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For-Profit/Non-Profit Partnerships in Funding

Shai Sachs at Planting Liberally has another post about how to fund progressive organizing and ease the reliance on big donors. Shai's idea - to fund an incubator that would promote for-profit/non-profit partnerships - is pretty ambitious, and I think there'd need to be some serious cost/benefit analysis to see if his model would be more efficient/sustainable than the current big-donor model.

My ideas in this area tend to be smaller in scale, like how to build revenue into projects. At MFA we tried selling merchandise, and had a very successful partnership with MoveOn, Barsuk Records and McSweeneys). I've also talked about even smaller scale stuff like College Democrat chapters, which have budgets in the thousands of dollars, hooking up with Amazon to bolster their budget.

Yesterday I read about a new project by Microsoft to promote their new instant messenger service. Called "IM (making a difference)," Microsoft has created partnerships with a number of nonprofit organizations including Sierra Club, The Human Society and the Red Cross. When you download Microsofts new IM client, you can choose one of these charities. Every time you IM your friends, Microsoft donates some of their ad revenue to the charity you selected.

I was thinking that something along these lines would be perfect for youth organizations to pursue in partnership with Working Assets. If you don't know, Working Assets is a dual for-profit/nonprofit organization that is in the credit card, wireless, and phone biz. Part of their profits go to supporting progressive causes, and since its creation in 1985 they have donated over $50 million to help sustain progressive organizations.

I have no idea if and how such a partnership could work (or if WA is even interested in the IM/chat business), but I saw that Microsoft program and it got the wheels spinning a little.

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June 14th, 2007 9:15am
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organizing student group fundraising efforts

Submitted by shai (not verified) on Thu, 2007-06-14 16:32.

Your perspective makes a lot of sense - especially for College Dems and other student groups, who can count on their members to do a lot of IM’ing (or what-not) to generate revenue. Along similar lines of the IM program is GoodSearch.com, which a MyDD reader just alerted me to today

I don’t think that these sort of small-dollar fundraising tactics can make a dent in larger movement infrastructure sorts of projects, but they seem like a pretty good way to get a student group to self-fund (or at least partially fund) itself. I don’t know how the numbers work out, but a group with 100 students or so should be able to generate a pretty large amount of book-buying, IM’ing, and searching traffic. That’s just about the right size for a College Dems group, a reasonably well-known liberal student publication, or a somewhat trendy social justice group. So from a feasibility point of view, this is great.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to organize all of these sorts of small-bore fundraising approaches into one large one? Maybe Campus Progress or YP4 could organize an effort to have all the college liberal groups participate in one or more of these fundraising programs, with the proceeds of that program going to the participating group? That way, we’d save students the time and effort of discovering and setting up such a fundraising apparatus, and we’d also have some institutional knowledge so that the apparatus doesn’t just disappear after the students who set it up have graduated. Do you think that would fly?