Philanthropy University teaches people working for social good how to change the world. A first-of-its kind, this nonprofit educational initiative offers tuition free courses taught by leading instructors and professionals. Through lectures, resources, and community, the program will help you elevate your cause and further your reach. Grow your skills. Grow your impact.
The world of fundraising can often seem inaccessible and overwhelming - but it does not have to be! If you are just starting to raise money for your organization or know that you will be soon, this course will help you get started. You will learn crucial fundraising terms and, most importantly, their implications for your organization. You will create a map of your personal and professional networks to help identify potential donors. This course will also help you understand what donors look for when deciding whether to fund a program or organization so that you can plan to strengthen those areas if needed.
Nonprofit leaders must connect their social impact work with the right business model to achieve sustainability. With finite resources and limited staffing, developing the most appropriate business plan can be a challenge for many nonprofits that are more focused on the immediate needs than their sustainability over the long haul.This course teaches nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, and social change leaders how to use financial modeling and creative approaches to market-based funding to scale the impact of their work. This course will be valuable for organizations of all shapes and sizes, and particularly useful for those in the early stages of development.
People remember stories, but forget facts. The best stories are those that spread great ideas like wildfire, taking their audience on an emotional journey and inspiring them to take action. This is why effective storytelling for nonprofits is such a powerful - and essential - tool, in order for you to grab people’s attention, make your message memorable, and inspire others to contribute to your cause.This free online storytelling course is packed with tools, best practices, and a step by step narrative framework that will enable anyone to improve how they create and share their stories. You will learn how to translate facts into emotions, turn the typical “I” story into a “we” story to engage your audience, craft a catchy Super Short Story for social media, and apply the secrets used by master storytellers such as Steve Jobs and Hollywood writers to make your story come alive. Along the way, you will meet an expert practitioner who will explain why the art of storytelling is their #1 recruiting and fundraising tool, and how it has helped transform their organization to maximize their impact.
In a perfect world, great initiatives for change would get the attention they deserve. However, in reality, many initiatives fail to “make it” even with a great idea, product or service. They fail because they do not reach the audiences they need or communicate their value effectively.In this course, you will learn how to build a brand that will get your cause the attention it deserves. A strong brand for your organization will help shape your communications, guide your visual identity, and inform your actions. By examining real-world examples from leading social impact organizations, you will be able to effectively use your time and resources to stand out from your competition.
All nonprofit organizations need a board. But how do you build a board that does more than just satisfies your legal obligations? How do you build a board that supports, guides, and multiplies your work?This free, online course offers an introduction to establishing a productive and useful board. It will support you in identifying your own governance needs and help you plan to recruit and onboard board members.
Advocacy is one of the most powerful ways that non-profit organizations can create large-scale social change. When advocacy is successful, an organization can achieve far greater impact than through direct service delivery. However, advocacy is an unpredictable adventure, requiring clear thinking, skill, and luck.Advocacy work can be large scale, advocating for governments to change policies, or smaller scale, advocating for community members to change behaviors. In this course, you will learn successful advocacy tactics and strategies from two of the leading experts on the subject. Ruth Levine of the Hewlett Foundation and Rakesh Rajani of the Ford Foundation will share real-world examples, interviews with extraordinary advocates, and lessons learned from decades of advocacy experience.
Stakeholders have the power to influence any project or decision, making them crucial to an organization’s success. Yet many are unfamiliar with effective stakeholder management techniques. This knowledge gap forces organizations to be reactive rather than proactive, resulting in many missed opportunities to identify new trends, gain vital feedback, enhance their brand, and most of all, create greater impact.This course provides the tools, frameworks, and best practices to help you create a cohesive stakeholder engagement strategy. From identifying stakeholders to designing your engagement, you will learn how to best engage with each stakeholder in order to achieve your goals. Along the way, you will meet an expert practitioner who will take you on their journey to creating an integrated stakeholder engagement strategy, and how it has transformed their organization to maximize their impact.
How can we serve our beneficiaries effectively, sustainably, and at scale? In this course, Shashi Buluswar, CEO of the Institute for Transformative Technologies, explains his nine-part framework for creating social impact. You will use his framework to assess your organization’s current level of success, identify upcoming risks, and make plans to achieve maximum impact. You will also meet a variety of innovative leaders from across the social impact space and learn how they have achieved such stellar success.Whether your goal is to increase efficiency, scale your model, or spark change in your sector, this course will help you make a plan to get there.
You know what your organization does. And, you know how your organization hopes to change the world. But how exactly does each of your activities lead to change? Are you, your teammates, donors, and beneficiaries able to clearly explain and measure this complex process?Theory of Change is a powerful tool for clarifying how you intend to create and measure change. It’s a foundational strategic process for any organization that hopes to make a measurable impact on the world. Whether you work at a new organization that is just defining its approach or at an established organization trying to improve its programs, Theory of Change can help your team to make better decisions, communicate your approach more clearly, and measure the impact that you are creating.This course is for senior-level leaders and board members who are ready to improve their organization’s strategy by helping to facilitate a Theory of Change process.
Are you worried about your organization's sustainability? Do you need to take you're your organization's impact to the next level?This course will equip you with the knowledge necessary to scale your organization's impact and reach by setting your programs apart from those of your peers. Through on-the-ground interviews with current nonprofit practitioners in India, Pakistan, and Kenya, students will learn how to design and implement effective programs that are far-reaching, replicable, and scalable. These theories will be used to guide discussions of how to tackle real life issues faced by the global poor, including human rights abuses, health, food security and education.
Despite tackling thousands of different issues, nonprofits across the world have one thing in common: the desire to make the greatest impact possible. However, finding out how your particular organization can make the greatest impact possible is not always easy. In answering this question, nonprofits often fall into the trap of focusing on improving what they want rather than what they may desperately need. And even when they do find the right solution, they struggle to implement it or obtain funds for their plan. In this course, you will learn how to address these issues. Specifically, you will learn how to improve your organization’s capacity— its ability to achieve your mission. In doing so, you will take a test to find out your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, brainstorm solutions to meet your specific needs, and find out how to raise funds to implement your solution. Along the way, you will explore materials and assignments to help you apply the capacity building strategies you’ve learned to your organization. You will also explore a case study of a nonprofit in India that used the techniques taught in this course to grow from a small organization into an award-winning nonprofit impacting the lives of more than 70,000 people.
What does your organization want to accomplish? Whether your goal is to combat deforestation or to provide sustainable livelihoods, your team needs to know which financial resources are available to them. In other words, your team needs an accurate and effective operating budget.This course introduces the fundamental skills that you will need to prepare an operating budget for a nonprofit organization or social enterprise. You will learn about the different types of budgets, explore operational budget components, compare different processes for generating financial estimates, and design inclusive processes to develop an operational budget with your team.
To tackle the world’s most difficult development challenges, nonprofit organizations cannot work alone. Strong partnerships—working relationships with other organizations, businesses, government agencies, or international agencies—are necessary to create sustainable social change. Yet getting different groups of people to agree to a single plan is no simple task: it requires tact, creativity, and skill.This course provides frameworks, guidelines, and tools to help you establish effective partnerships. From identifying potential partners to signing partnering agreements, you will learn how to navigate the initial stages of the partnering process. Along the way, you will meet expert practitioners, apply practical tools to your own work, and practice your negotiation skills.
People depend on you to deliver important products and services. The unfortunate truth, however, is that most social impact projects fail—either by spending more money than planned, by taking longer than expected, or by not producing the kinds of services that were promised. Luckily, the field of project management provides techniques for completing your project on budget, on time, and on scope.This course will introduce you to the art of project management for social impact. You will learn practical, field-tested skills for project management and acquire valuable project management tools. You will also hear from project managers working on social impact issues around the world, who will share how they respond to the unpredictable challenges of their work.
Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are an essential approach to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals, maximizing humanitarian assistance, and building resilience within communities. While the work of MSPs is complex, their success or failure can often be attributed to a single root cause: how well they engage the people and communities whose lives they aim to improve.To help MSPs achieve real, sustainable impact, we’ve assembled this playbook of powerful, inclusive strategies to turn ‘beneficiaries’ into partners. Through these approaches you should be able to design better, more context-appropriate, and more innovative programs, develop stronger local buy-in and leverage a range of local resources towards delivering more, and more sustainable, impact.This course goes beyond presenting general good practice. In each lesson, you will find case studies of programs that are successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully!) working with communities, assessment questions that analyze your MSP’s strengths and weaknesses on your own metrics dashboard, tools you can bring to your next meeting, and an interactive action planning tool where you can plan for the future.