Starting a nonprofit from scratch requires passion, purpose, hard work, creativity, resilience…and money. As with any organizational effort, financial planning is critical to the success of an organization.

One of the biggest questions that can be difficult to answer is, "how much money do I need to start a nonprofit?" The concise answer is, "it depends." There are a host of variables that will impact the answer to that question. Even if you don’t have the exact numbers, you can still have a sound financial plan and be prepared for the initial costs of starting a nonprofit.

We put together a guide to help you identify the standard costs associated with starting a nonprofit. Pre-planning will help you either find enough funding or save enough money to support the startup costs.

Are you thinking of starting a nonprofit? Fantastic! We’re always excited when someone has the passion and drive to make a difference in the world.

We’re always ready to cheer for a new generation of leaders. Of course, we’ve served our sector for nearly 20 years, so we also want to be honest and up-front about all the realities of starting a nonprofit. Launching a nonprofit can be fueled by passion, but the question is how much fuel do you have in the tank...and how long before you need to refuel it?

We’ve found that laying the right foundation, and going into the process with an open mind, tends to lead to the most successful organizations. Taking a slow, methodical approach at the beginning will help you avoid some potentially painful mistakes later. Here’s some questions successful nonprofit leaders have asked before starting a nonprofit.

Have you ever seen a fundraising campaign that feels like, well, it’s just kind of sitting there? You know it’s an important cause, but there isn’t any "there" there in the messaging. Nothing is compelling you to take action, bringing together a coherent story.

It can all feel a bit, well, empty.

Launching your fundraising campaign without a theme is almost as tragic as having a cute cuddly puppy without a name, or a house with no foundation. Sure, the puppy is still adorable and cuddly, and the house might have some great features. If there's no way to introduce your puppy to your friends, and no firm foundation to keep the house stable, people have this missed connection that they can’t always point to, but they can feel.

We hope you haven't committed this fundraising faux pas yet, but even if you have, all is not lost. We gathered some of the industry best practices and recommendations by fundraising experts to help you come up with an exciting and effective theme for your next fundraising campaign.

Crowdfunding is fast becoming one of the most popular (and useful) fundraising strategies for all kinds of nonprofits. In 2018, 46% of millennials and 45% of GenXers gave to crowdfunding campaigns. It has the potential to bring in a lot of money, help you expand your network, and raise awareness of your cause all at the same time!

First introduced to help entrepreneurs and inventors attract investors and raise money to launch their business, the approach has grown substantially, with some experts predict crowdfunding will become a $90-$96 billion dollar industry in the next few years!

We created this handy guide to help you avoid some of the common crowdfunding mistakes that nonprofits make when deploying a campaign. We’ve also gathered some industry best practices that will help make your campaigns more successful.

Countless nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world are doing invaluable work to promote justice, care for people, and enact change. The scale of their impact often depends on the amount of support they can build up from various communities.

Advocacy campaigns are one of the most effective ways to mobilize people into action. They raise awareness, educate people, seek to influence decision-makers, attract donations, help build your brand, and much more. A well-designed advocacy campaign has the potential to trigger wide-scale responses, prompt people to change their actions, and even affect government policies.

Advocacy can be misunderstood and difficult to define at times. To further complicate things, there are some rules and regulations about how nonprofits can engage in advocacy. Before you start planning your first campaign, we created this resource to help guide your organization in incorporating advocacy into your work.