Systems Analysis: Thoughts on Non-Profit Organizations.
I hate starting stories with a definition of what I’m writing about but sometimes it really helps with getting the ball rolling on the writing process. Tonight, my thoughts are on non-profit organizations, what are they? Why do they exist? What is their role in our society? These questions seem just broad enough to require some help thinking on them. So I did what all the good little millennials do. I Googled it.
When you Google “What defines a nonprofit organization?” the answer that you get is, “A nonprofit organization is a business that has been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) because it furthers a social cause and provides a public benefit”. The two things that stick out to me in that definition are “tax-exempt” and” furthers a social cause and provides a pubic benefit”.
Why are they tax-exempt? Well the answer is right there! It doesn’t make a profit! It legally can’t make a profit! What would you pay taxes on!
That is a lot of exclamation points but really this is how it works. All money that is earned by the organization must be retained by the organization and use for their expenses, operations, and programs. You have seen these organizations before: American Heart Association, American Red Cross, United Way, Humane Society, Salvation Army. All of these are very well-known nonprofit organizations.
So talking about why they exist, “to further a social cause and provide a public benefit”. I think that part can be summed up pretty well. What’s more interesting is their role in society. I would say that their roles range from everything that divides us to everything that unites us. I am just going to jump into the clear example, two nonprofit organizations that exist are the American Life League and on the flip side there in Planned Parenthood. Yep I’m jumping right into this hot button topic!
This goes to show how their role can be consider differently by different people. To say that their role is necessarily a defined output is incorrect in my opinion. I think the truth is in the eye of the beholder in that regard. Now other times this is a much easier cause. Let’s look at the American Red Cross, I think 99.99% of people would agree that this is an organization where everyone can agree upon the cause that is being promoted.
When I think of nonprofits that I have been a part of the first on I think of was my fraternity. Fraternities are nonprofit organizations and usually many people have thoughts on them and in many cases they get a bad rap for being places where you go to party and to drink lots of alcohol. While there is some truth to that, there is also lots of good that goes on with many of these organizations.
In my own personal experience, I can say that while I was in my fraternity, I was philanthropy chair one year. Basically I was the person who was in charge of creating the events that “furthers a social cause and provide a public benefit”. The big event that I talk most often about was our Make-a-Wish BBQ. My fraternity and another sorority would team up and together would raise money to fulfill a Wish for a sick child. Lots of planning would go into this event and into raising money. Besides the obvious operations aspects of it, which included securing donations of food and raffle prizes, contacting local radio to spread the word to the community and meeting with all the different organization on campus to try and promote the event. There were other things that made it compelling as well, we had social media that we were try to promote and a twitter challenge that was #wishmakerchallnge where me and my brothers would fulfill challenges in exchange for donations. Highlighting these challenges often got us even more exposure.
In the end we ended up raising over $9,000. We sent a little girl to Disney Land. It was one of the most rewarding feelings ever to meet with the little girl named Allie and her family and see the impact that we had in their lives. In the end I can’t say why all nonprofits exist or what their role in society actually is but I would have to imagine that for everyone who works at one and truly believes in what they are working for, they mean so much more then what we from the outside could understand. To the people that those organizations have helped they probably mean seeing compassion in the world.
How much profit is that worth?