Lunch with Ben: Make your nonprofit easy to run

​I have spent a lot of time with people who run nonprofits. I know the look. You carry more than most people ever see. You answer emails late at night. You hold the mission together when everyone else has gone home.

​For years I sat on the funder's side of the table. I helped manage a $200 million capacity-building fund, one of the largest in Canada, and I read the files. I said yes, and I said not yet. And I saw, up close, why so many good nonprofits cannot scale. It was almost never the mission. It was that no one ever paid for the systems underneath the work.

​That is why I started Nimara. Too much of your day goes to forms, spreadsheets, and funder reports. The heart is there. The hours are not.

​This lunch is not a sales pitch. It is 45 minutes to sit together, to name what feels heavy, and to look at how a small team can run and report its work without hiring more people.

​Bring your lunch. Come as you are. Leave with an idea or two you can use that same week.

​What you can take away

• ​One clear idea to lift a task off your plate that you still do by hand

• ​A simpler way to get through funder reports

• ​A picture of what steady systems look like for a team your size

• ​Room to ask your own questions, and to be heard