Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Power Of Shared Infrastructure There is a quiet assumption baked into how most nonprofits operate. If you need something, you build it yourself. Need a fundraising event, plan one. Need HR, handle it in-house. Need systems, cobble them together. The nonprofit shared infrastructure that could carry all of this rarely enters the conversation, because the default is to go it alone. I understand where the instinct comes from. Nonprofits are scrappy by necessity. Budgets are tight, and doing it yourself feels like the responsible, frugal choice. But there is a hidden cost to building everything from scratch, and it shows up in the same place every time. Your team's time. Your leadership's attention. The liability nobody was watching. The event that ate six months of staff capacity to net twelve thousand dollars. When an organization tries to be its own event company, its own HR department, and its own back office all at once, it is running several businesses it never meant to start. And none of them get the focus they need to be excellent. I've been thinking about this lately I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Bob Burbridge, founder of the Battle Green Run Foundation and a longtime leader in the HR world. He built something that lets small nonprofits plug into infrastructure they could never build on their own, and that changes what is possible for them. Running An event is a business, not a fundraiser Here is the thing most nonprofits underestimate. A run, a walk, a gala, a conference. These are not fundraisers you tack onto your year. Each one is a whole business, with its own logistics, systems, vendors, permits, marketing, and expertise. Bob's foundation exists to run one road race well. Twelve board members. A website that handles all the fees. Relationships with sixty local restaurants. Decades of accumulated knowledge about how to actually pull it off. That is what it takes to do an event at a level where the numbers work. Now picture a small nonprofit deciding to launch its own 5K to raise money. Same permits. Same logistics. Same insurance. Same marketing. Except now it is being done by two staff members who already have full-time jobs, learning it all for the first time, for an event that might clear ten thousand dollars if everything goes right. The math rarely favors building your own event from zero. The work is enormous and the expertise is real, and both are invisible until you are standing in the middle of them. Before any organization takes on an event, it helps to ask a hard question. Are we prepared to run this like the business it actually is? If the honest answer is no, that is worth knowing before you commit a year of your team's life to it. Shared infrastructure changes the math This is where Bob's model gets interesting, because it solves the problem from a completely different direction. Instead of each nonprofit building its own event, one organization builds the event infrastructure once, and many nonprofits plug into it. A small nonprofit brings a team of runners. They raise money through a website that already exists, run by people who already know what they are doing, with fees already covered. When the race is over, the proceeds come to them. They got the full benefit of a professionally run event without having to become an event company to get it. He built the same thing in his professional life through the professional employer model, where small businesses pool together so they can access group health plans, HR expertise, and compliance support that no single small employer could afford alone. The logic is identical. Specialized infrastructure is expensive to build and cheap to share. When you pool it, small organizations get access to a level of capability that would otherwise be completely out of reach. One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "We become a platform for these nonprofits to raise money on their own. We pay all the fees, and then when the race is over and our bills are paid, we take all that's left and share it with all the teams." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The value is not that Bob's group is generous, though they are. The value is structural. One entity absorbs the fixed cost and the expertise, and many organizations draw on it. That is leverage, and it is available far more often than nonprofits assume, if they stop defaulting to building alone. Some things should never be built in-house The same principle applies to the least glamorous part of running an organization. Human resources. Bob spent decades in the HR world, and his advice was direct. For most small nonprofits with paid staff, HR is not something to handle yourself. The regulations span fifty states and the federal government. The liability is real. And the power imbalance, when something goes wrong, is enormous. I know this one personally. Years ago I had an employee in another state and I had done everything correctly. New York State decided otherwise and started sending me fines that climbed toward thirty thousand dollars. I had to hire a lawyer. I spent many hours on paperwork. In the end I was right, I had done nothing wrong, and it still cost me thousands of dollars and a mountain of time. The lawyers on the other side had resources my small organization simply did not. Being in the right was not enough to make it painless. That is the kind of risk that lives quietly inside "we'll just handle it ourselves." HR compliance is specialized work, and specialized work is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from shared infrastructure. When it starts eating too much of your time, or when the liability is more than you can responsibly carry, that is the signal to bring in people who do it for a living. Community is the return most events forget to count There is one more piece of Bob's model worth naming, because it reframes what an event is even for. When you make an event a real community experience, the money is not the only return. The nonprofits at Bob's race network with each other. Startups learn from organizations that have been around for decades. Runners come back year after year because it feels like something, not just a transaction. The Minutemen fire a volley. A buffet from sixty restaurants. Families showing up to help. That community is an asset, and it compounds in a way a check never will. The fortune in fundraising is in the follow up, and an event that builds real relationships gives you something to follow up about. I had such a good time with you. Would you like to come tour our facility. Those conversations are where major gifts and lasting support actually come from, and they only exist if the event was built to create connection, not just to collect donations. Giving days and one-click donations have their place. But an experience people participate in creates relationships, and relationships are the quiet engine underneath every organization that fundraises well. What this makes possible When a leader sees this clearly, the pressure to build everything shifts. The question stops being how do we pull off our own event, our own HR, our own everything, and becomes what infrastructure already exists that we could plug into instead. That question opens doors. It means a small organization can access a professionally run event without becoming an event company. It means HR risk can be shared instead of shouldered alone. It means leadership attention goes to the mission, not to running four accidental businesses at once. The work does not disappear. It gets focused. And focus, applied to the few things only your organization can do, is what separates the nonprofits that thrive from the ones that stay stuck doing everything themselves. The bottom line This is not about doing less. It is about not building alone what someone has already built. Nonprofits can run excellent events. They can protect themselves from risk they cannot afford. They can grow without becoming experts at everything. Not by shouldering every function themselves, but by plugging into the infrastructure that is already there. About the Guest Bob Burbridge is a lifelong Lexington resident, community leader, and accomplished business executive with decades of service in both the nonprofit and human resources sectors. He is the founder and former CEO of Genesis HR Solutions, which he led from 1991 to 2023, growing it into one of New England's largest accredited professional employer organizations. Deeply committed to his community, Bob has held numerous leadership roles, including Chair of the Lexington Housing Assistance Board, Director of the Battlegreen Run Foundation, and founder of the Genesis Community Fund. His extensive civic involvement spans local government, youth athletics, and charitable initiatives, earning him honors such as Lexington's White Tricorne Hat Award. Throughout his career, Bob has also been a prominent figure in the HR industry, serving as President of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations and helping shape key legislation across New England. Connect with Bob: Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093515606579 Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/battlegreenrunfoundation/?hl=en Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! 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