For me, starting a non-profit was both very
rewarding and also the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Every year I meet Founders who
thrive, Founders who get started and then close up shop after just a year or two, and then
Founders who never quite get started at all. So in this video I want to talk about some
reflection questions to think about and ask yourself to identify if you're really ready
to start a non-profit and go on that Journey. Welcome or welcome back! My name is Amber
Melanie Smith, and I'm a non-profit founder and executive director and I make these videos
here on YouTube to help people on their social impact journey - whether that's social impact
created by starting a non-profit or social Enterprise organization, volunteering, leadership
and service, and all that good stuff, or something else. As always don't forget to give this video
a like and subscribe to my channel to let YouTube know that it needs to share this content with more
folks who want to
make a difference in the world. I also have some online trainings and resources
at my website FounderToFulltime.com for people who are interested in starting a non-profit or
even developing a sustainable fundraising plan for their non-profits, so check those out. Maybe
they're for you! This is a topic that I wanted to talk about because I feel like it's the part of
the non-profit process that you just don't talk about or don't have opportunities to talk about
usually when someone is thinkin
g of starting a non-profit the things they think about relate to
the financial aspects of it the legal aspects of it the logistics of the paperwork involved the
board of directors stuff like that the business side but what a lot of people might not realize
until they get a year or two into the process is that starting a non-profit is a pretty personal
undertaking it's just like starting any kind of business or special project or piece of art if
you're an artist it's something you pour a lot
of yourself into but the structure of non-profits
and how they are designed to work might surprise people who are not already familiar with this
world so that means we've got to ask ourselves some questions before we get started to um
just make sure that this is the right path for us I was thinking about my own journey
starting a non-profit and and the stories of so many other Founders that I hear from and
I've come up with six things that you might want to reflect on as you're getting sta
rted
so let's jump into those all right here are the six things that you need to be emotionally
prepared for if you start a non-profit and thing number one is you've got to be ready prepared
for the Long Haul you've got to have patience here's why starting a non-profit takes a long
time getting a non-profit up and running to the point where it can make a true Deep Impact in the
community can take time and we know this because it takes a lot of resources and building up those
resources unle
ss you're miraculously starting with a large sum of money in the very beginning which
is pretty rare it's going to take time to build up an audience and build up those donors and build
up those resources I know for someone like me I'm very impatient and I'm very frustrated when
I see problems in the community and I see that they're not being solved with a greater amount
of urgency so this was a hard lesson for me to learn but I have seen that over the many years
of my own work with my non-p
rofit that the impact grows once you lay that foundation so if you can
have the patience to get past those first couple of years of of paper work and legal stuff and
building up an audience and building up a donor base and finding what your ideal revenue streams
are depending on your non-profit model then once you get past those things and have laid the strong
foundation and created solid infrastructure for your organization things will start to go and
scale a little bit more quickly but yo
u have to go into it preparing yourself mentally and
emotionally for that long haul so that's thing number one that uh you you've got to emotionally
prepare yourself for thing number two is you have to be emotionally prepared for rejection and I
would say this is true of any Venture any business or I mentioned art before you know anything
that you're putting yourself out there for you are likely to face some kind of rejection at
some level and it's the same when you're starting a non-profit
organization you will be rejected
many if not most times for funding opportunities um for people to help you and donate their
services and you know what that's okay because you don't need necessarily everyone to say yes
all the time you just need a couple of those True Believers to say yes and get you started and
once you get one or two donors or volunteers or supporters on board then they can bring in their
social networks and then other people start to see who is involved in your organiz
ation builds up
something called social proof which is the idea that when people see that lots of other people are
involved in a cause it makes them more likely to want to participate too because there must be
something to it if so many awesome people are involved but I can tell you if you struggle with
this um just practice remember that being told no isn't necessarily personal and oftentimes a no
at that moment is not always a no later sometimes the timing isn't just right for someone to
make
a donation to your cause but maybe it would be the right timing a year after that for me it has
taken in some cases four or five years of building a relationship and building trust with certain
sponsors before I heard any kind of yes from them to support my cause so if you can develop a thick
skin and do number one which I mentioned was have patience then you'll be able to get through the
rejection and get excited when you have people who do say yes all right number three the third thi
ng
you need to be emotionally prepared for is that you need to be prepared to let go of some power
this is a hard one for lots of people I hear from um people watching this channel from people I meet
in my day-to-day life who um maybe they haven't quite you know learned all about the non-profit
structure and how it's designed but legally the way non-profits are set up especially in the in
the United States is that it's supposed to be led by people in your community not necessarily
just one
person or a specific family or a group of friends it is supposed to be designed by the
public or led by the public and serve the public so the IRS has set up the non-profit structure in
order to meet this vision you have to have a board of directors made up of people from your community
you are not supposed to have people who are related to each other serve in more than a handful
of board of directors positions so everything about the way non-profits are legally structured
is designed to e
nsure that no one person has all of the power even if you are the founder of the
organization this can be really hard to hear as a Founder I totally get it I have a vision for
what I want to happen for what I want to see for the impact that I want to see made through the
organization that I started but you know what I have to compromise sometimes I have to work to
educate uh you know the others on my team and the board of directors to get us all to a point
where we're making an impact that
is very well researched and effective and I think that that
just makes the organization stronger but it can be really hard for someone starting out to um to
understand this about the non-profit structure and to be comfortable with it and there are certainly
horror stories out there where Founders and their Visions have not been met or they've even in some
rare cases been ousted from the organization so I'm not going to say that doesn't happen but the
structure and the design of the non-prof
it world is that it's meant to be shared so that the impact
can be representative of the community now if you are hearing this and you're thinking to yourself
well maybe starting a non-profit is not the right path for me there are still other ways you can
create a social impact out there you can start a business that you own or a special project
that you are the sole leader of and make an impact through those mechanisms but if you choose
to go the non-profit route just understand that legal
ly it's structured to allow for sharing of
power all right the fourth thing you've got to be emotionally prepared for is to be accountable
to the public and transparent this kind of goes along with what I was just talking about this idea
of sharing power but uh when you're a non-profit a lot of your records are public so your annual
taxes that you have to file are public record anyone can look those up and um if you have a paid
CEO for example their salary is usually listed right on those r
ecords as well so um you know
this is all designed to ensure that non-profits because they're given the privilege of tax-exempt
status are also accountable to the general public so there are certainly laws around how you have to
as a non-profit be accountable and transparent but it's also just a really good ethical practice
that you need to get ready for you need to be open with and communicating your impacts as an
organization the list of people who are on your board of directors is also u
sually a bit of public
information many organizations have board members listed on their website so people know who is
involved in the organization the staff same thing um if an organization makes a mistake or does
something wrong it's just good practice to be upfront about it and say what you're going to be
doing differently just like you would hope that a business or a large corporation would this
requirement to be accountable and transparent means that you need to put some strong policie
s
in place when you start an organization to make sure that you're going to be able to uphold these
standards of accountability and transparency for example you've got to do really solid bookkeeping
you have to be able to do your taxes correctly each year or you could get penalized by
the IRS you have to be accountable to your um and transparent you know to your donors
if a donor says I want to make a donation to you but I would like you to spend it on
this one program this is called restr
icted funding then you are legally obligated to
spend it that way or you can decline the donation if you don't want to spend it that way
but there are all these layers of accountability that you just need to make sure you have policies
in place to support another one for example is a conflict of interest policy it's a good practice
for non-profits to have a written document that is their conflict of interest policy that
describes what a conflict of interest looks like in your organization a
nd what steps your
organization takes to avoid those conflicts of interest and other common policies that are
just a really good idea for non-profits to have in the spirit of transparency are things like a
whistleblower policy or you know Fair inclusive Employment Practices policy stuff like that
all right so the fifth thing you've got to be mentally prepared for is to be mentally flexible
and what I mean by this is you're going to want to Prime yourself to be ready to change your mind
and
be flexible and evolve as an organization and evolve your mission and involve the programs or
projects that you do and here's why I say that I have long believed and have talked about in
other videos that creating positive social change is like science problems that we're facing today
are so big and so complicated that it is probably quite unlikely or impossible for someone to come
up with the magical solution that solves these problems on the first try we've been trying to
end homelessnes
s for decades and decades and decades same with food insecurity they're big
problems they're really hard to solve and every community that has these problems is also a little
bit different so a solution that might work well in one community may or may not work the same in
another community for all these reasons you have to think like a scientist you have to be willing
to try some things that you think could work to get feedback from your community and to have
an open enough mind to learn th
at you could be wrong that your proposed solution might not be
effective at all and when you hear it that it's not you have to be willing to change that's why we
start nonprofits in the first place is because we want to make a genuine social impact and we can't
make a genuine social impact if we're sticking to a solution that we've been proven won't work
alright so we are on to the very last thing you need to be mentally prepared for that I'm going
to talk about in this video are you ready
for it okay here it is it is that you need to be ready
to accept help and ask for help this one was really hard for me and I've talked about this in
some other videos as well but when you're first starting out and you don't necessarily have
all of the volunteers and the money and the board of directors members that you think you
need it can be very very tempting to just say well I'll figure out how to do everything myself
and then I'll do it all I'll build a website I'll do my own accountin
g I'll do this I'll do that
and that might get you a little ways for some time but what I learned and one of my biggest
regrets is not delegating earlier in the process I wish thinking back on my experiences with my
own organization I wish I had recognized my top skills and my my worst uh like problems my worst
um lack of skill areas much sooner and delegated those things out within the first year or two of
the organization if I had done that I would have probably grown the organization way
faster than we
ended up growing because I would be specializing in the things that I'm best at and leaving those
other things to the people who are the best at those things I am not an accountant for example I
am not a website developer in another example so um you know see if you can find help it's worth
the investment to try to find the people with the right skills who can take those items on so that
you can focus on the items that you are best at earlier on in the organization and in so
me way
this goes along with the whole get ready to let go of some power thing because doing everything
yourself means you're in control of everything but it also means you're going to move
slower and you're not going to be able to use the best skills that you have to
offer your mission alright I would love to hear from you at this point if you
have already started an organization are there other questions that you think aspiring
Founders should ask themselves before they get started or if
you are an aspiring founder share
how are you feeling about your journey so far in the comments as I mentioned before I have a
website FounderToFulltime.com where I have some online trainings for people interested in learning
all the steps to start a non-profit as well as how to develop a sustainable fundraising plan for your
organization, so go check those out there. I have a newsletter for change makers and non-profit
leaders where I will send out information about the latest non-profit T
rends and even some funding
opportunities so be sure to subscribe to that newsletter using the link that I've left in the
description of this video here one final thing I have a Facebook group Change the World or Bust.
We've got lots of people from all over the world joining in having conversations talking about
their own Journey so I hope you can join us there. I hope you found this useful and and thought
provoking and I hope that you'll give it a like And subscribe to this channel for mor
e content
like this I hope to see you next time bye!
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