Giving Compass' Take:

• Sandrina Burkhardt, writing for Medium, discusses her experience working in nonprofit management and shares the challenges she observed while working in the charity space. 

• Burkhardt cites competition as one of the challenges for nonprofit organizations. How are philanthropists addressing this issue? 

• Read about why nonprofit leaders should embrace risk. 


After starting freelancing in 2012 I dived into the field of non-profit management in order to help NGOs, social initiatives and political organizations with their communication, marketing, and branding strategies, while looking at the same time into the behavioral profile of their donors, supporters, and citizens.

After a while, I encountered several challenges that limit non-profit organization to innovate the way they should and want to:

  • The need for resources such as manpower, knowledge, and money.
  • The need for time. In such a fast-moving field such as the non-profit market the traditional structures of many organizations create a very restricted space for development and innovation and limit the speed at which those can be implemented.
  • The image of charity organizations and the trust of people towards their efficiency has suffered throughout the past years, which makes the implementation of new concepts and ideas rather difficult and calls for high investments in well-structured marketing and branding strategies nearly impossible.
  • The need for security is the result of those challenges, with not much money to invest and time to spend, campaigns and initiatives need to be waterproof and ensure a significant profit for the organization.
  • The fear of competitions plays large roles in this area, as many organizations have the feeling that they are ‘fighting for the same Euro’.

Philanthropic organizations and social initiatives play an important part within the society and have an incessantly impact on the economic growth and decision-making processes of governments, businesses, and individuals and therefore need to find a special space within our global community. To do so, new strategies have to be found, enabling organizations to work more efficient and especially evolve around their most important component, their contributors, and donors.

Read the full article about two-way street to charity by Sandrina Burkhardt at Medium