Capacity Building Considerations

Building capacity in non-profit organizations or social enterprises is often difficult. The expertise is such areas is with the services provided or social mission/goals of the organization. The business expertise is often lacking. This creates difficulties in planning for increased capacity. What even defines increased capacity can be difficult and varies between enterprises. Often operating on a shoe-string budget, providing services now is a priority.

I feel our enterprise can avoid some of these pitfalls. Using the model of current for-profit financial entities provides a blueprint of how things can work. As a services provider that relies on human capital, our capacity constraints are talent and a information technology infrastructure. The human talent is what worries me the most. Finding talented individuals to do difficult work can be a challenge. I constantly read of a talent shortage and know those individuals that will be fit for the job are in an even shorter supply. Additionally, we will be competing with prestigious financial firms for this talent. We hope to be competitive on pay, something or social enterprises may have difficulty with, but in the financial services industry prestige matters. The IT infrastructure we will need is less of a concern. Such services have almost become commoditized and are mostly restrained by a lack of vision. At the outset, we have viewed this business as extremely scalable, therefore we believe we can avoid this problem.

Perhaps the biggest issue in IT, and in the business as a whole, is the initial capacity. We will need to make up front investments and will not see a return for an estimated 2 years. This is because the measurement of program outcomes take time. The initial investment in capacity and the judicious use of capital is of utmost importance to us in the beginning and should be where our attention as it relates to capacity should be focused.