One of the pleasures of working for nonprofit clients is knowing that your services are really making a difference for the client and that you are contributing to the greater good on issues that matter to you. But that often means working with small, community-based organizations, and that’s where the pain comes in. How can you as a freelance writer serve small nonprofits, but also serve your family dinner each night? I’ve used several approaches over the years.
1) Use a sliding scale for your rates. If you can make big bucks from a few big clients, nonprofit or otherwise, you can afford to charge the little groups less. I personally group clients into three categories based on the size of their annual budget: under $1 million, $1-5 million, and over $5 million. The organizations with budgets over $5 million get charged as much as I’d charge a corporate client. The others pay less.
2) Limit the number of hours you donate at drastically reduced rates or at no charge. Decide ahead of time, for example at the start of the year, how much of your professional time you can reasonably donate and limit work for those small non-paying or barely paying clients to that amount.
3) Accept comps as payment. If the organization has a membership fee, ask them to make you a lifetime member, or to give you a set number of free memberships that you can then give away to friends, family, or clients as gifts. Same goes for tickets to their events.
4) Get creative with bartering. Create deals with other supporters of the organization who have something you want. For example, maybe a member of the nonprofit’s board owns a construction company. In exchange for you volunteering your communications services, the board member’s company would repair your deck. The bookkeeping can get a little complicated with this kind of bartering, but it can be done. (The board member’s company is basically paying you to perform a service for the nonprofit via barter, so the board member is the donor to the nonprofit, not you, in this case).
5) Trade your time for a testimonial or case study. In exchange for a reduced rate or pro bono project, ask the client to agree to provide a detailed testimonial that you can use in your marketing. It can even take the form of a longer case study that shows how you work with clients over time to improve their print or online publications.
