I had a conversation last week that’s stayed with me.
Someone reached out with an idea. A good one. She wanted to start a not-for-profit that raises funds to help counselling students access the education they can’t otherwise afford, conferences, CEU credits, the kind of professional development that shapes a career but sits outside a university timetable.
Her plan was to ask businesses to donate.
I understood why. It’s a genuinely good cause, and donation is the model most of us reach for first when we want to do something values-driven. But I found myself pausing before I answered, because I could already see where this was heading.
Not because the idea was wrong. Because the ask was.
Here’s what I mean. A donation asks someone to give because it’s good. It relies on generosity, and generosity is a finite, unpredictable resource, especially from businesses who are themselves managing tight margins and their own recruitment headaches. You can build a program on donations. You can rarely build a sustainable one.
So I asked her a different question. What if the businesses you’re hoping will fund this aren’t donors at all? What if they’re buyers?
Every clinic and health business I work with is fighting the same battle right now: recruitment and retention. Finding good clinicians, training them, and watching too many of them leave. That’s not a fundraising problem. That’s a real, expensive, ongoing problem they’re already trying to solve.
So instead of asking a business to give money away, what if you asked them to pay for visibility? A platform that brings CEU providers, conferences and training opportunities together in one place for students and new graduates. Businesses pay a monthly fee to be seen there, not to be generous, but because it puts them in front of exactly the people they’ll want to recruit in eighteen months. That fee becomes the fund that pays for a student’s conference registration or a subsidised CEU place.
Same good outcome. Completely different container.
She’s now building it. So if you’re reading this thinking, that’s a genuinely good idea, you’re right, and I’d gently say: don’t assume it’s simple to replicate. What looks like one clean insight in a blog post is actually a platform, provider partnerships, a funding structure, and a lot of unglamorous infrastructure sitting behind it. Good ideas are common. Building them properly, over time, is not.
This is the part I think a lot of us miss when we’re building something values-led. We assume that if the cause is good enough, the commercial model will sort itself out. It won’t. A mission and a business model are two different conversations, and treating them as the same one is how good ideas quietly stall, or end up entirely dependent on the goodwill of a handful of donors.
The uncomfortable truth is that health professionals are often deeply uncomfortable with this kind of thinking. We’re trained to care, not to sell. Asking “what’s in it for them” can feel like it cheapens the reason we started. It doesn’t. It’s what makes the reason survive contact with reality.
Health professionals are also famously risk-averse buyers. We don’t like being sold to, and neither do the businesses and clinicians you’ll eventually need on side. But we do respond to trust, and trust gets built by showing, not asking. A business that invests in an industry’s next generation, before that generation ever works for them, is doing something more credible than any recruitment ad could do. That’s not a donation. That’s relationship-building with a return attached, for everyone involved.
I don’t think this is only true for a not-for-profit idea about student funding. I think it’s true for most of the values-driven ideas health professionals carry around, the community program, the mentoring pathway, the free resource you keep meaning to properly build. The idea itself is rarely the problem. The problem is stopping at “this would help people” instead of asking, “what problem does this solve for the people I need on side, and would they recognise it as one?”
Good ideas don’t need charity. They need someone willing to ask what they’re actually worth to the people funding them.
That’s where the real work begins. – Jo