In the first workshop of the SmartSteps to Organizational Excellence series, we discussed proposal writing and effective ways to seek funding from corporations, governments and foundations. In today’s workshop, we’re going to focus on another possible way of increasing your organization’s income: charging fees for some of the services you provide.
Throughout this workshop, we will be talking about both charities and not-for-profit organizations. Not all literacy programs in Ontario are registered charities, but the concepts we will be discussing apply to both those that are and those that are not. Notice that we call them “not-for-profit” organizations rather than “nonprofit”. The first term is a truer description of an organization whose primary mission is not to make a profit, although that doesn’t prevent it from doing so.
We will also be talking about fee-for-service, commercial ventures and business ventures. Again, these terms are somewhat interchangeable. In the Ontario literacy field, we are most familiar with the term “fee-for-service”. However, the charitable/not-forprofit sector refers to any of this type of business/incomegenerating activity in the broader sense and includes any type of program or service designed to bring additional revenues into the organization.