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Broadening the scope is meant here to be a solution for two types of organisations:
For the first type it means going into the market and earning some money.
For the second one it means combining the commercial activities with action activities.
(Read also: the fan of mainstreaming)
This development should only start after a thorough decision being made but in reality it often just happens. Once the possibility of making money is there, the desire to do so will occur.
The urge to do so is seducing, not only because of the money itself, but because of the meta-meaning of money. Being paid for the work is often experienced as a confirmation of the value of the work, of the competence of the workers and of the legitimacy of the organisation.
For the development of the organisation and for the quality of functioning, being paid may offer real advantages. Being competitive on the market may give the organisation an injection of being entrepreneurial, energetic, costs conscious, saturated by the necessity of delivering quality and motivated to give its best.
The fact that products or services, once filling a gap, now can be sold in a competing market, is a thrilling one. Subsidy is replaced completely or partially by profits as a commercially functioning market organisation.
The organisation may benefit of this change.
But there are also risks. Such a change is not only a change from offering products for free towards selling products, but also a change in the accompanying organisational culture and in each one's personal attitude. If the turnover to the market goes too fast or if the change is forced, the organisation might not survive the shock. People might not be able to follow the change. The buying force in the market might in the end prove not big enough.
A change like this should be made gradually, accompanied by well prepared internal discussions about the desirable and undesirable effects.
Organisations who succeed in conquering the market are mostly hybrid: partly market oriented and partly subsidised. This combination, if not managed well, may create all kinds of problems. The non-market part runs the risk to become the second-rate part of the organisation, and if workers are spread over the two compartments, then a division between first- and second rate workers may occur. Not because the best workers will enter the market part of the organisation, but because of the unconscious appraisal effect of paid work.
If money enters the organisation a firm mechanism will do its work, often resulting in: bad money drives out good. In other words: the market will gradually take a bigger the piece of the cake, the organisation ending up in being almost completely market oriented.
This development may parallel the process of -sometimes unintentionally- fading of the originally natural ideological inspiration.
(Read: the fan of mainstreaming.)
For some NGO's this development this development creates no problems, other will get gradually unsatisfied and worried. It raises questions about the ideological credibility. Becoming market oriented sometimes means losing contact with the movement, the grassroots or other original constituencies. Market oriented means being driven, in any case partly, by the perspective of profit. The main question seems to be: is it possible to keep the ideological roots alive?
From: the fan of mainstreaming, we borrow five conditions:
Financial transactions are only made if they offer possibilities to realise the mission of the own organisation.
Acting as a professional market party has to be combined with activist activities. This means that the organisation is able to combine an efficient and business like objective planning with a somewhat anarchistic way of operating.
Acknowledging that both activities may have strained relations may help to give room to the ideological action side and to slow down the technical professional side.
Actively looking for modern topics, alliances and means of communication. Action or campaigning is not a step back to the era of action, several decades earlier, but an actual element in a broad intervention strategy.
To avoid the development earlier mentioned as bad money drives out good the organisation should actively build in counter forces, intended to make the inspiration of the start into a continuous structural aspect of organisational life.
Organising debates to define the desired development of the organisation, discussing new problems for which's solution innovation is needed, assigning new-comers with important roles and functions, all of this it might help to counteract the routine, the technocracy and the cynicism of the ex-activists and to keep the ideological inspiration.