In episode 48 of the Charity Charge Show Stephen interviews Livestrong’s Chief Strategic Solutions and Programs Officer Suzanne Stone. In this interview, Suzanne and Stephen discuss Livestrong’s mission, Suzanne’s work in the nonprofit sector, and so much more. Check out this article to read up on a couple of the most interesting questions from this interview. Listen to the full episode here.
Here’s a snippet from Suzanne on the podcast:
“I’m going to quote a statistic here and there, and there will be people who are listening that are nonprofit executives saying that’s not right for me. While I know that this may not be true for everybody, it is in general. So 91% of all revenue for all nonprofits in the United States is coming from individual donors. 91%. This is a really important number because it shows the lack of diversity in the economy, right? Where’s that revenue coming from? Just like in any regular for-profit business, if you only have one primary stream of income, which is like what we’re seeing right now. Those businesses are able to shift quickly and have diversified areas of income. They figured out “Okay, well, if I’m a restaurant, for example, I need to make sure that I’m only certain that only 48% of my income is alcohol. Otherwise, they’re going to shut me down because I’m a bar. I need to have other revenue streams besides just this. We need to have maybe you see people starting to sell groceries out of the restaurant, right?”
They’re diversifying. It’s the same thing with nonprofits. It’s exactly the same thing. But 91% of all income that is coming in is from individual donors. We’re bound to the economy, married to it. If the economy is bad, and the individual donor doesn’t have discretionary dollars to use, then you can imagine that our revenues going to be down. It gets very hard to ask people for help in a time of crisis because we’re not going to you know, people still have to eat right grocery stores will be fine restaurants would be fine to hurricanes hit we have natural disasters, things that are short term. From a nonprofit side, that is not the case.”
