Is there a need in your community for some special charity or service? Hundreds of people start charities every year, and hundreds of charities also vanish each year, largely because they were poorly planned or started for the wrong reasons.
Before starting a charity, ask yourself a few questions:
Is there a similar charity in your area that serves the same population? If there is, you’ll probably find people reluctant to donate to your cause, and a lack of money is the best way to kill a charity.
Do you have volunteers with dedication and skills who can help your charity get off the ground? This is why church-related charities are more likely to succeed: the church has a built-in infrastructure with a pastor and a committee who can run the charity. If you don’t have volunteers or if you lack experience, you can still get your charity going if you’re dedicated, but it’s much harder.
Do you have a clear plan and vision for your charity? You need to have stated goals for your charity, and they need to be narrowly defined. In other words, a charity with the goal of “saving the whales” will likely be less successful than one with the goal of “preventing whale beachings on Lambda Beach.”
Are you treating your charity like a small business? While the two are not exactly alike, the information necessary for starting a small business — a business plan, a realistic conservative budget, a list of who’s goin to run the organization and what their expertises are, a five-year goal plan, a location of operations — are also necessary for your charity.
Beyond Organization
If you have thought hard about these questions and decided that you should go ahead with it, you have several other things to consider. Check first with your state’s Secretary of State and with your city or county’s attorney’s office to gather information on what you need on a local level to start a nonprofit organization. You should also call the IRS to obtain information about filing your charity as a 501(c)(3).
This tax rating is not absolutely necessary in the early days, but it helps a lot. The 501(c)(3) rating gives your charity two benefits: first, your charity can advertise itself as the sort where any donations – whether cash or in-kind – will provide donors with a tax deductions on their own returns. It also means that if you operate on an average of more than three thousand dollars of capital, you won’t have to pay taxes yourself. In addition to this, it shields you, the organizer of the charity, from tax and legal liabilities if things were to go terribly wrong.
If your organization is designed to gather money and distribute it to other charities, however, instead of directly administering services, you may want to consider creating a charitable trust instead of a 501(c)(3). For this, you should hire an attorney who can draw up the appropriate papers.Use your original business plan and create Articles of Incorporation for your new nonprofit. Your Articles should include your charity’s:
- Purpose
- Name
- Duration of operation
- Type of organization
- Structure (CEO, Board of Directors, etc.)
- Other details
You can probably find forms online to create your Articles of Incorporation; look in your local Secretary of State’s website. You may need to have two signatures to incorporate your charity. While you’re creating your Articles, you should write your bylaws. The best way to do this is to write to similar charities, ask them if they will share their bylaws with you, and then make changes in these that are appropriate to your charity.
After you’ve done all this paperwork, you can file an application packet with your Secretary of State. Be prepared to pay a small fee. Call the IRS to get an EIN number — this is like a Social Security number for businesses and other organizations, and then file with them to be recognized as a nonprofit as soon as you are recognized by your state’s Secretary of State office.
Making It Work
Now you have a legal nonprofit organization to work with. You’ll need to have the following items:
- Volunteers or others to run the organization
- A place to operate from (at least a phone number)
- A marketing and advertising program — what if you had a charity and no one came?
- A plan of action
The easiest way to advertise yourself starting out is by setting up a website and using the information there to promote yourself. You don’t need a lot — just a home page, listing of your important officers, and a vision statement. It’s a good idea to set up an area, passworded or not, where you can keep scans of your Articles of Incorporation, future 1099s, and anything else your state or the federal government want to have available to the public.
Later, start putting press releases up on your website as well, and success stories. This is a slow building process. The more great stories you have about what your charity has done, the better the community response will be. If you keep great records — both financially and in terms of what your charity has done to make things better — you’ll find all your future work to be much easier.
Call your local newspapers. Don’t just focus on your large daily paper; look at small weeklies and community newspapers. Smaller papers are often hungry for stories. You may be able to get a reporter to come out and do a story on your charity, or you may be able to simply write your own story and give it to the paper to run as a story. The more stories you can have done on your charity, the better community awareness will be. Once you’ve had a couple of stories in local newspapers, call local radio stations and television news stations and see if you can get them to come out and cover events, etc.
No matter what the response is from your local news, never give up. On a slow news day, local television stations are willing to cover just about anything, and you may just need to catch them on the right day.
While you’re promoting yourself, talk to other nonprofits. See if there are ways you can partner with nonprofits, especially with special events. For example, if you have a problem with whale beachings, you might talk to your local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to set up a whale watch at the critical times, or you could work with these volunteer-rich organizations to run whale rescues. This is the sort of story news organizations love to cover, too, so there are some great things you can do.
Look for ways to raise funds all the time. You may want to just solicit donations when you get stories on the news, or you may want to try sending out direct solicitation letters. Ask someone for a donation every day. Over time, this grows much easier. The one thing not to do: never use spam to promote your charity. This just turns people off, and can get you into legal trouble.
Once you’ve had a few successes, you can write grants. This has become harder and more competitive recently, but there are billions of dollars in grant money out there. Look for a Dummies’ book about grant writing to get yourself started. You may also be able to find a grant writer who will work for free or on commission — that is, she doesn’t get paid unless your grant goes through. Once you’ve written your first grant, all following grants will be much easier; most of the paperwork is the same every single time.
Last Things
Remember, everyone wants to see nonprofits make it. When you don’t know what to do, never be afraid to ask other nonprofits or community leaders for advice. If you really have trouble getting yourself going, contact your local SCORE — these are retired business leaders who help people start organizations for free, and they can be an amazing resource for both information and networking.
And never forget to have fun. While charities provide critical services for serious problems, you’ll never last as a charitable leader if you and your staff and volunteers don’t get some emotional reward out of it. Laugh a lot, and never forget that what you’re doing will make your community a better place.
