It was tight... but I made it work.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Nashville called Portland Brew.  It’s a great little coffeeshop.  In fact, this whole city is full of great little coffee shops (see my article on Crema).  I’m only here because I could not find anywhere to park at another of my favorites, The Frothy Monkey (what a name, right?).

Which brings to a light a major issue with non-profits & small businesses these days.  Parking.  It’s hard enough running a coffeeshop with the tiny margins you make on each patron.  You need a lot of business to walk through those doors every day or you’ll never make it.  So when you build your business in a location where parking is a problem, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

This can happen with your non-profit organization as well.  It may not be parking.  But what is preventing your patrons from walking in your door and giving you a donation?  What are the unseen issues in the system that may cost you some major bucks to fix, but in the long run, will help you raise the money to meet the need you support.  It may be a bad website (by the way, I tried to go to PortlandBrewCoffee.com to link to it for this article and guess what… it was down.  Yikes.  Major parking problem!). It may be a poorly written mission or purpose statement.  It may be a lack of accessibility to your leadership.  What is it?

I was speaking to a wealthy relative of mine who shared his own concern with giving to an organization called Young Life.  He’s a big supporter.  I don’t know what that means, but I get the feeling that he’s the type of donor that you’d block off an entire day to go golfing with.  But he told me that something needed to be done with the Young Life website.  He said it was too difficult for him to go on and make a donation.  And he realized that if he was frustrated with trying to make a very sizable donation, how many others have tried and given up.  I told him that we should build them a new website that connects to a smartphone app with a one-touch donation button built in.  He agreed… but that’s another article for another time.

This is a parking problem.  It can be fixed but you’ve got to make an investment.  If it costs you $3,000 to fix it and the end result is a net increase in online giving of 5%, what would that mean to your organization?  Could you recoup that in three years?

Sit down and think for just ten minutes today about the parking problems at your organization.  What are they?  How can you fix them?  What would happen if you fixed them?  ….Now go and do it.