I recently had my first experience negotiating a contract with a county. It didn’t go so well. Coming from a small organization, we thought getting a contract would be a long shot but figured, you never know. Imagine my shock when I received word that we had received the grant and would be going into contract negotiations.

It was a process like no other I had experienced. In my experience with grant proposals, you write what you do or are proposing to do and then if the funder likes what you have presented, they fund you or not (this is a dumbed down, very basic synopsis of a grant maker’s process…I know there’s a lot more to it, but this is the gist of it). I won’t get into the specific details of this process, but let’s just say that from the minute we sat down, they fired off questions at us. They liked the idea of what we were proposing – but they wanted us to change substantial parts of our proposal and had certain expectations that we realistically would not be able to meet. After a lot of discussion on our end, we formally withdrew from negotiations.

Not every organization and leadership team would have made that decision. Especially not in these cash strapped, financially strained times. However, I think situations and decisions like this should ALWAYS go back to the mission of the organization. We looked at our mission and realized the changes they were asking us to make would be a stretch and not directly tie back to our mission. We looked at our strategic plan and saw that if we accepted one of their requests, we would be completely ignoring a very clear direction laid out in our long range plan. We looked at staff time and resources. We ultimately did what was best for the organization and all those involved.

Sometimes, saying no, IS the best thing to do. Allowing funding to drive programmatic decisions can become a dangerous path to go down. What happens when that funding cycle ends? Or if, like a lot of government funding, it dries up? How will you sustain that program and keep it going?

If you want to read more about keeping an organization’s mission at the heart of decision making, I highly recommend Peter Brinckerhoff‘s book, “Mission-Based Management: Leading Your Not-For-Profit in the 21st Century.”