An innovative way to fund social-service programs is slowly catching on in the United States—and it has the potential to transform the way larger nonprofits and mission-driven companies go about their business.

Pay for Success (PFS) is a funding model that relies on public-private partnerships to provide services that have traditionally been provided by the government. The idea originated in Great Britain in the early 2010s and gradually made its way across the Atlantic to the U.S., where it is now being employed in the social-service, healthcare, criminal-justice, and housing sectors.

Nonprofit organizations now have countless options for communicating digitally with stakeholders. Emails, text messages, and a wide array of social media platforms provide opportunities for marketing, sharing information, fundraising, and attracting new clients or volunteers.

In recent years, many nonprofit organizations have been forced to adapt in response to political, social, and economic changes. The economic recession which began during the COVID-19 pandemic required most nonprofits to operate with reduced resources, while the demand for many of the services they provided was increasing.

A grant proposal’s evaluation plan measures change. Formative evaluation measures include changes in policy, procedures, and processes.

Formative evaluation includes the following types of data collection methods that in turn show data that is measurable and demonstrates change over time:

Priya Prabhakar is the Director of Compliance at Beth Israel Deaconess HealthCare. Formerly, she was the Corporate Compliance Officer at Walden Behavioral Care. Skye Learning was thrilled to include her expert commentary in Skye’s online course Nonprofit Ethics and Compliance.

Prabhaker has earned her MBA, Master of Public Health (MPH), and Doctor of Medicine (MD). In addition to her compliance-related roles, she was a physician for more than six years at both Jackson Park Hospital and Inlaks Medical Hospital, served as a visiting faculty member at Boston University, and was the Associate Director for the Foundation for Research and Education in Eating Disorders.

The most fundamental ethical obligation for any nonprofit organization is to avoid conflicts of interest. Because nonprofits rely on donated funds, it is essential that they be able to demonstrate that this money is being properly spent—and that none of it is being used improperly to enrich the organization or its leaders.

Conflicts of interest most often involve the organization's executive director or members of the board of directors, because they are the people with the most direct influence over the organization's activities and business dealings.

Successful grant writing is a highly iterative, detail-oriented process. To craft a truly great grant proposal, you need to demonstrate to a potential funder how all of the parts of a grant application both fit together and affect one other.

To ensure a grant proposal is both logically and structurally sound, use a logic model (also called a theory of change) to demonstrate how all of the moving parts in a proposal work together to form a cohesive, measurable project. A logic model is a blueprint that evaluates and measures how certain assumptions, inputs, activities, and outputs (the process-focused components of your program or project) lead to the desired goals and short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes that will best serve the target audience and effect social change.

Pushing your grant writing skills to the next level is an exercise in focusing on the details. Our newest course “Advanced Grant Writing” shows you how to ask iterative questions of yourself, your team, and your proposed program in order to sharpen and refine your grant proposal and push it to the top of the pack. By looking closely at how a logic model can shore up your proposal at each key stage, the course will demonstrate how to push your planning, evaluation, and budgeting from good to great.

This week, Skye Learning is thrilled to feature Cynthia Holt, an experienced consultant and nonprofit manager with more than two decades of experience in management, coaching, strategic planning, grant research and writing, and more. She is a subject matter expert for several Skye courses, including Introduction to Nonprofit Management and Strategy for Nonprofits.

Like for-profit businesses, nonprofits range in size from small and medium organizations to very large, well-established organizations. These differences in size affect the way that nonprofits conduct every aspect of their operations, including fundraising, developing volunteer programs, establishing financial processes, and selecting a board of directors.

Regardless of a nonprofit’s size, the board plays an essential role in the organization’s success.