Social Currency

"Over the past 3 years, the length of stays at our shelter has increased from 11 to 27 to 33 nights, because of a lack of affordable housing. We are scrambling to come up with creative solutions to shelter women for whom we have no room. Economic recovery is still not a reality here."

-Sarah Lange, Abby's House

This is a quote from one of the 4,607 respondents to NFF's just-released Annual State of the Sector Survey. If this sounds a lot like your organization's situation, you are not alone. This year's respondents tell a collective story of a sector still stretched thin, with organizations feeling distant from their funders and boards, and staff facing more work with less money and fewer benefits to take home. While the recession may be over, the nonprofit financial crisis isn't. Here are a few facts from the survey (to check out detailed results and analysis, visit the main survey page):

• 85% of nonprofits experienced an increase in the demand for services in 2011.
• This is on top of years of increased demand: previous NFF surveys found that 77% of nonprofits experienced an increase in demand in 2010; 71% experienced an increase in 2009; and 73% experienced an increase in 2008.
• 88% expect an increase in demand for services in 2012. 57% have 3 months or less cash-on-hand. 87% said their financial outlook won't get any better in 2012.

NFF conducts the State of the Sector Survey to provide the sector with concrete data to act as a compass for decision-making. While there are some glimmers of financial improvement, the fact remains that people who need nonprofit services are slipping through the holes in the safety net. In the current system, nonprofits cannot keep up. And with government funding on the decline and private funding not making up the difference, there are no signs that things will get better any time soon.

We'll be taking a closer look at the results over the next few months and posting them here. In the meantime, take a look at our new Survey Analyzer. In our efforts to make the data more readily available to even more people in the sector, we created a tool that allows you to filter the results by geography, sector, and/or annual expense. Please share with us here what you find!

Twenty-five percent of annual operating expenses. That’s what the National Center for Charitable Statistics recommended in it's Operating Reserve Policy Toolkit for Nonprofit Organizations, published in September 2010 in partnership with the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and United Way Worldwide.  Grantmakers in the Arts, in January 2010, launched their National Capitalization Project and at their October meeting in Chicago released a summary document which stressed the importance of well capitalized organizations and added, “…we repeatedly came back to the fact that the most common source of capital is accumulated surpluses. We agreed that getting organizations to achieve a surplus would require encouraging a significant shift in nonprofit practice and culture, a challenge we thought well worth undertaking.”

Nonprofit Finance Fund has long been a proponent of healthy balance sheets, but as the reports and recommendations mount, it’s clear that NFF is not alone in suggesting a course of action that considers the creation of reserves.  While reserves alone do not comprise total capital structure, they are an indicator of the degree to which an organization is prepared for the day to day and long term challenges they may face.   Capital structure is the nature, composition and magnitude of the assets, liabilities and net assets comprising the balance sheet – or in other words the financial and physical platform from which the organization’s mission is accomplished.

The provocative question is, how will nonprofits develop healthier balance sheets?  And perhaps more pointedly, how patient are we willing to be?  While generating operating surpluses may be ideal, it will take time and patience to realize a well capitalized sector utilizing this approach.  Our third annual national survey of over 1900 nonprofit leaders (funded by Bank of America) is telling on this point: 

So, is capitalization via accumulation of operating surpluses the answer?  In simple terms, if we are waiting for the sector to build (or re-build) balance sheets independent of new philanthropic dollars, it will take a minimum of five years for those functioning at the 5% surplus level to generate even the equivalent of three months of additional cash reserves.

At NFF our recently released paper, The Case for Change Capital in the Arts, sets out a series of definitions, strategies, and sample cases from our work with Leading for the Future (funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation) that can inform the conversation about capitalization.  In today’s economic environment, in the midst of the conversations and changing dynamics in the field about capitalization for nonprofits, the time for an equity ethic, an embrace of philanthropic equity if you will has arrived.   While we have many tools to teach nonprofits how to create new strategies for operating that generate surpluses, the sector has been struggling for a long time with inadequate capitalization.   Asking nonprofit leaders to generate operating surpluses to build healthy balance sheets will also require asking ourselves if we are providing the proper support for that expectation to be realized.