A Guide for Building Nonprofit Organizations

The guide offers different supporting tools for NPOs according to their maturity and developmental level. The model was built based on scientific research and practical experience in building incubators and accelerators with some examples from successful local incubators and accelerators.

• The First chapter defines incubators and accelerators and shows the differences and similarities between them. It shows the proper use for each of them according to incubator or accelerator sponsor or owner.
• The second chapter explains the NPO building model and details its most important elements. Everything starts from the main goal and objective of building an incubator or accelerator. This is followed by analyzing incubators and ways to select them and build relationship with them. Next is to analyze the strength points for the incubator or accelerator and defining the program designs that capitalize on these strengths and offer best support to incubators. Finally, the analysis comes for partnerships needed in addition to revenue structure and cost structure of the incubator or accelerator.
• The third chapter explains the developmental lifecycle of an organization which consists of six phases, starting from the idea stage to beneficiary discovery, beneficiary validation, then strategy, operational and financial validation, then scale-up and finally self-sustainability.
• The fourth chapter discusses the governance of incubators and accelerators with the tools to measure their impact.

Finally, a detailed example of Misk incubator for Initiatives was illustrated to demonstrate how to apply the model on real life situation. We hope that this guide will help in the further development of NPOs for greater social impact.