Beyond the Grant: Increase impact with pro bono support

Many funders have been working for years to amplify their grantees’ impact beyond issuing grants. One strategy is to leverage skilled volunteers to double down on providing financial support that can have an exponentially greater impact on a grantee’s ability to advance their mission. Specifically, providing pro bono support becomes an essential component of your funding strategy and a meaningful vehicle for growing an organization’s capacity. So, how can skilled volunteers be put to good work on behalf of your grantees—even those that did not receive a grant?

Empower nonprofits to leverage their resources

It is extraordinary what nonprofit organizations continue to accomplish given limited resources and the restrictions on how they can use them. All too often, nonprofits are prohibited from even putting the funding they can access toward building the organizational infrastructure needed to sustain and grow their impact. However, access to specific expertise, assistance, and bandwidth can substantially increase an organization’s reach, impact, and efficiency. Here is where skilled volunteers come in.

Volunteers with professional expertise in fields such as marketing, finance, and human resources can play critical roles in filling resource gaps and accelerating progress on key organizational challenges. They can provide guidance on how to best leverage existing resources and determine what is required to help support an organization reach that next level of progress toward its mission. Volunteers can also help evaluate and translate their knowledge into resources that are tailored to an organization’s realities and needs. These resources can include a new performance management process, an integrated donor database, marketing materials for program enrollment, key messages for a new campaign, and much more. Over the past 20 years, we at the Taproot Foundation have seen this skilled volunteer strategy create tremendous impact and value for the more than 10,000 nonprofit organizations that have received over $280 million worth of pro bono service through our programming.

Support sustainability and improve readiness to apply for other grants

In providing access to highly skilled volunteers, grantmakers can help grantees beyond the grant and other sources of traditional funding—and even extend support to those not directly supported by the current funding cycle. Volunteers can help the organization advance in key areas toward obtaining funding, such as messaging to articulate an organization’s value proposition, data analysis to generate meaningful financial forecasts, and marketing strategies for GivingTuesday campaigns. Volunteers can also partner with nonprofit leaders to prepare them to compete for and secure other funding sources, provide mutual opportunities for valuable skill development, as well as gain resources to build infrastructure.

In “Pro Bono Service: A Tool for Inclusive Grantmaking,” an online event cohosted by PEAK and Taproot, Dawnn Leary, chief program officer of the Greater Washington Community Foundation, shares how she sees pro bono support as in-line with their commitment to finding different ways to “support nonprofit partners investing in themselves and the infrastructure that it takes to operate… and sustain going forward,” even after the grantmaking relationship ends. She further elaborates that it is also representative of their values that “nonprofits and social enterprises should also be able to receive the resources to invest in their infrastructure and sustainability just like for-profit enterprises do.”

Break cycles and build capital 

When thoughtfully designed, pro bono support can also help mitigate the effects of systemic funding inequity. During the PEAK and Taproot event, Taproot Foundation CEO Lindsay Gruber referenced how it has become more widely recognized even within the philanthropic community that “the true expenses for a nonprofit organization to run the programs that bring its mission and impact to life are historically and consistently underfunded.” But Gruber went on to emphasize how that recognition can “fall woefully short if one doesn’t also acknowledge how that gap is made substantially wider and deeper through persistent, historic, racialized obstacles” which further marginalize access to funding and resources.

Data from Race to Lead studies concur that Black-, Indigenous-, and people-of-color-led nonprofits have been disproportionately excluded from funding. While skilled volunteers cannot solve systemic problems on their own, pro bono support can do its part to dissolve the barriers to resource access and meet the moment where funding falls short.

And when crises like the pandemic hit, these inequities become even more pronounced, and additional sources of support and resources often become even more important, particularly as existing access to funding often declines, too. When discussing this topic at that same event, Sherry Green, CEO of the nonprofit Building Families Together, shared that, for them, open access to skilled volunteers provided “sustainability, survival, growth, and opportunity—opportunities we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

In addition to creating access to resources, successful connections can transform into long-term relationships, enhancing sustainability. After completing a pro bono project with the Golden Gate Philharmonic, finance executive and Taproot volunteer Gloria Liu shared these comments: “Their mission resonated with me so much that I’ve joined their board of directors as treasurer.” And both Gloria’s and Golden Gate Philharmonic’s experiences are indicative of a larger trend. At Taproot, we have found that the majority of pro bono projects turn into longer-term, strategic relationships.

Break the confines of the traditional funding model

Does pro bono support work? According to a Taproot survey, 95 percent of nonprofit professionals reported that working with skilled volunteers improved their organization’s cost or resource savings, efficiency, effectiveness, and reach.

Here are four ways that you, too, can help provide that same impact by adding access to skilled volunteers as a resource for both grantees and those beyond your grantee pool, deepening and accelerating vital organizations’ ability to pursue their critical missions.

1. Leverage the expertise of skilled volunteers to augment your funding strategy.
2. Commit this form of support to organizations not currently within your funding pool.
3. Combat the resource inequities disproportionately impacting Black-, Indigenous-, and people-of-color-led nonprofits through access to pro bono support.
4. Create pathways to strategic leadership support through mutual skill development, potential board support, and relationships born through pro bono partnerships.

By adding pro bono support to your toolkit, you can narrow equity and power gaps that will unlock and expand the potential of your grantees and better support the communities they serve.

About the Taproot Foundation

Taproot Foundation, a US-based nonprofit, connects nonprofits and social change organizations with passionate, skilled volunteers who share their expertise pro bono. Since 2001, Taproot’s skilled volunteers have served over 10,000 social change organizations providing more than 1.9 million hours of service worth over $280 million in value. Learn more at www.taprootfoundation.org and follow them on Twitter at @taprootfound.

Image: Taproot board cochair Rebecca Wang (right) with a client. Courtesy of Taproot.