Hello! Welcome back! When you are starting or growing a non-profit organization, which
operational functions should you try to take on in-house,
and which ones should you outsource? That's what we'll talk about in this video.
I'm Amber Melanie Smith! I am a non-profit founder and executive director and I make these videos
here on YouTube to help folks who are on their own social impact journey, whether that's starting
a non-profit, socially conscious business, or other things. I hope that this helps you as you
are on your journey to make an impact in the world. Please don't forget to give it a like
and subscribe to my channel for more content like this! I also have a website FounderToFulltime.com
where I offer some trainings especially about starting a nonprofit and developing a sustainable
fundraising plan for that nonprofit, so go check those out. So if you've watched some of my earlier
videos, especially my video about 7 mistakes I made starting a non-profit, that i made a couple
of years ago you might have heard me express regret especially about one thing in particular
and that is trying to take on too much as a non-profit founder i will always wish that i had
outsourced some things earlier on and also through the evolution of my own organization and the work
i've done with other non-profits and observations i've had of other nonprofits as they have grown
I've come to see that some things shouldn't be outsourced also so I'm going to talk about both
of those things in this video i also want to say that I get it. The prospect of outsourcing
something for your organization can be a little bit anxiety-inducing. You are so passionate
about this cause, you've done all this work to get this organization up and running with your
team and board of directors the thought of someone from the outside coming in and messing something
up can be terrifying but there are plenty of reasons it might be a good idea to outsource
especially earlier on in your organization because it will allow you to truly focus
on the things that you are best at some of those benefits of outsourcing could include reduced
costs if you find the right vendor it could actually be cheaper to outsource some functions
and I'll talk about what some of those are then it could be to try to figure it out in-house secondly
having access to that professional expertise that you might just not have on your team yet
and third and in my opinion most importantly because outsourcing takes stuff off of your plate
allowing you to focus more of your time on your mission so let's talk about three things that i
definitely would have outsourced earlier on had i thought to do so the first is accounting
and bookkeeping and i mean this at least for your annual tax forms that you are required to complete
for the irs but at a certain point of your growth as an organization also possibly for your regular
bookkeeping services too for those annual taxes that you're required to file i could see it
costing anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars a year depending
on the size of your organization's budget and the complexity of your various accounts and financial
transactions and similarly with bookkeeping this is the regular upkeep at least probably monthly
i would say having someone go through and just reconcile all your accounts and keeping all your
transactions categorized properly so you can later do your taxes and analyze your budget and all that
good stuff that is also going to depend on the size and complexity of your budget and typical
financial transactions so could also be anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand
and i would say a couple thousand is probably for much larger organizations per month but if
you consider that compared with the cost of having someone in house it could very well be a savings
the second thing i recommend outsourcing is human resources and payroll functions now you can do
this to varying degrees but if you are growing to the point where you are ready to start taking
on staff there are lots of things you're going to have to think about everything from payroll
and paying payroll taxes to the government properly so that you don't get penalized later
and onboarding your new employees and off boarding them if they if you have to terminate their
employment at some point all of these things um can be a headache for someone who doesn't have a
lot of experience in this realm so this is another example of something it could be worth it to
outsource now if you don't want to hire a person or a firm to support you with this there are also
online services and websites to handle simple things at least like payroll that could cost you
anywhere from 50 bucks to a couple hundred dollars per month depending on what features you are using
but those platforms will at least keep you up to date with all of the latest employment laws
so that you don't get get in trouble later down the line and these will also handle things like
automatically depositing uh payments into your staffs bank accounts and taking out the
proper taxes and all that good stuff the third thing i recommend outsourcing is professional
training for staff or and or key volunteers on specialized topics as a non-profit leader
you can't do it all and you also can't know it all so in some specific cases it might be a smart idea
to outsource training or bringing in a consultant to help train your team on some of the topics that
your team might have less expertise in one example of professional training you might seek on the
operations side is fundraising you might have one or two people who do have some fundraising skill
and experience on your team but training your entire board or core volunteer group or staff
in how to do this could be a good idea and having that outside person with some additional expertise
could be smart if you can do this early on and get really good at it in the beginning stages of your
organization and on the programmatic side let's say your mission deals with serving vulnerable
populations such as youth or seniors then you want to make sure that your team is
designing programs and executing on programs that are meeting the needs of those populations without
inadvertently causing harm now ideally people on your team will already include
experience in working with these populations perhaps someone with a social work background
or lived experiences in these areas but even if you have a couple people on your team
with this experience i think it's a good idea to ensure that your entire team is trained on
working with these groups too so that you can as i mentioned before make sure that you're not
inadvertently causing harm now the next category of things i want to talk about are things that you
maybe would outsource and it really depends on a variety of factors one thing that falls into
this category is graphic design now i say maybe outsource this because not every organization
has a consistent need for graphic design support and perhaps you also have some talent in-house so
taking into account these factors plus the advent of resources like canva that has a free version
for non-profits and lots of templates that you can use it really depends on if this is something you
need very regularly and you need to be very high quality organizations that deal with educating
the public on a topic might be a good example of an organization that might need very consistent
high quality graphic design services in which case you might consider bringing on someone to support
this need for a couple of hours a month the second thing that you maybe would consider outsourcing
is grant writing for your organization and this depends on a number of factors too for example
does your organization need or rely on grants in order to get its funding not all organizations do
so that's one factor another factor is do you already have all of the materials your messaging
your language about your programs in place ready to go for a professional grant writer
remember a grant writer is most likely somebody who is not yet familiar with your organization
they're not going to be able to come in and within a couple of days know your organization so well
that they could write a compelling grant to a foundation and have a good chance of winning it
you're going to need to prepare a lot of materials for them in advance including your budget
mission project activities and your upcoming strategic goals and another factor to consider
when you are thinking about whether outsourcing to a grant writer is a good idea is does your
organization have the funds already in hand to be able to pay that grant writer regardless of
whether or not the grant is won it's important to have the funds available to be able to pay them
regardless of whether a grant is won, because it's considered a bad practice and unethical
to pay on a commission basis or pay a percent of a grant won. That's because according to the
Association of Fundraising Professionals it can encourage abuse of this process and of fundraising
professionals. It also puts the professional grant writer in a precarious situation if the grant is
not won they've already done the work up front and then they will not get compensated for the work
that they have done for you. And in many cases it is going to be out of their control whether
or not the grant is won. Good writing can take a grant only so far but how organized and compelling
a program is how effective and impactful it is is something that the organization is responsible for
not the grant writer and the final category I want to talk about is things that i do not recommend
outsourcing and there's really just one main thing in this category and that is fundraising
and donor stewardship for this i'm talking about the practice of hiring an outside firm to perhaps
do cold calls or cold emails or letters to people on your organization's behalf the reason i don't
recommend outsourcing this is because fundraising especially effective and sustainable fundraising
relies on cultivating authentic meaningful relationships with your donors and having an
outside firm come in and do this just doesn't get you those relationships it's more transactional in
that case if you can take this on in-house you're going to be able to sustain those relationships a
lot longer and garner more support over the long term not to mention the fact that an
outside party is not going to know your mission or be as passionate about your mission as you
and your team and that passion definitely comes through when you write or speak to others i'd
love to hear what you think are you and your team already spending some number of hours per week or
per month on some of the tasks that i mentioned would you consider outsourcing them yes or no
and do you think it would really free up some of your time to focus on other things
share in the comments below and as i mentioned before check out my website FounderToFulltime.com
if you're looking for some trainings and resources on starting a non-profit from scratch
or developing a sustainable fundraising plan, very very important for new organizations
especially. I also have a newsletter for change makers and non-profit leaders
you can find the link to subscribe to that in the description below the video as well you can join
and or opt out anytime you'd like but i send out resources including the latest news trends grant
and funding opportunities that i come across that might be useful to you final thing i have a group
on Facebook called Change the World or Bust, where me and a couple thousand folks from around the
world are having some good conversations about the work that we're doing to make an impact so
i hope that you join us there as well. I'm Amber Melanie Smith - I hope that you found this useful
and helpful. Thank you so much for watching, and I can't wait to see you next time - bye!