Giving Compass' Take:

• Matt Boitano from the Mindful Life Project discusses earned revenue (acquiring money through goods and services) and its significance for assessing early-stage nonprofit growth.

• As Boitano explains, this is one funding model that may fly under the radar a bit, but is worth exploring due to its potential for sustainability. Do we have the right tools to measure impact?

• Here's why one nonprofit decided to move to a for-profit model.

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, innovation expert Richard Tait writes about the importance of earned revenue in nonprofit funding models, noting that it’s “well worth exploring” for nonprofits even if it’s not currently the single most significant source of organizational revenue.

But I would go a step further. To me, earned revenue is not just a “nice-to-have” element of your funding mix, it is essential for nonprofit sustainability and a key indicator of which early-stage nonprofits are worth a significant investment to grow their organization and significantly expand their impact. For private foundations, nonprofits with ever-increasing earned income funding streams are likely to generate a greater return on grant dollars because they grow less reliant on foundations with each passing year. For individual donors, nonprofits with this profile in their communities are signaling their commitment to sustainability and are more likely to continue to achieve impact at a high level during times of economic hardship.

What if we reframed our giving strategies from subject-matter funding to sustainability-oriented funding? Which early-stage organizations would emerge as the leaders in this new field?

Read the full article about earned revenue as a giving strategy by Matt Boitano at medium.com.