INL 438: The Power Of Shared Infrastructure with Bob Burbridge

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Power Of Shared Infrastructure There is a quiet assumption baked into how most nonprofits operate. If you need something, you build it yourself. Need a fundraising event, plan one. Need HR, handle it in-house. Need systems, cobble them together. The nonprofit shared infrastructure that could carry all of this rarely enters the conversation, because the default is to go it alone. I understand where the instinct comes from. Nonprofits are scrappy by necessity. Budgets are tight, and doing it yourself feels like the responsible, frugal choice. But there is a hidden cost to building everything from scratch, and it shows up in the same place every time. Your team's time. Your leadership's attention. The liability nobody was watching. The event that ate six months of staff capacity to net twelve thousand dollars. When an organization tries to be its own event company, its own HR department, and its own back office all at once, it is running several businesses it never meant to start. And none of them get the focus they need to be excellent. I've been thinking about this lately I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Bob Burbridge, founder of the Battle Green Run Foundation and a longtime leader in the HR world. He built something that lets small nonprofits plug into infrastructure they could never build on their own, and that changes what is possible for them. Running An event is a business, not a fundraiser Here is the thing most nonprofits underestimate. A run, a walk, a gala, a conference. These are not fundraisers you tack onto your year. Each one is a whole business, with its own logistics, systems, vendors, permits, marketing, and expertise. Bob's foundation exists to run one road race well. Twelve board members. A website that handles all the fees. Relationships with sixty local restaurants. Decades of accumulated knowledge about how to actually pull it off. That is what it takes to do an event at a level where the numbers work. Now picture a small nonprofit deciding to launch its own 5K to raise money. Same permits. Same logistics. Same insurance. Same marketing. Except now it is being done by two staff members who already have full-time jobs, learning it all for the first time, for an event that might clear ten thousand dollars if everything goes right. The math rarely favors building your own event from zero. The work is enormous and the expertise is real, and both are invisible until you are standing in the middle of them. Before any organization takes on an event, it helps to ask a hard question. Are we prepared to run this like the business it actually is? If the honest answer is no, that is worth knowing before you commit a year of your team's life to it. <div cl