Review of Literature

Relevant Information That Support the Recommendations

The Review of Literature the section of the recommendation report that discusses the data we have found from our research. It provides expert observations that are used by the team to build on our recommendations on how to improve funding at CHIP. The Review of Literature consists of ideas such as:

grant writing
reaching a specific target audience
how the right person at the right place can influence who donates

Understanding funding with non-profits: Are grants essential to a nonprofit?

Non-profits tend to find a halting point when it comes to finding the amount of funding that they need. Unit4 Communications' article on top challenges for nonprofit organizations goes into good discussion on funding and other challenges faced by nonprofits. From Unit4 Communications, "Many nonprofit organizations depend on the assistance of the government. This assistance may be in the form of grants or part of a matching scheme, or it may merely serve as a safety net to fill the gap when funds are short" and "Shrinking budgets at state, national and municipal levels mean there is less to go around. Most nonprofits end up getting less funding than they want or need, while some are left with no funding at all." These quotes directly talk about how government funding is there to help but how most of the time it falls short of what the non-profit needs. 501 C services has an article that connects these articles together. 501 C services states, " About 1 in 5 nonprofits could be at risk of falling into the starvation cycle: underfunding necessary infrastructure—new technology, employee training, and fundraising expenses—in favor of high programmatic spending. These organizations spend between 90-99 percent of expenditures on program-related activities, compared to the average nonprofit that allocates 77 percent." Many non-profits are invested in looking for grants because funding is down, and they eventually will start to crumble with lack of funding.

Comparable Grants for nonprofit organizations

Georgia Grant Watch is a website that can be subscribed to and is a place to view grant details. The website states, "we are the #1 grant listing directory featuring more than 27,979 current grants, funding opportunities, awards, and archived grants from foundations, corporations, federal, state, and local government funding sources in the USA, U.S. Territories, & Canada" (About, question 7). The Founder and CEO of GrantWatch.com, Libby Hikind is the leading grant funding search engine for nonprofits, businesses, and individuals. Libby holds a post master’s degree in Educational Administration and Supervision. Under the about our founder section on the web page it says, "many nonprofits also use Libby’s two other websites: GrantWriterTeam.com and YouHelp.com. GrantWriterTeam, which first launched in 2013, matches grant seekers with highly skilled grant writers" (pg.1). More than 130 partnerships have been formed between grant seekers and grant writers just from the first-year operation.

Funding for nonprofit organizations through donations: Reaching a target audience

Linda Plitt Donaldson has her Ph.D. and is an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America; she wrote an article in the journal Administration in Social Work that was published in 2008. Her section was titled Developing a Progressive Advocacy Program Within a Human Services Agency. In it, she wrote, “even though the agency had highly diverse funding sources, it still felt hesitant about ‘biting the hand that fed it,’ even if the portions were quite small” (Donaldson, 2008, 19). This is the issue that our client faces at (CHIP). CHIP works hard to advocate for the homeless and for their own funding, but to outside organizations, at times, it could look like they are being greedy or taking funding from other organizations with a different or potentially the same mission. From 2005 to 2007, Shawn Moulton studied the impact that government funding had on the chronically homeless. In his article, Does Increased Funding for Homeless Programs Reduce Chronic Homelessness?, Moulton shares his use of the formula he used to calculate how increased funding methods decreased chronic homeless rates. He uses this method and says, “suppose a community of 500,000 people receives a $1 per capita, or $500,000, increase in federal [Continuum of Care] CoC funding. They can expect to have a 9.0-person reduction in chronic homelessness” (Moulton, 2013, paragraph 41). This shows the significance that even if the government cannot afford to increase their funding to a community, all it takes is each person in the area donating $1 to their local backbone agency that is working to end homelessness. If we use Moulton’s model to encourage donating to organizations like CHIP to a younger audience, they will feel that even just $1 makes a difference. It will not come off as greedy or pushy to receive donations because most younger audiences understand the importance of donations to nonprofits.

Reaching a target audience: The importance of the speaker

In an article that covers the difficulties of convincing an audience to give to nonprofits, Katie Milway, author of multiple articles that are focused on nonprofits, and her other fellow authors discuss ways that philanthropists can improve their methods to reach a specific target audience to donate. The article is broken into sections of their top four ideas in doing this: “document the problem with hard data and define what success looks like, recruit influential people to advance a new idea and give them the tools to be persuasive, show what it looks like to change, and eliminate obstacles to adopting new ideas” (Milway, K., et al, 2020). Under the section focused on influential people, the authors note how valuable it is to have the right person representing your organization. They must build rapport and credibility with their previous work. They noted that, “who pitches an idea is almost as important as the idea itself” (Milway, K., et al, 2020). In this case, they studied an example of billionaires advocating for social change to other billionaires so they could invest in donating to nonprofits. The billionaires were trained to help them “share ideas on how to give more effectively and to impress the urgency of giving now” (Milway, K. et al, 2020). When using this method, the results showed that much of the audience would follow through in donating to specific nonprofits. Providing more advantages to have someone speak for an organization increases the publicity of the organization and the number of donors. When the right person speaks with the right story backing them up, such as the importance of the organization, people will be more inclined to sympathize with their cause.

The review of literature was helpful to the team’s research and influenced the recommendations we have provided for CHIP.