As nonprofits, we have some of the same issues that businesses do, like increasing our revenue, marketing and taking a program to scale. What are some of the critical business or organizational development issues that are facing your nonprofit?

• Position: Industry Outlook: Q&A

FARRINGTON: Cyber security for us is really important. You have that little "donate" button on your website. Yet we don't have a robust enough staff for that kind of information. We just don't. So we were able to reach out to a corporate partner who has a tremendous system, and we're able to benefit from their knowledge.

BARNHART: A lot of us are pretty reliant on federal grant funding, which looks to be precarious at times--and sometimes disappears altogether. And yet I hear at the same time that we can't be very reliant on corporate funding, so it's kind of squeezing organizations from two ways.

HASSAN: When things do contract, as we saw in 2008, every source of our funding contracts. So we have a bit of a greater disadvantage perhaps than the business community--because at the same time our funding contracts, the social services nonprofits' needs tend to go up. So finding those things that we can do best and keeping "scope creep" from taking over when there are so many needs and so few resources can be an issue.

When things do loosen up, as they seem to be doing now, making sure that we are still not taking on more than we can accomplish, that we are finding that niche that we can fill, that we are leveraging and making the highest and best use of our limited time and people is a continual challenge.

ACKER: One challenge that most of us face is that our growth is in a step function. When we hire one person, it's a big, big deal. So what does that person do? Well, they fill that fundamental need that we think we have--like information technology, for example. Then we do have to go peripherally to the business community to pick up outside expertise, whether it's in law, trademarks or whatever that happens to be. So our problem is we grow in steps, rather than a smooth path that would occur if we had a larger staff and resource base.

MARTINEZ: I just want to echo Maria: technology, technology, technology. We just can't afford the robust systems. Maybe there's a middle ground fix, but we don't have the technology expertise internally to even figure out what can we afford. So we are often dealing with half systems or almost-there systems.

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JIMERSON: One of the things we're facing is that move toward a more appropriate business model. Sometimes culturally as nonprofits, we get in our own way because we carry around this change-the-world mentality. People come to us for these jobs to help them and make a...