Gaining Donor Respect and Funding

Badgerdog is a small nonprofit, with about half a million in revenue last year. We think of the company as being a "social entrepreneurship." While we are a public charity and rely on philanthropic support, we run it like a for-profit business, and we’re focused on growing our earned revenue stream, now at 41%. At the same time, we fill a social and educational need in our economically depressed communities.

Badgerdog is organized into two complementary business units. One publishes our nationally distributed quarterly literary magazine, American Short Fiction. Just like playing for a AAA farm team is the right place to be seen by MLB scouts, being published in ASF is a great place for emerging writers to be seen by literary agents.

The other side of our business is an educational initiative, which contracts with local writers to conduct workshops for students in grades 3-12. We work with the students on both reading and writing, with the goal of publishing some of their work. Three times a year, a collection of the students’ work is published in a journal that we distribute. That program started in 2004 with about 40 students in four schools. This year, we will serve over 1,000 students in 21 schools covering four school districts. So we’re creating jobs for writers but also filling a void in our educational system in teaching fundamental writing skills and promoting writing as a profession as well as a vital skill.

Brass Tacks

As a nonprofit our earned revenue can grow from 41% up to 69%. My goal is to bump right up against that and be as self-sustaining as possible.

That’s probably because I come from a for-profit background---as a journalist and as a sales & marketing exec at a high-tech company. Since founding BLP in 2003, I’ve had to learn a lot about how nonprofits work----and the oblique sales approach we have to take to ensure future funding.

More than 50% of our funding must come from grants. In making our requests to government organizations or private philanthropic organizations we must present a formal Proposal, and then as partners we will provide our service to a third-party---such as children in our local schools.