Capacity-Building Grants: Learn to Be a Self-Sustaining Nonprofit, Part 2

[Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a two-part series. Read part 1 here.]

Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento is one funder that provides capacity-building grants as an alternative to strictly cash grants. The goal is to provide consultation and resources to teach nonprofits how to become self-sustaining for the long haul.

River City Food Bank (RCFB) was the second recipient of Sutter’s capacity-building grant, receiving the 12-month grant in 2009. The California-based food bank is an established but small organization. Founded in 1968 as River City Community Services — the name it still went by when it first received the Sutter grant — it had just two part-time employees at the time, says Executive Director Eileen Thomas, “and our time was spent almost completely with our mission.”

That left little time to think about long-term planning, but Thomas knew her organization needed some help. That’s what attracted her so much to the capacity-building grant.

“It was very appealing to us because we’re a fairly small nonprofit that’s been around for a long time that has never been able to maximize community support and get our word out to the community about the work that we do,” Thomas says.

One of the reasons for that, says Tom Gagen, CEO of Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, is that “people had a misunderstanding of what they did when you talk about community services versus a food bank.”

So the first thing Sutter and its capacity-building partner, 3fold Communications — a nonprofit marketing agency — did with River City Community Services was change its name to River City Food Bank to make it clear to community just what the organization does. From there, 3fold and RCFB mapped out a basic marketing plan, which included:

• a website redesign;
• what grants to go after;
• what appeals to make;
• what programs to grow and how to grow them.

RCFB also expanded its major fundraiser, Empty Bowls, which 3fold helped maximize into a corporate-sponsor cultivation event. Empty Bowls had been bringing in around $56,000 annually for the food bank and relied heavily on volunteers. With the help of 3fold, that total increased to $89,000 the following year and more than $100,000 the year after that, Thomas says.

RCFB also launched some online-giving campaigns during the lower donation periods of the year to “smooth out the giving cycle,” Gagen says.

During the 12 months of the capacity-building grant, RCFB accomplished the following:

• Renamed the organization, rolling out a new logo, website and social-media strategy.
• Launched an online fundraising campaign in July called the Growing Circle to raise $10,000 and 10,000 pounds of fresh produce, exceeding both goals.
• Secured first-time funding for a food stamp outreach coordinator position from a new funding source.
• Increased online donations by 18 percent.

“[This grant] gave us the ability to step back, look at our organization, look at what we had done in the past, and look at ways that we could utilize media and social media,” Thomas says. “When you’re a small nonprofit and you’re stretched with staff, you spend 99 percent of your time doing crisis management instead of vision and strategy. So giving us the ability to strategize and expand our vision with actual ways of implementing plans was huge for us.”

The story for the food bank doesn’t end there. Shortly after the capacity-building grant was completed, RCFB sustained a terrible fire that completely destroyed its building, something that could cripple any organization of any size, let alone a small community nonprofit.

“When you face a tragedy as a nonprofit, the first thing you think is maybe this is it,” Thomas says. “But because of where we had come from and the work that we did with 3fold, we already had name recognition in the community and we are able to come back stronger after something that was so devastating."

Incredibly, with some assistance from Sutter, 3fold and other agencies in the area RCFB bought a place to relocate thanks to the funding programs it put in place during the grant and used all its learnings to build the organization into an even stronger one.

After the grant ended, RCFB continued to work with 3fold on a consulting basis, and in 2010 it was able to:

• increase its employee base from two part-time staffers to two full-time employees and one part-time employee;
• increase the goals of Growing Circles from $10,000 to $15,000;
• increase net proceeds from Empty Bowls by 61 percent.

“This kind of grant has made all the difference in the world for the way that we’ve progressed and the way that we’ve been able to grow,” Thomas says. “At the same time, there’s a danger in growing. You don’t want to grow in a direction that’s not mission-driven. We’ve been able to sustain our mission through both Sutter and 3fold — the health of our lower to moderate income population in Sacramento really receives all the benefits because we are stronger than we were three years ago.

“When I read the financial report, I have to pinch myself because we’ve been able to truly maximize what we’ve been given in a way that has made us much stronger,” she adds. “That all comes down to relationships of people who believe in us, who worked with us, who partnered with us. It makes all the difference. I consider Sutter and 3fold partners in what we do.”