If I had a dollar for every time I have been told: “You don’t know what it’s like to raise money for ______________,” followed by a description of the place where the organization is located, or the issue it works on, or the people it encounters, or some other variable, I could endow every nonprofit I ever cared about. Of course, it is true that I don’t know what it is like, but I can ask questions and learn, and that is usually why an organization is paying me to be there. What people mean when they tell me that I don’t know what it is like is that I don’t know how hard it is. No one says, “You don’t know what it’s like to have an easy time raising lots of money.”

People in nonprofits often imagine that it would be easier to raise money for a different NGO than the one they are in. People in the arts think social service fundraising is a cinch, people in advocacy imagine that providing free legal services would really loosen the purse strings, environmentalists covet the fundraising jobs of labor rights activists, and so on. For the most part, people kid themselves that fundraising would be much easier in another setting, but occasionally special circumstances make fundraising more difficult for certain kinds of organizations or at certain times in an organization’s existence. An accurate analysis of your fundraising situation is essential for creating a robust and sustainable fundraising program.

Most of the problems you have in an organization will show up in your income, and often show up there first, leading people in the organization to think that funding or fundraising is their problem. However, it is worth a few moments of time to understand that fundraising is often a symptom of a different problem, one that must be solved before fundraising (or even fundraising problems) can be addressed. The issue of analyzing your real problem is something I explore in depth in my book Reliable Fundraising in Unreliable Times. If you think fundraising may not be your organization’s real problem, I advise you to check out that book.

Here are just three examples of how organizations mistake what their real fundraising problems are:

• An organization may feel that it can’t raise money because no one agrees with its program, when in fact it has failed to articulate a clear case as to why it deserves support, or its work is not generally known. Many organizations flatter themselves that they are so controversial when in fact no one is discussing them at all.
• An organization that is losing donors and volunteers may believe the economy is to blame or that they need to use a new fundraising strategy. It may be, however, that the organization has drifted away from its mission, the programs it is engaged in don’t really match what people think the organization is about, and donors are voting with their feet.
• A founder has built the organization past his or her ability to run it. Instead of stepping aside, the founder stays and unconsciously shrinks the organization back to a size or focus he or she can manage.

Aside from how an organization’s own myopia may affect its fundraising, external factors also play a much bigger role than organizations realize. An organization’s fundraising may be diminished for any of the following reasons:

• When the economy is in really bad shape, people just don’t have that much money to give. With rising concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few and a massively increasing number of people at or near poverty, fundraising will be affected.
• A scandal in a large, well-known nonprofit can cause distrust of all nonprofits and decrease revenues temporarily. A series of scandals in a number of nonprofits, as occurred in the first part of this century, can cause an overall decline in public confidence, which takes a toll on fundraising.
• The sheer number of nonprofits asking for donations can contribute to donor fatigue.
• Natural disasters take attention and sometimes funding away from the day-in and day-out work of service agencies. In recent years, there have been so many natural disasters (compounded by poverty and racism) that organizations are in an almost permanent state of raising money for themselves while being supportive of efforts to address major crises.
• Wars take a bigger toll than is generally acknowledged. Financially, they absorb money that needs to be spent elsewhere, but they also wreak psychological damage, as the scale of wounded and killed overshadows a small, community-based organization’s case for doing a piece of needed work in a local area. As veterans return with very serious physical and psychological problems, social service agencies find themselves overwhelmed and are given little government support to help this new audience.
• Issues come into style and go out of style; long after it has ceased to be popular to fund solutions to a particular problem, the problem will still exist.

In this section, I concentrate on five of the more common special circumstances that an organization may find itself in, either temporarily (being brand new) or permanently (being rural). The fifth circumstance is one that all organizations face at different times, in which a question arises about whether to seek (or take) funds from a particular funding source—in other words, the question of clean versus dirty money.

An entire book could be devoted to special circumstances, but these five should give you a sense of how to think through special circumstances of your own and make fundraising plans that overcome the adversity and take advantage of the opportunity the special situation presents.