Building Nonprofit Sustainability Through Digital Apps

Product-based income strategies are challenging for nonprofits because of the costs associated with inventory. Either your organization has to shell out significant capital to keep the products you hope to sell in stock, or you have to partner with a company that will manage the inventory for you. In most cases, the company will take a portion of your sales to cover their costs and turn a profit before turning over the remainder of the proceeds (if any) to you – in effect, turning your carefully cultivated army of volunteers into a second sales team working to boost its own P&L statement.

With a digital product like an app, on the other hand, a nonprofit bears the one-time cost of product development and then is able to sell the product in perpetuity – or what passes for perpetuity in the digital age -- without having to worry about costs associated with building and maintaining inventory. In the digital marketplace, once an app has been created, selling a hundred thousand copies doesn't cost you any more than selling ten thousand copies.

What's more, having an app on a supporter's mobile device creates a new channel through which you can communicate with that supporter as conveniently as you can with email but without the "noise" created by the hundreds of emails most of us receive on a daily basis. Push notifications that directly target users of an app can quickly mobilize your user base, alerting them to new petitions, challenge grant opportunities, and other kinds of events designed to deepen donor engagement. (Note: while nonprofits are allowed to make money from the sale of digital apps, they cannot collect donations through an app. If you want to use the app to generate donations, you need to get potential supporters to click a "Donate" button that sends them to a mobile-friendly Web page where the transaction can be completed.)

So how much does it cost to develop an app? In 2014, when the team at RedRover first hit on the idea of building a digital version of our RedRover Readers program, we didn't have a clue. And asking a developer how much it costs is like asking an architect how much a new house will cost – the answer can range anywhere from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on what you want the app to do. The more complex the functionality, the more it's going to cost.

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts (May 2016)

Greetings from Northeast Ohio, where the seventeen-year cicada are vibrating their tymbals to beat the band. We're pretty excited, too — about our lineup of popular posts from May featuring pieces by a whose who of social sector luminaries. So grab a cold beverage and your noise-canceling headphones and let us know what you think in the comments section below....

• Native Voices Rising: Critical Leadership in Institutional Philanthropy (Edgar Villanueva)
• Why and How Do Nonprofits Work Together? (May Samali, Nathalie Laidler-Kylander, Bernard Simonin, Nada Zohdy)
• Philanthropy's Role in Creating Tomorrow (Trista Harris)
• Investing in Infrastructure for Impact (Jacob Harold, Phil Buchanan)
• Foundations Will Contribute $364 Billion to SDGs (Brad Smith)
• 4 Performance Measurement Mistakes You Don't Want to Make (Liana Downey)
• Weekend Link Roundup (May 7-8, 2016) (Mitch Nauffts)
• [Review] The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century (Kyoko Uchida)

Got a submission you'd like to share with our readers? Drop us a line at mfn@foundationcenter.org.

How Local Nonprofits Can Engage a Global Community of Donors

"Think globally, act locally." It's more than just a catchy slogan; it's a phrase that captures a way of being that a lot of folks take to heart. For many people, acting locally entails giving back to organizations that support the communities in which they live, largely in the form of monetary donations. And it's a practice that appears to be growing in popularity: the Giving USA Foundation recently reported a slight dip in giving for international development and suggested that it might have something to do with the fact that donors are focusing more on causes closer to home.

What's more, giving locally is particularly common among those who donate significant sums of money. According to a recent study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy of gifts of at least $1 million, only 33 percent of the total dollar value of those gifts was captured by organizations outside the donor's home region.

While it's wonderful to see so many people giving generously within their own communities, it is even more remarkable to see donors from around the globe deciding to contribute large gifts to organizations with a specifically local focus. One example is the Naples Children & Education Foundation (NCEF), which focuses its charitable efforts on the community of Collier County, Florida, yet garners substantial support from donors around the country and the globe. This is largely due to its connection with the Naples Winter Wine Festival, the organization's main fundraising event, as it attracts international donors by offering unique travel and dining experiences in addition to raising funds for NCEF. This past year alone, more than 40 percent of the total amount raised for NCEF came from donors outside Collier County.

Four Things Your Resume Says About You – That You Don't Want It To

You've heard it before: Your resume is your one-minute opportunity to create a good impression and convince people in a position to advance your career that they need to learn more. But many job seekers fail to take advantage of the opportunity. Below are four of the most common mistakes people make in their resumes:

1. You haven't kept up with the times. If your resume doesn’t include, at a minimum, an email address and a link to a LinkedIn profile, you are sending the message that you're not even marginally tech-savvy. Increasingly, employers won't even bother to communicate with job candidates at a physical address and, instead, spend most of their time looking at candidates' presence on, and use of, social media. It’s also a good practice to add hyperlinks to your previous employers’ websites, initiatives you might have been involved in, and other sources of information about you so that the HR people screening resumes can learn what they need to know as quickly as possible.

2. You don't spell out what you've accomplished. Many people make the mistake of spelling out their day-to-day job responsibilities in their resume instead of using it to highlight what they've actually accomplished. Here's an example: You could say "Managed five program assistants," which would be an accurate description of your daily responsibilities. But you'd be better off saying "Built and managed a team of five program assistants, achieving 100 percent program growth over two years."