By Carmen Gandulla
If your funding strategy isn’t rooted in your mission, you’re putting your organization’s resilience at risk.
By Carmen Gandulla, Chief Operating Officer, Carey & Co.
I have sat on both sides of the funding table. I spent the first half of my career in banking and finance and the second half in the public sector, leading community development for a New Jersey municipality and administering federal, state and local funding. Today, I work with nonprofit leaders on the operations side of the same question.
What I learned on the government side changed how I think about resilience. We may sit on opposite sides of a grant agreement, but we serve the same communities. Government has priorities it has to deliver: youth services, housing, health, workforce. Your mission is probably built around some of them.
So instead of asking what funding is available for my organization, ask a different question. What are we trying to accomplish together?
I call that the collective Key Performance Indicator (KPI), or the KPI-C. Not their number. Not yours. The one you both need.
The C carries five meanings: collective, coalition, community, constituent, and coins. In a year when pandemic-era dollars have wound down, priorities have shifted and awards that felt dependable are being cut. Each one is a question worth asking before you write another proposal.
Collective
Government has its performance measures. You have yours. But if a city or town is trying to reach 2,000 young people and you serve youth, why are we not looking at the outcome we could reach together?
When I was on the government side, I saw nonprofits as an extension of our ability to deliver. We would receive millions with twelve months to move it. We could not always do that alone. And the last thing any of us wanted to do was send money back.
So do not position yourself as an organization that needs funding. Position yourself as the one that can carry the work out. That is a different conversation, and it starts with the outcome instead of the grant.
Coalition
If we agree on the outcome, the next question is whether every organization has to reach it alone.
I have watched organizations chase the same funding to deliver the same service. Sometimes the better answer was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). You lead this piece, you lead that one, and together we meet the deliverable instead of building the same program three times.
Those conversations start with a question we tend to skip. What do you need? Not what can you give me.
The useful part begins when someone names a gap, like “we cannot handle intake,” “we have no evaluation capacity,” or “we cannot front payroll on a reimbursement contract.” Usually, someone else in the room can.
Community
The numbers matter. The level of service matters. How many people we reach and how many people we serve matter. Those measures tell us whether we are meeting the commitments we made.
But the numbers do not tell the whole story.
Behind every KPI are people and communities experiencing the work. What changed because of the investment? What became possible because government, a nonprofit, and community partners came together?
Those stories matter too.
Demonstrating the success of a public-private-community partnership through a real-time narrative gives the funder, the grantee, and the public more than a compliance report. It shows what is possible for communities when grant-funded projects go well.
That is also why I am careful about which funding we chase.
I have seen organizations take grants outside their mission because the money covered payroll or admin. That solves this month. Eventually you are running programs you were never built to run, for people you were never built to serve.
Every available dollar is not the right dollar.
Your funding should strengthen the organization you are building, not slowly turn you into a different one.
Constituent
Sometimes we only think of a constituent as the individual person, consumer or client. But small businesses, churches, nonprofits and other community organizations are constituents too. These are part of the infrastructure essential to thriving communities.
Government has an interest not only in serving individual residents, but also in strengthening the organizations and businesses that serve those residents every day.
Every funder also answers to someone. A mayor. A council. A board. A state agency. A federal reporting requirement. Once you know who your funder has to satisfy, you know what they need from you.
Which is why you don’t wait for the RFP to build the relationship.
Know your elected officials, but also the department directors and program leaders who carry out their priorities, and the grants, finance, and procurement staff. They see how the money actually moves.
Use your reporting the same way. Do not just submit the numbers. Tell your funder what the investment produced because they have to justify it internally too. Give them the numbers, but also give them the impact and the story behind those numbers.
And look beyond the funding amount.
Government entities often have resources for organizational and business constituents beyond the grant itself: technical assistance, capacity building, training, connections and other forms of support.
Ask for technical assistance before you are in trouble. If you need help strengthening compliance, reporting, financial systems or program delivery, ask what is available. I used technical assistance intentionally on the government side because helping organizations build capacity also protected the public investment.
Accessing the full scope of government support can be just as important as the dollar amount of the award. From community development to healthcare services, those resources can help make both the project and the organization delivering it stronger.
And here is what most organizations miss. Those relationships are fund development.
Fund development is not a department you either have or you do not. Most of you are already doing half of it informally, through the board member who makes introductions or the director who knows the health department. It is just uncounted and unassigned, so it cannot grow, and it leaves when one person leaves.
Coins
Coins is my shorthand for understanding the money underneath the mission.
What does the work actually cost, and who is paying for which piece?
Know your funding stack. Government contracts, foundation grants, individual giving, corporate support, and earned revenue. What are the proportions, and which piece disappears first? Being government-heavy is not a failure. It is a concentration you should be able to say out loud.
Then hold your plan against it. If the strategic plan says you are expanding, where is that in the budget? If you add a program because a grant will fund it for two years, what happens in year three? If a program is costing more than you projected, are you measuring that cost against the impact?
A strategic plan that does not meet a financial plan is a document, not a strategy. I have read plenty of strong plans that were never tied to an operation that could pay for them.
Because funding decisions become operational decisions.
This cannot live only with finance or the development team. Your leadership, your program staff, and your board need to know where the money comes from, what the work costs, and what happens when the funding changes.
Your board matters here more than most leaders treat it. When did you last look at whether it reflects where the organization is trying to go? Are you using the networks already sitting around the table? If the expectations around giving, advocacy, and introductions have not changed in years, that is a resource you are leaving on the table while you go looking for new ones.
Back to the Five C’s
Collective. Coalition. Community. Constituent. Coins.
Miss any one of them and you are back to asking for a grant. Hold all five and you are having a different conversation, the one where your organization is part of how the work gets delivered.
And none of this is really about raising more money. It is about knowing what is at risk. Diversification is risk management. If one contract is your largest single source, that is something your board should be able to say out loud before the notice arrives, not after it.
Funding resilience also means looking beyond the award itself.
What did the investment accomplish? What capacity did it build? What relationships did it create? And what remains when the grant ends?
The numbers matter, and so do the stories behind them. The people being served matter, and so do the nonprofits, businesses, churches and community institutions helping to serve them. The grant dollars matter, and so do the technical assistance, capacity building and relationships that can strengthen the organization carrying out the work.
That is the collective KPI.
It is not simply about what one organization delivered. It is about what becomes possible when government, nonprofits, and communities work toward a shared outcome.
So, in this environment, the work is to name your concentration, define the outcome you share with your public funders, understand the impact behind the numbers, find the partners who can carry part of it, and make sure the strategic plan and the financial plan are the same plan.
But there is one more part of resilience that we do not talk about enough: sometimes you have to get out of your own way.
Bring in fresh eyes. Question the program you have always run. Revisit the board you have always had. Ask whether the funding you have always pursued still makes sense. Maybe you need a coalition partner, a stronger financial system, a fund development strategy, or outside expertise to help you see what you cannot see from inside the organization.
Leadership is not knowing every answer. Sometimes it is knowing when the organization needs another perspective.
Funding resilience is not built after the cut lands. It is built before. Through the relationships you develop, the coalitions you create, the communities you serve, the numbers and stories you understand, and the decisions you are willing to make. And it is what you stand on when you rebuild.
The stories behind this framework are explored further in The Funding Resilience Playbook, including how a mentoring program was built through a partnership with a police department and what I learned in my first hundred days on the government side.
These are also the conversations we are having with nonprofit leaders at Carey & Co.: not simply where the next dollar comes from, but whether the organization is positioned financially and operationally to sustain the work.
Start with your mission. Understand your funding. Know your impact. Find your partners. Define the KPI-C.
And when the cut comes, get out of your own way, get back up and build again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carmen Gandulla is Chief Operating Officer with Carey & Co. and a finance professional whose leadership experience includes serving as a Chief Financial Officer. Her career spans banking and finance, municipal government and the nonprofit sector, including leading community development for a New Jersey municipality, where she administered federal, state and local funding. She served as a board member of the National Community Development Association, a non-partisan association of more than 500 local governments that administer HUD community development and housing programs.