Nonprofits aren’t Special, they’re Different

And that’s not the same thing.

The sooner the nonprofit sector as a whole realizes and comes to accept this the better.

The belief that nonprofits are special, that nonprofits are an exception, that nonprofits need special treatment, that nonprofits need a different set of rules, that nonprofits are victims, is damaging and is holding the entire sector back.

The only real difference between a nonprofit and a for profit is non profits have people who pay for services, let’s call them customers and people who receive services, let’s call them clients, and that these two groups of people are often different. In the for profit world these two groups are almost always one and the same. This is a difference, it does not make nonprofits special.

When fundraisers start looking at them selves as a subset of sales When boards and directors realize they are operating a serious business. When donor stewardship is as actually being the same customer experience/relations. When nonprofit communicators realize they are marketers. When funders realize they are paying for a service provided to others. When overhead is seen as part of the cost of delivering a service and not a subset that can be removed from the equation. And when nonprofiter’s can look to their for profit counterparts for solutions to problems that have been already solved instead of saying “we need a different solution because we are in the nonprofit sector”.

Only then will we be able to get past the problem of being a nonprofit and onto the problems that our nonprofits are in business to actually solve.