Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
By Erin Gloeckner
Take yourself back to college math class; perhaps you studied statistics or calculus. You may have been one of the lucky few who aced every exam, but more likely, you had trouble staying awake during lectures. Numbers can be boring, confusing, and overwhelming when you’re not a math whiz. Still, nonprofit leaders require financial awareness and diligence to sustain their organizations’ missions and operations. While you might prefer to pass finance to the CFO and never crunch numbers again, finance is truly a shared responsibility. Take part in writing and telling your nonprofit’s financial story to generate momentum toward fiscal health.
Many nonprofits remain in a weak position with regard to fiscal literacy and engagement because they present financial data as a dull, mathematical maze. What are the contextual issues that lead to the sharing of cold calculations rather than a compelling financial story?
As you may have heard, ‘dashboard’ is the new buzzword in the nonprofit finance arena. A financial dashboard is a tool for inspiring greater fiscal awareness and enthusiastic participation in fiscal oversight. Awareness and participation are essential to identify and address sort-term and long-term financial challenges. A typical dashboard consists of a set of ¡°dials,¡± images or charts that depict various financial results. For example, one chart may illustrate the organization’s progress in reaching a specific goal (e.g., a fundraising target for the fiscal year), while a second chart could illustrate Working Capital and Debt to Asset Ratios. Yet another image could illustrate how many months of cash a nonprofit has in reserve. The number of images in the dashboard and what they show is limited by your imagination! While a dashboard can be an effective tool, it must be created thoughtfully and with an audience in mind. Develop your dashboard with these strategies as a backdrop:
Financial Storytelling at its Finest
No matter the purpose, remember that your audience will not listen to a financial story that isn’t entertaining. Brainstorm about your audience’s interests and the metrics they care about measuring. And remember to design your dashboard with your audience’s financial expertise, or lack thereof, in mind.
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