3 Lessons learned from launching a nonprofit
Seeing The Ready Room Project grow from a “good idea” to an actual “thing” has taught me and Catherine a few important life lessons. Time, courage, mental toughness, and a little we-are-doing-this attitude ended up being what we needed to get our idea off the ground!
Lesson 1 / It’s not impossible.
Have you ever had a great idea or “ah-ha” moment hit the wall? We have!
The idea for The Ready Room Project was born over 8 years ago. When we started to look a little deeper into the actual requirements to start a non-profit, we quickly realized - wow, there is some work to do.
We didn’t have the bandwidth - we stalled.
This time around we were a little more determined, we had a bit more moxie to slog through corporate bylaws and IRS applications forms.
We learned that if we wanted to truly have an impactful non-profit, we had to invest in setting up a legal, compliant, and enduring organization.
Those “business” functions will likely never inspire a single donation, but they ensure we have a sustainable and enduring platform to affect change for good. The long hours spent dissecting corporate structure and legal “what ifs” were worth it.
Don’t let the process stand in your way. You will be a better organization on the other end for having pushed through what feels “impossible” in the moment.
Lesson 2 / Be specific with your “ask.”
We were very intentional with who we felt comfortable “checking out” our website. After all, we spent a lot of effort dissecting language, designing the look, and assessing the tone of our message to ensure we were delivering a perfectly curated user experience.
When we were finally ready to have our dear friends and family fawn over our hard work and smash that DONATE button, we asked them to “check it out.”
They did exactly that - turns out our inner circle can edit :)
We received the feedback we asked for. Everything from wholesale content changes to getting new pictures, we heard you. The responses were value added (we fixed those typos right away!), but we learned that words matter.
Bottom line, we were afraid to ask for donations.
“Check out” our website does not always lead to a donation. We needed to be a little brave, stick our necks out there, take some risk, and just ask people to donate.
That was a lot harder than we expected, but it gets easier as you go. And it turns out people are happy to help, you just need to ask!
Lesson 3 / More good is a good thing.
We didn’t invent the active-duty centered non-profit. There are a lot of services and resources specifically tailored to help veterans and their families, literally thousands.
We were questioned (rightfully so) whether we’re tackling an unmet need. “Is somebody doing that already?” We realized that we are not the only ones in this space.
There are lots of awesome organizations out there doing great things for our military families. At first glance this made us second-guess our conviction. Should we do this? There is already somebody kind of doing what we are doing. We even had close confidantes challenging our mission.
We took the questions and constructive criticism seriously. We didn’t want to dilute the resource pool, we wanted to add to it.
In the end we always landed on “Yes - we should do this!”
Just because a resource or non-profit exists does not mean that it is reaching every corner of the demographic. We see a community that deserves outreach.
This is what we want to do: we want to say “thank you” and put some good out there for a deserving crowd. The world may be saturated with ideas, but it can always use another good one.
