As a nonprofit leader, you know your organization is doing great work. But does the public?
Self-promotion can feel uncomfortable, particularly for altruistic, service-minded individuals drawn to charitable work. But in the nonprofit world, sharing your organization's accomplishments isn't bragging; it's a crucial way to ensure your group stays in compliance, secures its financial future, and, most importantly, sets itself up to continue working toward its founding mission.
It's a core business need, when you think of it that way.
It's no secret that nonprofit organizations rely on a number of funding sources. In addition to individual donations and grants, there are fundraising campaigns, matching gifts with corporate partnerships, membership fees, and in some cases, even crowdfunding. To secure any funding streams, you'll need to build external trust and sell people outside the organization on why they should support you. Donors, grantors, businesses, and individuals will be more inclined to open their wallets if they can see clear proof of the good you're doing, and once the checks have been written, they'll also want to see how their money is being put to appropriate use.
For these reasons and several more, top-notch nonprofit reporting tools are necessary for nonprofits and charitable entities. Extended financial planning and analysis (xFP&A) solutions help organizations create comprehensive reports that demonstrate organizational impact, attract donors, and maintain transparency, all with the overarching goal of fueling their community-enriching work.
Whether you measure the efficacy of your organization in the number of people helped, amount of money raised, the types of services rendered, or something else, effective reporting tools can demonstrate your impact clearly. The key is collating unlimited data streams and bringing them together in a centralized location to create a single source of truth. By integrating with your accounting ERP, CRM, and fundraising system, modern reporting solutions create a 360-degree view of your organization's financial and operational health.
Using interactive nonprofit dashboards, you can get real-time insights on a range of key performance indicators (KPIs), including financials, memberships, donors, grants, and volunteer insights, visualized in formats that are easy to understand. View key metrics, analyze trends, and make data-informed judgments about what's working and what's not. That way, you can not only make better business decisions, but also zero in on the impacts worth highlighting to existing and future donors and existing and future funding sources.
When it's time to generate reports to share those insights, advanced reporting tools allow users throughout your organization to design customizable and professional reports, complete with beautiful data visualizations through drag-and-drop simplicity. From statements of activities to membership overviews and public-facing annual reports, you can showcase whatever data matters most, in a format best suited for that information.
Imagine you are allocating your charitable contributions for the year. Would you direct your hard-earned cash toward an organization that makes only vague statements about its impact, or one that backs up those words with cold, hard data? The answer is clear.
Effective reporting means you can slice and dice your data however you see fit, using it to create attractive and comprehensive reports that will convince potential donors that you're a group worth supporting. Showing is always more effective than telling, building trust in a sector where that's its own form of currency.
Of course, it's also important to package your group's data in a way that's easy for anyone to understand—not just financial professionals. To that end, integrating with visualization solutions like Microsoft Power BI, the world's leading visualization platform, can help your story come alive. When paired with visual storytelling, your numbers will resonate with prospective donors.
Securing donations and grants is only one step in the process. Nonprofits must also maintain donor transparency, meet strict grant reporting requirements, and fulfill legal obligations.
When outside entities fund an organization's operations, they have a right to know where their money is going. Automated reporting through xFP&A makes it simpler to supply that information, ensuring that nonprofit organizations stay in compliance and meet their donors' expectations.
For example, a nonprofit employee creating an annual report about their organization could turn to dashboards to identify the KPIs most relevant to showcase to donors and members of the public, drilling down into the data as deeply as necessary. When it's time to translate that information to the public-facing report format, they can take advantage of report design features, as well as customizable and ready-to-use templates that make financial and operational reporting simple on any timeline.
Nonprofit organizations are out to change the world; the more individual donors, corporate partners, grant-funding organizations, and other funding sources can get on board with their mission, the closer they get to achieving it. That's why it's so vital for nonprofits to not only harness and analyze their internal data, but to share it in formats that will increase transparency, build trust, and inspire donors and others to get involved.
xFP&A solutions like Solver equip organizations with the reporting tools they need to do just that. Solver for Nonprofits brings together all your data streams, creates interactive dashboards for real-time insights, and provides advanced reporting capabilities that make it simple to design professional, compelling annual reports that demonstrate your impact and secure your funding future.
Contact Solver today to learn more about how our innovative xFP&A solution can support your organization's mission.