Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, Third Edition

Chapter 3

The First Relationship—Within Your Organization

Creating the Infrastructure That Produces a Healthy Organization

The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

—Daniel J. Boorstin1

The non-profits are human-change agents. And their results are therefore always a change in people—in their behavior, in their circumstances, in their vision, in their health, in their hopes, above all, in their competence and capacity. In the last analysis, the non-profit institution . . . has to judge itself by its performance in creating vision, creating standards, creating values and commitment, and in creating human competence. The non-profit institution therefore needs to set specific goals in terms of its service to people. And it needs constantly to raise these goals—or its performance will go down.

—Peter Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 85