What do you want the business community to know about your philanthropic needs and how they can help you achieve those long-term goals, maybe doing something really outside of the box that may not be something you can seek traditional funding for?

• Position: Industry Outlook: Q&A - Interview

DIVRICEAN: The view of what a not-for-profit is is changing. The shift is dramatic. Somehow the people that benefit from your programs, they expect free services, but at the highest quality level. But people that fund you, people that support you, they look at you as a not-for-profit. And because of that, they want you to have certain financial principles. Pay for your staff has to be lower for some reason. The resources are very different.

So the people that do want to support us look at us totally differently than the people that benefit from our services. I feel it every day. I am being held at a highest level of standards by the people that benefit from the programs, and they pay half or nothing for their services. However, the people who support us, they expect you to do as much as you can with volunteer work, pay your staff almost nothing, and so on. That is the shift that is happening, and it's unfortunate. It is a survival game, to some degree, because you have to somehow educate your donors to give you the support you need in order to provide that awesome service.

BRAY: What I have found is that funders are on three different levels. The smaller funders want every single dime to go to programs--they want that 100-percent rule. As they get more involved and they are on your board and they understand your cost centers, they move to this other area where they understand the importance of paying your staff a livable wage and that retention is key to your nonprofit. If you've got churn, it's like any other business in that you are not going to be able to deliver on your mission.

And then the ones that are really exciting for us to work with are those that can say, "OK, I get that it's important to have these different cost centers, but I want to make population change and I want to work not with your nonprofit, but with other similar nonprofits in the sector. And how can we get to population change, how can we end poverty, how can we end homelessness, how could we end inequity within our communities, how could we make sure that every high school senior graduates and goes to college or is able to fulfill their dream?"

Those are big, complex systems and questions, and we find more and more funders are really interested in that and want to have conversations with a group of unlikely partners around nonprofits. It's a cross-sector partnership, because they really understand that we can't do this by ourselves. We need business, we need...