Soundness is the number one criteria. For pigs and nonprofits.

My 11-year-old son decided he wanted a Hereford pig for 4-H this year.

If you're not in the livestock world, that might not mean much. But in Kansas, where the show pig circuit runs pretty predictably on certain breeds, a Hereford is a choice that isn’t easy to come by.

So we did what 4-H parents do. We looked until we found one, and we ended up buying a pig online from Indiana. Eight hundred and fifty dollars all in, between the pig and the Livestock Express shipping fee. My child has been doing 4-H long enough to know that's a real investment for a show animal, but it was his money and his choice.

“Mike” came off the trailer with an air of Winnie the Pooh — red with a white face and floppy ears. We got him settled. We were excited.

A month later, after a trip to the county extension office for tagging, we noticed a limp on his right front leg. Within weeks he was a tenderfoot on both front legs, walking on his toes instead of striding out.

One look from a pig expert, and the verdict was clear: that's genetic. He's built that way. It didn't come from the trip or a stumble off the ramp. It's just how his legs work.

With show animals, soundness is the number one criteria. If your pig can't walk right, it isn't going to place. We've got about seven weeks until the fair, $850 committed, a feed bill still running, and a pig that is just not put together right.

However, with an 11-year-old, there is no such thing as a lost cause. So we ordered the recommended supplements with Hyaluronic Acid, Methylsulfonylmethane, Glucosamine and Chondroitin — the cocktail that is, I will note, essentially the same thing humans take for bad knees. We are putting the supplements in the feed and hoping 120 days' worth of improvement will somehow compress into seven weeks.

We are, in other words, putting lipstick on a pig. Literally.

And all but one of us have accepted the truth:you cannot supplement your way out of a structural problem. 

The pig's legs are built the way they're built. We can make him more comfortable. We can try to mask the situation. But no amount of well-intentioned additives changes the underlying architecture.

This story is akin to what I hear from grantmakers.

They invest real money into nonprofits with real potential — organizations doing work that communities genuinely need — and then they watch those organizations struggle to build the support that would let them do more of it. The mission is good. The work is real. But donors aren't growing. The community doesn't quite understand what the organization does or why it matters. And the people running it are so deep in the work itself that they don't have a system for bringing anyone else along.

What drives funders nuts: grantees are afraid to be honest about where they are.

They’re scared that if they admit their communications are inconsistent, their donor base is stagnant, and their credibility outside their own walls is thin, then the funding disappears. So instead of saying "we don't have a system for building support," they post something on Facebook and call it outreach. They send a newsletter when they have news and go quiet for months. They apply for grants describing impact they can't actually demonstrate because they've never built the infrastructure to capture and communicate it.

The foundation, wanting to believe in them, keeps funding it. And nothing actually improves.

Wishing your nonprofits will figure out how to build support on their own is not a strategy. Neither is a one-day workshop. You wouldn't hand a youth sports team a playbook and tell them to go win the championship without a coach and practice. Yet that's essentially what happens when we fund organizations without also investing in the communications infrastructure and ongoing support that would make them effective.

The nonprofits doing the most important work in your region have a problem that won't fix itself with a social media tip sheet or a single training. They need a real system for telling their story, reaching the right people, demonstrating their impact, and building the kind of trust that turns into sustained support. They need someone who will be honest with them about what's broken and walk with them toward what works.

If this resonates with what you're seeing in your work, I'm doing a free webinar on Thursday, June 11, at 1:00 PM CST — Building Nonprofit Communications Capacity — specifically for foundations and funders who want a clearer framework for identifying the gap and structuring support that actually helps.

Register Here

Hope is not a strategy. And despite an 11-year-old’s greatest wishes, supplements won't fix the legs.

Lori