Giving Compass' Take:
- Jessica Culverhouse shares data from Elevate indicating that funders are increasingly willing to provide operating support for nonprofits - a significant win for the sector.
- Operating support - also known as overhead - is essential for nonprofits. How can you best help nonprofits to make an impact?
- Read about giving general operating support specifically.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Elevate’s data team examined thousands of grant opportunities and the results challenge the prevailing advice that grantmakers will only fund programs, not overhead. Further information regarding the specificities of this study, for example, data and process, available on our blog. We assume that our 100+ clients reflect the experiences of the nonprofit community write large and believe this is a reasonable assumption given the number and diversity of our partner organizations. Our analysis resulted in three key takeaways:
- Grantmakers still offer many — more than 30% — more opportunities to request program-restricted grants than to ask for general operating support.
- Therefore, nonprofits typically secure more than twice as much funding for program-restricted grants than for general operating support.
- However, nonprofits are more likely to win general operating support grants compared to program-restricted grants. Elevate clients won 72.2% of general operating versus 68.8% of program grants — a small but statistically significant difference!
Read the full article about operational support by Jessica Culverhouse at Blue Avocado.