Focus on opportunities within your current proposition

Focusing on opportunities within your current proposition allows you to stick with what you know whilst adjusting your behaviours where required.

This is the fourth step in our series of moving your charity in to a social business.

For example, you may be a charity supporting the homeless by providing beds, clothing, food and other forms of care they so desperately need. You may be reliant on schools for donations of blankets and bedding, low cost rental from local businesses and possibly multi-lateral organisations for grants to cover basic operating costs.

I suspect that these donations are not provided indefinitely, and that they are made in conjunction with specific projects that may have a set lifespan. This means that at the end of the project you will need to reapply for funding, using valuable time and effort to obtain the funds needed to run your organisation.

If you looked at replacing, for example, the blankets and bedding that are currently donated to your organisation, with a commercial opportunity that pays for itself. This could be through selling goods that your beneficiaries made - perhaps bedding or linen that a typical consumer would buy.

This would be providing your beneficiaries (previously homeless) skills that they did not have before and a new income stream for your organisation.

This could be taken a step further by partnering with a well known brand or designer to design the goods that you are selling. This would help the designer, since he or she would be providing a valuable service to communities in need, and also give your products an associated brand that would help sell the them.

By using opportunities that are within your current proposition, allows you to reduce the risk of trying something completely new, whilst also using existing contacts and resources to move your organisation from a charity to a social business.


Mike.