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This article is taken from Chris Borgan's blog: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/

THE INEVITABLE NONPROFIT AND MONEY CONVERSATION

With the launch of 501 Mission Place comes the same conversation about whether it’s right to charge a nonprofit for education. My thoughts on this have always been the same: nonprofits are businesses with a cause in mind. They consume services and products just like other businesses. They deserve some consideration in such matters, but free isn’t the only price point with a nonprofit.

NONPROFITS NEED MONEY TO RUN

The same people who complain that someone charges a nonprofit for a product or a service are the same people who hit me up multiple times a month for donations or support for their cause. Yep, at the very heart of every nonprofit is a need to sustain itself through donations and grants. I donate plenty of my own money every month to various causes (mostly homeless, children, autism, and cancer). One goal of 501 Mission Place is to help people improve their ability to raise more funds in a sustainable way. After another conversation with a CFO for nonprofits, we’re even going to look into conversations of budget and money management.

NONPROFITS BUY FROM FOR-PROFITS ALL THE TIME

Having talked to people who run charities and nonprofits, there are all kinds of operation and infrastructure expenses built into such organizations. The goal is to minimize overhead so that more of the donated money goes to the target cause, but there’s always some overhead. Education is a decent kind of overhead because it’s the kind that hopes to provide a yield for the expense. As I run into nonprofits at events all the time, I know that they buy conference tickets and airfare and hotels and pay for meals. 501 Mission Place is a for-profit platform that offers a reduced rate from most online education community platforms (most of the other HBW platforms will cost $47 a month, so we took almost 50% off the rate to be sensitive to a nonprofit’s budget).

MONEY ISN’T EVIL

Every nonprofit and charity I know needs money to exist. They shut down all the time from lack of money. Seems to me that money is the lifeblood of every nonprofit I know, because just sitting around wearing ribbons and wanting to change the world isn’t really helping many people, is it? Systems need resources to survive. I charge a small amount of money per month with the goal that you’ll figure out ways to make much more than that for your organization based on the information the group gives you.

DECIDE FOR YOURSELF

I invite you to join 501 Mission Place, where we help nonprofits figure out how to grow, help with your specific challenges, and give you a network of engaged people seeking to take on the world’s issues and bring them to a new level. With our leader and facilitator, Estrella Rosenberg, and a bunch of smart minds like John Haydon, Marc Pitman, Rob Hatch, and you, we’ll do what we can to improve your cause’s effectiveness.

It’ll cost you $27 to figure out whether it’s for you. That’s the cost of a hardcover book. Sometimes, books are great but don’t apply to us. Not everyone got what they needed from Trust Agents, and that’s okay. So, you decide. Swing by 501 Mission Place and see what’s taking shape. We’re already hard at work trying to give people their money’s worth.

_______________________________________________Chris Brogan_________________

My comment:

I would like to enlighten you about this article. First of all, I want to introduce Chris Brogan. He is the president of New Marketing Labs(a new media marketing agency for medium-to-large businesses), and of Human Business Works(an education and media company for small and solo businesses), the co-founder of Third Tribe Marketing(an online community for marketing education) and a professional speaker. He's a New York Times / Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and a publisher at chrisbrogan.com. He has also writing gigs with American Express OPEN Forum, with Entrepreneur Magazine, and with Success Magazine. His blog was chosen as one of the best business blogs in the world, therefore I decided to give you an article he wrote about business.

While I was surfing around his blog, this article pulled my attention since I saw familiar terms that we learned during the business class: non-profit organizations' and money's relation.

In case you don't know, 501 Mission Place is "a community of the best and brightest leaders in the nonprofit world". For about the cost of attending a one-day conference, one can spend an entire year connecting to, learning from, and thinking with non-profit consultants and Executive Directors from a variety of organizations. ($27/month) (http://501missionplace.com/)

I'm agreeing with Chris Brogan at the point that non-profit organizations need money to run. That was exactly what we learned in class; "Systems need resources to survive, whether profit or non profit." However, it is essential to know the actual intensions of the administration and to make sure their mission doesn't shift from providing good to raising funds. Also, I think the content he is providing on 501 Mission Place is very important and valuable, since plenty of non-profit organizations ask for support whereas their management board is making a proper salary. The lines, "The same people who complain that someone charges a nonprofit for a product or a service are the same people who hit me up multiple times a month for donations or support for their cause." effectively explain this point. Even though it may seem like a paradox; being benevolent and also being in need of acquiring money, the comment "sitting around wearing ribbons and wanting to change the world isn’t really helping many people, is it?" says it all. I think $27 dollars is a reasonable amount of money, since it provides a much wider content than other companies offer for more prices.