Lunchtime Links: How To Keep Your Non-Dues Revenue Going

Don’t keep your eggs all in one basket when it comes to your association’s annual revenue. How to reap the power of nondues revenue, and more, in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Cash flow: Nondues revenue can go a long way—provided the offerings fit with your organization’s core mission. According to the Association Adviser’s Hank Berkowitz  (opens in a new tab), associations are diversifying their nondues revenue streams, whether through sponsorships, education, affinity programs, and so forth, to avoid relying on one specific area to generate the majority of revenue. But how do you maintain that steady flow of revenue without asking for too much, too often of your sponsors and vendors? Berkowitz’s answer: Ask your members what they want and expect from your association, and then find new ways to present that information, which will create revenue and sponsorship opportunities for the new programs, products, and services you develop as a result of member feedback. This will be a win-win for both members and sponsors. Are you asking your members what benefits they want your association to provide?

Open tabs: Feel stranded without Google Reader? Now’s the time to welcome the rise of curated news sites. Writing for SocialFish, Maddie Grant  (opens in a new tab) offers her go-tos for the aggregated web pages “you may not have heard of”: Feed the mind with Medium  (opens in a new tab)’s brainy selection, or beef up your tech talk with picks from the Launch ticker  (opens in a new tab). Wander over to Quartz  (opens in a new tab), your one-stop shop for critical business news, or satisfy the midday itch “for random headlines about cool stuff the internet is talking about” on Digg  (opens in a new tab). What curated sites are on your must-read list?

Metric tools: No two organizations are the same—therefore no one measure for “effectiveness” applies to all. The Nonprofit Technology Network’s Nell Edgington  (opens in a new tab) suggests that nonprofits should look past overhead expenses—once treated as the only metric that mattered when it came to measuring their effectiveness. Instead, she says, they should develop a theory of change  “to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of social change efforts.” Standardizing a system with both outcome and impact elements helps organizations “compare the social return they would get in a for-profit and/or nonprofit setting,” Edgington writes. “You can’t measure whether an organization has created change if they have no idea what they are trying to change in the first place.”

How does your organization measure effectiveness? Tell us in the comments below.

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