Acterra

https://acterra.org/about-us/

Round

Fall-Winter 2024

Project Location

Palo Alto, CA

Project Type

Fast track

Project Focus

Market Analysis,

Operations Review

Organization Type

Environment

Organization

Acterra’s roots go back to 1970 with a long history of environmental action including watershed protection and land stewardship. In 2000, the Peninsula Conservation Center Foundation merged with Bay Area Action to create Acterra, which brings people together to create local solutions for a healthy planet with climate change as its focus. Acterra educates across beneficial electrification, climate-friendly food, and electric vehicles to equip students, residents, civic leaders, and local businesses with the ability to make informed and thoughtful decisions to create solutions for a healthy planet. Acterra is a convener organization, building community by partnering with community-based organizations (CBOs), as well as schools and local and regional government agencies, to promote and support building an informed and engaged citizenry.

Issue

Is fiscal sponsorship an earned revenue stream to which Acterra should devote people and financial resources in order to scale its impact on mission-critical issues?

Situation

As a small-medium nonprofit, most of the Acterra team’s time is spent running day to day operations and solving for the medium-term future. Acterra lacks the staff bandwidth to dedicate significant resources to long-term future growth and to implement the operational growth plan that the last Stanford ACT project team recommended in 2022. One area identified for supporting its strategic priorities is increasing earned revenue. Acterra currently provides back-end operational support (e.g. invoicing) to some of its nonprofit partners and receives inquiries about doing similar work for other nonprofits. The leadership team is interested in understanding how much they could lean into the fiscal sponsorship role for expanding earned revenues to dedicate to its priorities in its 2024-2026 Strategic Plan and thereby maximize program reach.

Project Overview

Before devoting people and financial resources to developing and promoting a more robust fiscal sponsorship arm, Acterra seeks additional assistance from ACT to conduct an organizational and competitive assessment. Acterra would like to understand who the key players are, how they are structured operationally, what services they provide to nonprofits that pay for fiscal sponsorship, and what their fee structures are. Additionally, the leadership team would like an assessment of Acterra’s strengths and areas of development for building its own fiscal sponsorship operation.