Optimizing Surplus Dollars
At this time of year, as a nonprofit leader, you are probably reviewing fiscal variance reports from the first six months of Fiscal Year 2023. These reports will tell you where your finances stand relative to what was predicted in the board-approved budget for the organization, likely completed and approved back in May or June of 2022. This fiscal year has likely gone as planned: no significant destabilizing events, like COVID, and seemingly minimal impact inflicted by the economy’s current challenges. At the same time, there have also been growth opportunities: government contracting, in particular, has looked to invest in areas like workforce development, homeless services, immigration services, and mental health care, to name a few. As a result, you may be noting surpluses year-to-date.
In these cases, you quickly start to think of how to invest surplus dollars. There are numerous, competing priorities: raises for staff, the need for greater infrastructure, and strengthening middle management, to name just a few. What if an investment could be made that would allow you to impact all three? Consider what an investment in a quality client management system could afford your organization.
Supporting Staff Recruitment and Retention: Yes, today’s workforce wants to be paid what they believe they are worth, but they also want technological solutions that optimize their efficiency, thereby ensuring a sense of professional impact, as well as work/life balance. A quality client management system allows an organization to streamline its program processes and data collection, saving employees significant time that can be put toward serving additional clients. This reporting functionality also rolls up into employee dashboards that will provide employees with a visual representation of their impact every time they log into the system. Finally, this system’s reporting functionality would prevent staff from having to drop everything when a report was due and rather, focus strictly on service delivery to participants.
Supporting Infrastructure: Fundraising teams can also have dashboards, significantly and positively impacting the amount of effort it takes to produce reports to existing funders and proposals to new ones. Further, this is also the time in the Fiscal Year when you are working with the development team on the organization’s annual report. Imagine if the agency-wide statistics – not just service numbers but also data that spoke to programs’ impact – were at your fingertips. This publication would take a fraction of the typical time invested every year. Such dashboards would also alert the development team to programmatic challenges early in grant cycles, which could in turn, inform proactive conversations with funders and maintain positive relationships with these key philanthropic resources.
Supporting Managers: Dashboards can also be designed for managers, allowing them to efficiently and effectively manage program staff toward their annual development goals and manage program development toward greater and greater impact. Nonprofits notoriously lag in providing real time and even annual feedback relative to employee performance. With a quality client management solution, each employee can set annual goals tied to their program’s goals and the client management system can capture each employee’s contribution to goals in real time. Further, the manager dashboard alerts managers to programmatic successes to celebrate and challenges to meet with strategic planning. As a result, if a program stumbles, the manager can address immediately versus not realizing these challenges until funder reports are due and it is too late to correct course.