organizations go much ahead of nonprofit in using social media as a tool in promoting themselves. Most of well-know brands have a mature online system including announcing activities, discounts, related online games, to name a few. Why it is not the nonprofit organizations which lead this trend? Even though the book, Forces for Good, said nonprofits are result-oriented, it takes them longer to find efficient ways to get the result because the procedure which leads to the result is complicated. So if we try to do some subtraction and simplify our results by learning from business sectors, we might get our results more efficiently.
I like this chapter in the book because it highlighted that non-profits are different from business and although they might be lobbying along side corporate America, they are fighting for their causes and some of the agencies make sure to let business that may partner with them know that they may stand for one issue or another at some point in time. I like how these featured non profits try to balance advocacy and providing direct service along with their mission and values. They are helping us to become aware of the struggles of becoming political.
ReplyDeleteXiaofei about running business like non profit...
ReplyDeleteVavaCell -MTS is Armenia’s leading mobile operator.It has a pure business mission to achieve business success through the new culture but what is interesting about this company is that they do a lot in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility in Armenia http://www.mtsgsm.com/blog/entries/27571/ . They are not only give grants but they are also initiating and implementing developmental and social projects.