Your Innovation Budget Is Hiding in Your Outdated Line Items

Over the last several months, we've been exploring how to build strategic clarity by identifying what to stop, where to focus, and how to get your board on the same page.

Now comes the practical question: how do you fund new initiatives when your budget is already stretched?

The answer might surprise you: your innovation budget is hiding in plain sight. 

Last fall I was catching up with Kathy Kempff, CEO of Nuclavis, a mobile technology company serving the peer-to-peer fundraising space. I knew I didn't know as much as I wanted to about mobile fundraising, but until I talked to her I didn't know how much there was to know! I was impressed with the technology and with the application to mission work.

I asked about the market potential and the kinds of challenges her team faces in implementation, which led to a larger conversation about planning and innovation. We were lamenting the fact that many organizations we work with don't think they can afford to innovate when Kathy said something that stopped me mid-sentence.

"Some of our clients don't think they can afford mobile. But their mobile spend is hiding in their old email budget."

I've been thinking about that line ever since, because it applies well beyond mobile fundraising.

The Habit Trap

Here's a conversation I keep having with nonprofit leaders: "We know we need to try something new. But we just don't have the budget for it."

I get it. Budgets are tight. Donors are distracted, and once reliable funding sources are shaky. The pressure to do more with less is real.

But what if the budget already exists—it's just trapped somewhere else?

Many peer-to-peer fundraising programs I work with have email open rates hovering around ten to fifteen percent. A solid open rate might be 20%, or perhaps 25%. Which is a nice way of saying, three-quarters of their carefully crafted communications are disappearing into the void. And they're not alone. Across the sector, organizations are pouring resources into tactics that stopped working years ago, then saying they can't afford to try something new.

Strategy Before Budget

This is exactly why taking time to understand your strategic landscape before you set your budget is so critical. A thoughtful strategic planning process, like More For Many's own Ariadne framework, should challenge you to identify the two or three major initiatives that will define your next few years.

Those initiatives require investment. And that investment has to come from somewhere.

I've written before about using a simple Investment-Impact Matrix to evaluate your current activities. The exercise sorts everything into four quadrants based on what you're putting in and what you're getting out. The most revealing quadrant is always the lower left: high investment, low impact. These are the programs that absorb real budget and staff time but don't move the mission forward.

That's where your innovation budget is hiding.

For Kathy's clients, it's often email programs with declining returns. The email budget could fund mobile engagement that actually reaches supporters.

But I see the same pattern everywhere: the annual event that costs $80,000 and nets $12,000. The quarterly report that takes 40 hours to produce and nobody reads. The legacy program that made sense a decade ago but now exists because "that's what we do every year."

The Uncomfortable Math

Here's a quick exercise worth trying:

Pick one program or initiative that's been on autopilot for more than three years. Add up the real cost—not just direct expenses, but staff time, opportunity cost, and management attention.

Now look honestly at what it produces. Not what it produced five years ago, or what it might produce if everything goes perfectly. What does it produce now?

If the math doesn't work, you've found budget. The question is whether you're willing to reallocate it.

Kathy shared an example that made the point concrete: One organization was paying $60,000 annually for a mobile app solution that wasn't even branded to them—a generic container app where supporters had to scroll through dozens of other organizations just to find theirs. For roughly the same investment, they could have had a fully branded mobile experience.

They didn't need more budget. They needed to see what they were already spending.

What Real Strategy Looks Like

Good strategy isn't about doing more. It's about doing differently, focusing on the things that will set you apart and help you grow. That means making hard choices about what to stop.

Most strategic plans fall apart in the middle. Teams jump from lofty vision statements straight to tactical to-do lists without ever deciding where they'll invest differently. Channel strategy is a perfect example. If your communications plan looks the same as it did five years ago, you haven't made a strategic choice. You've just kept going.

The question isn't "Can we afford to innovate?" The question is "What are we funding out of habit that isn't working anymore?"

And what would happen if you redirected that investment toward something that does?

Your innovation budget isn't missing. The question is whether you're ready to go find it.

Kathy Kempff is CEO of Nuclavis, which provides mobile fundraising technology for peer-to-peer programs. At More For Many, we write about the tools we use and people who inspire us. In other words, we weren’t paid to write this article. 

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