Last fall, MCN began a three-year project to assess the current patterns of government grants and contracts with nonprofit organizations at the state and county level.  We recently completed one of the major steps in this process: surveying nonprofit organizations in Minnesota to learn about their experiences with the state funding system.

The response to the survey, which closed May 31, was even greater than anticipated - over 575 organizations participated.  One of the purposes of this study is to identify why some nonprofits are unsuccessful in securing state funding and discover why other organizations do even try to apply.  Therefore, our survey was targeted both at nonprofits that receive funding and those that don't.  We were successful at reaching nonprofits outside the state funding system: 40% of survey respondents do not currently receive any state funding.  Of these, the majority have never tried to secure state funding (60%), while others have recently tried and failed, and still others have had state funding in the past, but are not currently seeking any.

Nonprofits completing the survey represented the broad diversity in the nonprofit sector.  Respondents came from all areas of the state: 43% located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, another 12% from the Twin Cities metro area, 16% from Northern Minnesota, 10% in Central Minnesota, 12% in Southern Minnesota, and seven percent considered themselves statewide organizations.

Furthermore, participants represent the experiences of both large and small nonprofits: 19% of the organizations have annual budgets over $3 million, another 17% have budgets between $1 and $3 million, 32% have budgets between $250,000 and $1 million, and 28% have budgets under $250,000.  These nonprofits are also engaged in a wide variety of activity areas: 274 organizations identified themselves as being involved in human services, 217 in education, 158 in youth development, 144 in health, 123 in housing, and 109 in the arts, to name a few of the more popular activity areas.

Using new technology, we have been able to accelerate the process of entering and analyzing the data we have collected.  Nearly all of the surveys were completed online.  This web-service allowed us to easily design the survey and then automatically entered respondents' answers into a database - saving us valuable data entry time and eliminating data entry errors.  Organizations not able to complete the survey online were also able to complete the survey on paper and return it in a more traditional way.

What's next?
Our first step is to prepare a report highlighting the lessons we can learn from the experiences of Minnesota's nonprofits with the state grants and contracts system: What works?  What could work better?  What doesn't work at all?  And also, what do nonprofits left out of the system need to be more involved and competitive? When completed, the report will be posted on this webpage.

In order to explore in more depth the issues raised by the survey, MCN will also be setting up focus groups later this year.  In face, 175 of the organizations that took the survey also expressed interest in participating in these focus groups.

Click here to see a brief summary of the survey results

Click here to see a copy of the survey instrument

(Last updated: November 7, 2002)
Questions? Comments? Contact Christina Wessel at cwessel@mncn.org