To nonprofits pessimistic about raising funds for organisational functions: keep the faith. It is possible to find support for core activities such as human resources, finance, administration, and monitoring and evaluation—line items that are not linked to specific programmes. This can be done with some innovation, tweaked language, stronger internal systems, and good old-fashioned pushback.
Last year, at Access Life Assistance Foundation (ALAF)—the nonprofit Ankeet Dave and I co-founded and run—we made a focused attempt to raise funds to cover the full cost of our work, and not just programme expenses.
ALAF runs 11 centres across eight cities for families of young cancer patients. We set up the first one in Mumbai in 2014, after seeing parents living on the streets while their children underwent cancer treatment in hospitals. They had travelled from other locations and could not afford the high accommodation costs in the city. This even caused them to abandon treatment at the first sign of improvement. We started as a shelter with eight families but soon realised that they also needed help with groceries, nutritious food, transportation for treatment, and so on.
Over the years, corporate sponsors have been happy to fund the setup and running of centres for children and their parents, but there hasn’t been as much support for the head office in Chembur, Mumbai—the nerve centre of the work.
In 2023, 10 years into running ALAF, we had a moment of reckoning. When two of our CSR commitments were delayed, it put unexpected pressure on our working capital—enough to make us consider drawing from our corpus reserves. That’s when we decided to rethink our approach.
We resolved to factor in the total costs of running a centre and ask CSRs to fund it in full. Twelve months on, a couple of them have agreed. For us, this has been a breakthrough in fundraising, and here’s what we learned from the process over the past year:
1. Reframe the narrative
When nonprofits pitch to funders, we tend to use words that make core functions appear like back-office, overhead, or administrative activities. But all the work we do, whether overt or invisible, is intended to help our communities. It is, therefore, extremely important to present non-programmatic expenses from this perspective, especially to corporate donors.
Tweaking language to demonstrate these links can help show how these ‘indirect’ activities are connected to the overall vision and goal of the nonprofit. In some cases, the need is obvious. In ALAF’s case, one example includes the costs for parental counselling. A child’s chemotherapy may last for months, and parents face enormous financial and emotional pressure during this period; counselling support is therefore crucial. In some other cases, such as building a management information system (MIS), the link to the end goal may be less recognisable. Here it becomes our job, as nonprofits, to underline that the MIS, which corporates find useful when evaluating a programme, is not frivolous but an essential tool for serving communities better. It helps us track every family’s journey in real time, identify gaps early, and ensure that no one is left behind.
Nonprofits can also share evidence to show that these organisational expenses are essential to a project’s success. For example, staff salaries—often dismissed as overheads—are, in fact, the human infrastructure without which the caregiving experience collapses. Similarly, when CSRs get a clear view of how money is actually utilised, it builds trust and shapes their understanding of our actual requirements. If they can be made to see the value in such a system, they may be willing to fund us to set it up or hire for it.
2. Work the cost in
An important step in raising the total cost of running a programme is to calculate it accurately. Robust systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs) can help organisations account for all expense buckets and arrive at the true cost of a programme.
Two years ago, ALAF used an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to analyse the data around organisational functions. We employed tracking tools to capture the actual costs of running the centres—including electricity, pest control, water, and minor repairs—and calculate operational costs per family per month. Service dashboards tracked the number of sessions conducted for academic support, counselling, or nutritional interventions to compute the cost per intervention per child.
SOPs play a key role in ensuring that every centre records and reports costs in a consistent manner. They define how groceries, cleaning supplies, or learning materials are to be purchased and accounted for, preventing leakages and ensuring standardisation across centres. Onboarding procedures determine the average time and resources required to induct each new family. Audit checklists capture both quantitative and qualitative inputs that affect cost—such as wear and tear, replacement of items, or staff overtime during emergencies. The rent and salaries of the head office are also added in.
This multi-pronged approach helped us build a more granular and defensible cost structure. It not only brings clarity internally but also builds trust externally, especially with CSR partners and institutional donors who increasingly ask for per-unit costs, impact-to-expense ratios, and line-item transparency.
3. Retain a diverse mix of sources
Last year, approximately 70 percent of our money came from corporates. CSR is currently the largest non-government funder in India, with a spending of nearly INR 35,000 crore in FY 2023-24. Some of them are evolving and are willing to spend on an organisation’s strategic, long-term goals. However, many CSR wings are run from within HR departments that may not know enough about how the sector works. They continue to insist that almost all their money go directly towards community-related expenses. Approximately 20 percent of ALAF’s budgets is raised under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), but the conditions with such grants are as stringent as with CSR.
This is why we continue to rely on individual donors and family philanthropists to some extent. They are more flexible about spending on organisation-building costs. In fact, for the first three years, the cancer centres were backed entirely by retail funding. But as an organisation grows, the percentage share of retail funding usually doesn’t keep pace with the growing budgets, and most organisations have no option but to turn to CSR.
One set of donors, therefore, is just not enough anymore. It is also not fair to put all the burden on the same set of donors just because they are more flexible with their funds.
4. Push back
Earlier, when a CSR partner supported a centre, we gave them exclusive branding. Their name went up on a plaque at the location. We have now started using this branding to communicate our perspective with them.
After we worked out the real cost, which included organisational needs, we clarified upfront that they could take sole credit for the shelter only if they were paying the entire amount. But if their support was partial, and another philanthropist was contributing towards the indirect costs, they would have to share the goodwill.
Nonprofits should push to be viewed the way companies view themselves. Like for-profit companies, nonprofits need working capital and reserves—what our sector calls a corpus.
Working capital is especially critical since CSRs make annual commitments but often disburse funds in the middle or even towards the end of the year. How are nonprofits expected to run operations with this uncertainty of cash flows? By educating donors about all the financial needs of an organisation, nonprofits can help them evolve too.
5. Simply ask
One of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make is to avoid asking for what they really need to sustain themselves. We are all so grateful when a corporate decides to support us that we are hesitant to negotiate for what we really need. In fact, we have had thoughtful corporate partners sometimes point out to us that nonprofits do not share their accurate cost structures and organisational development needs.
Fundraising is unpredictable. We must keep innovating and putting ourselves out there, despite the fear of rejection.
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Know more:
- Read more about fundraising best practices from a funder’s perspective, and what nonprofits can do to strengthen their pitches.
- Learn how grassroots nonprofits can overcome barriers of scale such as funding, leadership, and compliance.
- Explore how nonprofits can develop long-term, sustainable funding strategies to achieve greater impact.
