The concept of doing more with less is a familiar one to nonprofit managers, even though during the past three years they have found themselves having to do more with a lot less.

In her book “Nonprofit Finance for Hard Times,” Susan U. Raymond observes that doing more for nonprofits will mean more than just stretching each dollar. She offers four innovations in the use of philanthropic resources that provide opportunities for nonprofit finance. They share a common effort to link resources to markets in ways that leverage the capacity and impact of philanthropy itself. They are:

• Mission-related investing (MRI). This is the process of using foundation assets to contribute to the success of organizations serving the societal mission to which the foundation is committed. It attempts to turn the corpus of foundation funds into a mission-directed tool.
• Program-related investing (PRI). These deploy resources to both for-profit and nonprofit entities engaged in market activities. They are used to leverage philanthropic capital with other sources of capital, reduce nonprofit costs of capital for expansion, create nonprofit financing sustainability and enable large distribution of capital at a certain time.
• Social Enterprise Support. Its central characteristics are market orientation, social aims and social ownership.
• Harnessing investment to philanthropy. New strategies to flow resources to nonprofit needs are emerging and are deeply tied to financial management and investment strategies.

courtesy NonProfit Times