Growing your nonprofit isn’t just about increasing in size and being able to recruit more volunteers and donors, or provide more services. Healthy growth should be sustainable, and NFPs should aim to grow in such a way that they can remain true to their values and core mission, wisely manage their resources, and avoid spreading themselves too thin.  The following list is a brief overview of four strategies that can help your NFP achieve sustainable growth.

Invest in Recruiting Top Talent and Building Expertise

Each member of your team is literally the “face” of your organisation to service recipients and other stakeholders. This is one of the reasons why it’s important that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities and is willing to give their best effort every single day, despite the circumstances. Every team is also only as strong as its weakest member. Which is why it pays to invest in attracting and recruiting talented people with the right mix of skills, background and passion for your cause.

Once you have attracted talented people to fill spots on your board, staff and volunteer corps, nonprofits are well served by investing in proper training, as well as long-term guidance and oversight of their new and existing members to help everyone increase their competency and level of expertise.

Increase Capacity

If you truly want your nonprofit to be able to grow, you must invest in your operations. Especially when it comes to your people having the tools that they need to perform their work well, and having durable equipment that will continue to be reliable and fully functional as you scale your operations.

As you work on building your capacity to offer services, it’s still important for nonprofits to continue to focus their efforts and energy on providing services that advance their core mission.  If you have the opportunity to receive increased funding, but attached to it are requirements that will pull you away from your key goals, you need to be strong enough, and focused enough to pass on the offer so that your organisation grows at a sustainable rate.

Be Open to Third Party Collaboration and Partnerships

Being able to provide all the services that your community needs is almost always a challenge, but one way that you can ease demand on your scare resources and increase capacity to help you to grow is to look for ways to collaborate or partner with outside groups in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.

When your values and goals align, corporate sponsorships can help you increase the ability to provide services while drawing increased attention and name recognition to your NFP. Partnering with other NFPs to share resources and eliminate duplicate services allows both of you to focus on what you truly do best without wasting resources, making it easier for both NFPs to grow and flourish.

Don’t Forget About Branding, and Storytelling for all Your Messaging

Often NFPs miss out on opportunities to draw more attention to their cause with simple errors that they make with their branding and messaging. Whether it’s internal or external communications, content on your website, fundraising material, or calls to action it’s important to make certain that all of your messaging is consistent. Messaging should always be in line with your NFP’s values and mission. Your NFP will benefit if you use storytelling in all of your messaging to increase your connection between your supporters and your cause. It’s also critical to use branding in all of your messaging to help to firmly cement in the minds of your supporters who you are as an organisation, and what you stand for. Organisations that follow these best practices benefit from the excitement and interest that their name and brand generates, increasing the donations that they receive and making it easier to fund operations and services.