On April 12, Community Action Partners (CAP) of HBSAB (the Boston area alumni club) convened a keynote and panel discussion at HBS on New Paradigms in Nonprofit Fundraising and Marketing.

Addressing an overflow crowd of over 100 alumni and nonprofit practitioners, renowned social entrepreneur and author Dan Pallotta gave a thought provoking keynote address on the structural disadvantages nonprofits face in fundraising and marketing that constrain the sector’s ability to produce large scale impact. Drawing off of his hugely popular Ted talk, Dan walked the audience through ways in which the nonprofit sector is inherently handicapped as compared to the for profit sector in five key areas:

  1. Society’s ideas on appropriate compensation for nonprofit leaders
  2. Misconceptions about nonprofit investment in overhead – including advertising and fundraising
  3. Little appetite for risk in pursuit of new ideas, particularly risk in fundraising initiatives
  4. Limited capital to invest in an idea upfront to get it to scale - i.e. no runway, must show dollars primarily flowing to the “cause" from day one
  5. No well-developed capital markets or growth/risk capital available to the sector

Pallotta argues that as a result of these limitations, our culture is constraining nonprofits from achieving transformative impact. He spoke of his work training nonprofit boards to develop “a pragmatic and conscientious alternative to the culture of financial deprivation and constriction that they often find themselves upholding.”  He also spoke of his work with the Charity Defense Council and Advertising for Humanity to transform the way donors think about impact and strengthen the fundraising power of high performing nonprofits.

Read the source article at Harvard Business School