Are your financial statements holding back your fundraising?
Financial Statements. Board Reports. Annual Reports. Audited Financial Statements. Form 990 tax filings. Financial Plans. Yikes!
When you are running a nonprofit organization, the variety of financial reports can be overwhelming, particularly if they are calculated differently from application to application.
Your financial statements are a structured and critical way to get actionable information to decision makers. If your financial statements aren’t in great shape, you are going to face challenges. Using them for decision making will be difficult and confusing. Great financial statements offer high consistency of accounting and reporting across different applications, leading to transparency and clarity.
Are you a church or nonprofit for whom public charity ratings don't apply? The principles in this series still apply. Your contributors and stakeholders are interested in your sustainability and stewardship of resources and actually have limited ways to access relevant information if you don't supply it.
Improved financial reporting also positively impacts direct donor discussions and can increase your public transparency rating on Candid and the Financial & Accountability beacon rating on Charity Navigator. Candid (GuideStar) offers transparency ratings for public charities ranging from Bronze to Platinum and Charity Navigator offers up to 4 stars for charities deemed effective. Improved public charity ratings signal to donors that you will use their donation well, which helps increase your fundraising.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself:
Do my organization’s financial statements conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)?
Does my organization publish interim financial statements monthly?
Are our financial statements audited regularly (for organizations over $2 million annual contribution revenue)?
Don’t let avoidable financial statement errors be the barrier between your charity and your potential donors.
Let Missionwell help you enhance your financial transparency, boost your ratings, and achieve your fundraising goals. By improving your financial statements, you can elevate your organization’s profile on these platforms, attracting more support and trust from potential donors.
If you have concerns over why your charity ratings are not as strong as they should be, Missionwell’s Stars for Stars assessment will yield robust recommendations and a road map to improved charity ratings for your organization across multiple areas. And if you also know your accounting and financial reporting needs help, you can add remediation services as an add-on to your Stars for Stars assessment.
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Welcome to the world of better decision making through stronger accounting and financial reporting and getting the stars from Charity Navigator and seals from Candid (GuideStar) that you deserve.
This is article 1 of 6 in our series on improving public charity ratings to increase fundraising.