I came across a New York Times article on Babson College and its entrepreneurial students  the other day. Babson is the home of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship.

What intrigued me about the article is what we might learn from entrepreneurs, or at least college-level programs aimed at helping people learn to be entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs have a bias towards action. They don't spend a lot of time writing budgets or writing out plans. But those who succeed manage to at least capture enough information to educate their process. They also, early on in their projects, figure out what critical factors will affect the success of their ideas. And teaching what those factors are and how to capture them is at the core of many entrepreneurial courses.

We can also learn from the mistakes they study. For example, the documentary Startup.com is a great movie about a couple of guys who start a web site that is supposed to help Jane and Joe Citizen link to their local government. One line that gets repeated again and again is from their pitch to venture capitalists. The line is something to the effect of "How many times have you spent an entire morning taking care of a parking ticket at city hall?" 

Well, perhaps our local governments in the Northwest are models of efficiency, because I've never spent more than about ten minutes….usually the biggest cost is the check I write and the stamp I have to put on the envelope. So it was no surprise when this web business, GovWorks.com, never gained traction.

Recently I read some background on GovWorks.com developed since the movie. The most revealing comment is an admission by one of the original two partners in the web business.  He said that now he realizes that their major error was in marketing the benefits to individual citizens. Since government offices were going to foot the bill, they really needed to convince local government officials how GovWorks.com would benefit them in their work.

The lesson here for nonprofits is remembering that you have to connect to funder values. GovWorks failed because it never convinced local government officials that being on the web was important enough for them to pay for it. 

Even though grant money is given away, it is still given with a purpose in mind. A funder is not buying a tangible good, like materials for a manufacturing process or something his or her organization will consume.

 But the funder is buying something for the community, whether it's increased access to health care for children or leadership development through youth groups.

Grant seekers and entrepreneurs have a common ground in understanding how to reach that common ground of action, yet at the same time capturing enough information do make a convincing case to funders.