Below are three factors – among many others – to consider when determining the right mix of funding for your group.

Composition of your Board
Your board list is one of the first places a foundation administrator or corporate giving professional looks at on a grant application. They want to know whether you have people on the board that are able to do a good job of shepherding your organization.

If your board doesn’t have a good representation of leaders, it may be hard to raise funds from foundations or corporations, especially getting in the door the first time. Similarly, if no one on your board knows wealthy community members, you may have difficulty starting a major gifts program.

On the other hand, the profile of your board is usually not that important to individual supporters who may give online, participate in a fundraising event, or respond to a year-end appeal letter. This is why many young organizations, especially those with inexperienced boards, stick mostly to mass appeals to individuals for fundraising purposes. Until they attract a stronger board and have more of a track record, they have difficulty getting funding from other sources.

The key is to utilize your Board to help find your natural supporters – those who really care about your mission – and then equip them to help you expand the circle.

The Age of your Organization
Just like most for-profit ventures, nonprofits have to prove themselves over a period of years. In the first few years, your nonprofit has to build systems for delivering your mission in ways that are distinctively valuable to your constituents and your community.

At the same time, you have to find people who care enough to support what you’re doing. Often, those people are your Board, their friends, families, and business associates; the friends, business associates, families of the founder(s); and your constituents themselves, along with their families and friends. This is why mass appeals, fundraising events, and online asks are the primary fundraising activities of young, small organizations. They are building their “gift pyramid” from scratch. Within about five years of founding, if they are progressing at a good rate, organizations should start branching out in their fundraising methods.

It should be said, however, that most organizations don’t ever employ the full menu of fundraising methods. When they do, they are usually at least 15-20 years old, and have built an enthusiastic set of individual donors as a base. Planned giving, for instance, cannot succeed until your organization seems sure to sustain itself into the future and has financial sophistication.

The Nature of Your Mission and Work

If your organization has an inclusive, “whole community” mission, like a food bank or a community college, you can confidently approach any funding source that you can muster the resources to approach (not that mustering those resources is easy). At the other end of the spectrum, if your mission is one of serving a relatively few community members – no matter how compelling the need may be – your potential sources of funding will be more limited, and you will have to do more research in order to find those sources.

Most nonprofits fall somewhere between “whole community” and “narrow subset” in terms of who they serve and what they do. And some nonprofits serve a narrow niche, but at a national or even international level, and thus have donor prospects, very thinly distributed, all over the world.

The complexity or technical nature of your work also has an influence on your sources of funding. If you are a nonprofit research center studying (for example) the migration of invasive species in nature, you will probably find that your charitable support is mostly limited to foundations and a few visionary individuals that are already aware of this issue, and have tracked similar research, perhaps in academia or government. There may be business interest in this research as well, but because you’re working on a global environmental issue, your research may be both too complex and too “big picture” for corporate philanthropy.

Finally, your work may seem controversial to certain segments of the public. To the extent that your work is viewed as controversial, online fundraising – using frequent e-mails, texts, Tweets, and blogs on your website – can greatly enhance the passion with which your individual supporters view your organization, and the funds you raise. If your organization is not very controversial, you have less emotion to call on, and your investment in online communication may not be rewarded as highly as those that take stands on contentious issues. In regards to other funding sources, however, organizations that are broadly embraced by the public have a wider set of prospects, including business funders.