Since NEED featured Modest Needs last year, the organization has taken off. To find out about its recent progress, I spoke with founder Keith Taylor. Read the interview below to learn about Modest Needs’ new developments.

Q: How are things?

A: We had a spectacular year last year. Our previous year we did about 880,000 dollars and in 2007 we blew right past the million dollar mark over to 2.056 million. More grants than ever, our pass through is better than ever.

Q: Modest Needs uses its website really well to connect aid givers and recipients in a personal way through the testimonials and individual requests for help. How do you think that that direct connection inspires compassion and understanding?

A: Everybody wants to reach out specifically; everybody wants to feel helpful. It’s one thing to give money to an organization and another thing to help a person. I think that that’s the real difference that you’re seeing. At Modest Needs people have the very real sense that they are helping a person through a difficult crisis as opposed to giving Modest Need money and letting us decide what’s going to happen to it and who’s going to get help. That’s what you see inspiring the compassion, that there is that one-to-one direct connection. There’s an old adage in the non-profit world: people do not give to organizations – they give to people. What we’ve really done is try to make that connection as clear and straightforward at our website.

Q: How do small donations make a meaningful impact?

A: I read at some point that the average non-profit depends on corporate and foundation support for about 85 per cent of all of its income. Individual donors make up the other 15 per cent. At Modest Needs we have finally gotten to the point where we can get foundation grants and we do, and we use those for operating expenses, and we do have corporate partnerships and they help us fund a significant number of persons. But even so the ratio of individual donors to the percentage of our income is about 55%. Our donors our making up more than half of our revenue and the average donor at Modest Needs is giving a dollar a day. So you’re talking about making up at least half of 2.05 million last year in very, very small contributions. They made a huge difference.

Q: Do you have any great new stories?

A: Well, I can tell you something that we’ve looked at in terms of the future. We’re just about to create a Modest Needs for non-profits. It’s really the same type of inspiration that resulted in Modest Needs. I had been in personal situations where a small amount of help from somebody who cared about me made a really big difference in my life – thus Modest Needs was born. Now, having been on the other side of this and operating a non-profit, I know what it is to be in the bulk of non-profits who don’t have operating revenues more than a quarter of a million dollars. They don’t have the capacity to write grants for the small needs that they have because foundations that have multiple millions of dollars in assets don’t have time to vet an application for a printer. At the same time we’ve found that the non-profits in this position, not only can’t write grants, but they don’t have the communications capabilities to let donors know what they need. For example, you’re a dog lover and you find out that your local animal shelter’s going to close unless they get 300 pounds of dog food, who’s not going to do that? But they the shelter has no way to ask for it. So we’re going to create a facility whereby non-profits that aren’t large enough to write grants and benefit from that kind of fundraising will be able to place an application at Modest Needs and have people fund their own immediate needs so that they can keep themselves operating through a short-term crisis. The goal here is to let individuals have an even larger impact than they’ve already had at Modest Needs. When they help another individual, they are certainly doing a great service to the individual and the community where they live, but if they help a non-profit in the same way, they’re serving the non-profit, the community and the constituency that the non-profit serves. It’s a natural extension of what we do at Modest Needs and I think you’re going to see a tremendous impact when we launch that.

A: Any other updates?

Q: We’re finally set to launch in Canada after a long process, in June. That’s really important because Modest Needs has always been a joint American-Canadian venture. The guy who helped me with the original programming of Modest Needs was Canadian, so it was the ultimate cooperative effort between representatives of two countries that resulted in this terrific charity in the United States. Now, we’re going to be able to reverse that and bring it back into Canada. We got our four-star Charity Navigator rating, that was a big deal, and we got our Better Business Bureau accreditation. Those are the biggest updates for now and they’re all pretty good.

Modest Needs Foundation
115 E 30th Street
Floor 1
New York, NY 10016
USA
212.463.7042
questions@modestneeds.org
www.modestneeds.org

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Interviews, Organizations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.