Giving Compass' Take:

• USAID-funded Facilitating Financial Sustainability consortium, led by LINC in partnership with Peace Direct and Foundation Center, launched three new reports that together help civil society organizations navigate financial sustainability within the philanthropic sector. 

• How will these reports help CSOs battle specific challenges in the donor space? What are those challenges? 

• Read about the intricacies of the framework for digital and civil society. 

Financial sustainability gets plenty of lip service in the civil society sector, and anyone who has submitted a grant application has probably written a required "sustainability plan." Despite the prominence of financial sustainability in the donor discourse on civil society, however, actually obtaining the resources needed to be resilient to the ups and downs of the donor marketplace remains a critical challenge for civil society organizations (CSOs).

While the challenge is widely acknowledged, relatively little data is available on the amount and nature of support specifically designed to help improve organizations' financial sustainability or how different drivers of organizational sustainability may be more or less important in different contexts. That's why the USAID-funded Facilitating Financial Sustainability consortium, led by LINC in partnership with Peace Direct and Foundation Center, is excited to launch three new reports that together provide a comprehensive examination of the CSO financial sustainability system.

On the funder side, the team found that only 5 percent of total grant funding to local CSOs is explicitly targeted toward supporting organizations' financial sustainability. And in cases in which funders do focus on supporting sustainability, they tend to follow three strategies: providing unrestricted support; building organizational capacity; or developing and facilitating networks.

On the CSO side, the research team found that in addition to the organizational factors traditionally associated with driving financial sustainability (e.g., robust internal strategic and financial planning systems), in certain settings less obvious factors such as community social capital can be equally important.

By bringing together quantitative funder data and structured analysis of interviews with CSOs, funders, and other stakeholders, the research provides a systems-level view of the challenge of financial sustainability.

Read the full article about civil society organizations by Mitch Nauffts at PhilanTopic