SUMMARY

We establish gift terms that align with a venture’s objectives and stage, resisting the norm of using financial power to redirect an organization’s goals or unsustainably accelerate its growth. We make gifts in a way that signals our trust in a venture’s ability to use funds wisely to meet their goals. Because our commitment to the venture extends beyond the gift, we dedicate time to understand, pray for, resource, and encourage their work. 

 

REDEMPTIVE OPPORTUNITIES

1. We provide unrestricted funding as often as possible, encouraging the flexible use of resources to deliver on a venture’s stated goals. We deploy restricted gifts when needed to support catalytic initiatives, encourage greater risk-taking, and prototype new approaches. We co-design restricted gifts with the nonprofit leader, ensuring that the gift is aligned with the venture’s strategy and timing.

2. To encourage long-term planning, decrease the venture’s time spent on writing applications, and lessen revenue-driven anxiety, we make multi-year pledges as soon as trust is established. We are transparent about the size of gifts we are likely to make; and we grant in amounts that honor the time and energy necessary to engage in our giving process.

3. We regularly bring to the Lord in prayer the leaders, teams, programs, and beneficiaries of the ventures we fund. We ask leaders to share non-financial ways in which we can support them, and we pair our funding with introductions to other funders, as well as free or discounted access to services, space, and other resources as a part of our gift agreement. 

4. We work with the venture to identify the most critical metrics on which to report. By understanding the venture’s program model we avoid asking for less-relevant reporting that takes unnecessary time or requires the venture to create new processes.

5. We are transparent and missional in our application and selection process, and we continually improve those processes to decrease the writing and administrative burden on the venture. We set clear expectations, ask once for all the information needed, meet our timelines, communicate good and bad news with truth in love, and solicit feedback to learn how our processes contribute to or detract from their work.

6. We help leaders avoid the common nonprofit sector practice of meager compensation to their team (and themselves), especially beyond the startup phase. Even granting that nonprofit work may be less lucrative in the long run compared to some alternative vocations, we encourage ventures to honor the talent, ambition, and contribution of their people through sustainable pay and benefits.