One of my greatest frustrations in trying to build a sustainable nonprofit organization has been the difficulty in finding capital. GuideStar has been blessed with a consortium of foundations that have generously invested tens of millions of dollars in our early years. But as we have grown and reached mid-life in our maturation, foundation dollars for operations have been harder to raise. Several years ago we took on over $2 million in PRI’s as a way to bring in stable and reliable dollars that we could invest in product development, sales and marketing in order to continue our growth at a fast pace. We’re pleased to say that we ended 2010 with 90 percent of our operations covered by sales of products and services and we’re now to a point that increasingly we are relying on foundations for special projects and opportunities, but not support for direct operations. In general we’re now starting to see some attention given to the lack of nonprofit capital and there are a number of interesting developments going on in the nonprofit sector (a subject of another blog). I’ve often thought, though, that with easier access to capital, GuideStar could have grown much faster.