The Need for Certification with Nonprofits

As a nonprofit organization, the fulfillment of your mission statement is the most important activity you can do. After all, if you’re not doing that, then most of the donor or grant money will shrivel up, leading to a downward spiral. It is vital for representatives of your organization to be well versed in everything about that mission statement.

However, as an organization grows and grows the difficultly of venting representatives will increase rapidly. This effect will only be compounded as training gets harder and harder to manually certify each learner. A wide-sweeping system for instructing and verifying that instruction is needed.

Why is certification so important?

Most, if not all, nonprofits survive off their reputation with most of their money coming from government grants. Securing these government grants requires that a nonprofit both identify a problem and plan how to solve it. While certification does not impact the former, it is a necessary part of the latter.

For example, if your organization focuses on uplifting communities through volunteer service, your teams will gain credibility in the eyes of the community (and, thus, government) if your leadership goes through a certification program. Part of demonstrating that your organization can solve the problems it claims it can is by having a system for teaching those solvers.

Certifications go beyond just demonstrating that someone knows the “how” of an issue—they can be a symbol of thorough understanding of the “what” and “why.” These two are necessary for the function of advocate groups who often seek to spread messages or bring attention to issues. The need for understanding is furthered by nonprofit organizations typically getting very limited time in the spotlight, which can be easily ruined because the spokesperson does not understand why or how to describe the problem.

Certification is more than proof

Up to this point, we’ve referred to certification only to prove that someone knows something, but it can also be a sorting mechanism. As your organization grows, it’ll be equally more difficult to ensure who knows what and where they should be focusing. Certification allows this sorting and structuring to be much easier while being more effective.

Certification doesn’t have to be difficult

You might be looking at this thinking that you would have to hire someone or create a new system of distributing certifications which would be too costly and time-consuming to be of value. However, with software like CoreAchieve, affords widespread distribution of eLearning and certifications with lost cost (both of time and monetarily).

CoreAchieve specializes in certifications and accreditation, as such, it is an optimal solution for the guarantee of knowledge and proper structuring. All records are kept indefinitely, or certifications can be set to expire, so CoreAchieve goes beyond just labeling what someone has accomplished. Furthermore, CoreAchieve has a free version that does not limit any features, so you can try integrating certifications into your organization without cost.