Steal This Business Idea: Outsourced Fundraising

Some social entrepreneurs love fundraising. They love being able to passionately tell the story of their work to new audiences and engage donors in a growing relationship for change. But then there are a lot of social entrepreneurs (and nonprofit leaders in general) who hate fundraising. Sometimes it's just a question of personality type. Sometimes these leaders feel like their time is better spent on the ground or creating organizational capacity and impact.

The latter group includes Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) founder Peter Haas, and for all the development professionals out there, he has a suggestion: create a company based solely on outsourcing the fundraising process.

Writing on the TED Fellows blog, Haas lamented the lack of good options for external organizations that could help him reach their fundraising goals -- goals currently undergoing new pressure because many of AIDG's regular donors have already given their annual donation to help with the organization's post-Haiti efforts.

One of the interesting things about Haas' post is that he sort of pokes a hole in the consultant's approach to this problem. He basically argues that, although he's done a number of different fundraising coaching and support programs, at the end of the day, his strength as founder is not as fundraiser, and there are pretty good reason's to think that it's a bad use of his particular strengths to have him, as he puts it, labor over every word in a fundraising pitch.

The model he imagines is a commission-based model where the fundraising contractor actually does the heavy lifting rather than just advising, and takes something like a 10% cut. His argument is that this would give small organizations the benefit of top fundraising talent without the (often impossible to afford) upfront cost of a salary. In the meantime, it could be a great little boutique business for the right small team.

I think it's a pretty fascinating idea. I know 4 nonprofit leaders who hate fundraising for every one who loves it, and even some people who are leaving the space because they just got too frustrated that their job ended up being 70% fundraising vs. 30% organization building and change creating.

What do others think? Are there models like this? What are the challenging parts of this? Has anyone tried and failed? Peter is serious - offering publicly to work with someone on a model like this. Let's see what we can churn up.

Photo credit: las (used to be meeza 1)