Fall is a crucial time for donations, with many donors and mission-driven organizations determining their year-end giving plans.
This is an important time to ensure your organization’s accounting and development teams are in tune with each other’s goals and needs.
From budgets and planning to collecting donor information and accounting for fundraising dollars, your organizational operations can be in perfect harmony.
Pre-Fundraising Preparation
While accounting is busy prepping reports and ensuring budgets are on track, donor development and fundraising teams are working to create campaigns and develop new income sources.
Prior-year reports and budgets help development teams create more honed-in campaigns and set realistic goals and expectations for the funding your nonprofit can expect from this year’s campaigns.
From estimating costs associated with fundraising events to showing how your organization will use the funds to make a difference before any fundraiser takes place, your accounting team can kick off the planning efforts and set realistic expectations and goals with the development team.
Explore this step-by-step guide for inspiration to reach your year-end fundraising goals. From planning to execution to post-campaign analysis, this guide will make your fall fundraising season the most successful to date.
Once you have worked with the development team, it is time to kick off your campaigns.
Kicking Off Your Year-End Fundraising Campaigns
With goals set and budgets approved, your development team is now launching its campaigns. This execution phase turns planning into action, volunteers are helping take your campaigns to the next level, and as donations come in having a strong, integrated system is essential for accurate processing , managing event expenses, and tracking progress in real time.
With the campaigns underway, it’s not too early to begin analyzing your ongoing campaigns.
Analyzing Ongoing Year-End Campaigns
Once dollars come rolling in, accounting will be tracking donations and expenses and reconciling bank accounts to ensure transactions are completed and preparing financial reports on the campaign’s performance.
How you track and manage the funds is crucial to your nonprofit’s success. To be successful, your team needs easy access to:
Financial Reporting
Financial reports are the heart of your campaigns. From shaping goals, to influencing ongoing campaigns, reports are at the core of your organization’s fundraising.
Your organization should have tools in place to assist with donation tracking, expense management, revenue projections, simple account reconciliation, and report creation.
Rely on real-time financial reporting and enable your team to quickly access up-to-date financial data, make timely decisions, and more importantly, ensure your organization manages cash flow effectively.
Automation
Technology automates the data entry process, reducing the time spent on manual input and minimizing errors.
As you get into the thick of fundraising season and approach the end of the year, the more your organization can embrace automation, the faster it can prepare reports that shape ongoing efforts, and recap completed campaigns.
Budgeting
Budgeting and forecasting ensures your organization is working towards its mission. Your budget ensures you’re meeting the goals to fund future financial needs and helps your team manage resources effectively during the high-stakes year-end season.
Relying on tools with error detection mechanisms helps identify and corrects discrepancies promptly, ensuring accurate financial records.
Audit
Audits ensure your organization is a sound steward of donated funds. Your organization’s financial tools should feature robust audit trails that document every transaction and change made in the system, and ensure your organization is a good steward of raised funds.
This transparency is crucial for internal and external audits and helps maintain regulatory compliance. Plus, your audit provides the data that is the basis of year-end financial reports.
This step-by-step guide features resources and best practices for audits. Whether you have an established process or need help getting started, it covers everything you need to know.
Beginning your analysis as campaigns are still ongoing ensures your organization is on track to reach its goals, and most important, fund initiatives that benefit your members and beneficiaries.
Wrapping up and Analyzing Fall Fundraising
As your campaigns and fall fundraising season ends, the data your teams’ collect is critical to creating future campaigns and telling your organization’s story. When your organization incorporates fundraising data into the financial planning and analysis processes, it drives better development outcomes.
Just as you’re tracking campaign success, ensuring your organization remains compliant is critical. While compliance standards vary on a state level, these guidelines cover general areas finance teams must handle to stay in compliance:
Audit Preparation: Show that your organization is a good steward of donated funds. Prepare for internal and external audits by organizing financial records, supporting documentation, and ensuring all accounting practices meet auditing standards.
Grant Reporting: For organizations that receive grants, ensure compliance with grant requirements, including adequately reporting how funds are used and meeting stipulated conditions.
Internal Controls: Internal controls prevent fraud and ensure the integrity of financial data by segregating duties, requiring transaction authorization, and accommodating a regular review of financial processes.
Tax Compliance: Ensuring accurate and timely filing of tax returns, including any specific forms related to charitable contributions (e.g., Form 990 for nonprofits in the U.S.), and adhering to tax-exempt status requirements.
Gift Acknowledgement and Receipting: Teams must properly outline what is required to acknowledge donations for tax purposes.
Tracking Restricted vs. Unrestricted Funds: Restricted funds have strict parameters governing what your organization can spend funds on. Finance teams must follow those guidelines to remain in compliance.
Compliance considerations are non-negotiable for continued operational success. Ultimately, however, the most agile and successful mission-driven organizations use this wrap-up data not just for compliance, but to strategically plan for the future.
Creating Continued Success
Prioritizing an agile fundraising strategy ensures that your financial plans are directly linked to mission delivery, allowing you to quickly pivot based on changing donor preferences or grant restrictions, and ultimately secure the long-term sustainability of your organization.
The key to fall fundraising success? Properly leveraging your organization’s technology. Using fundraising and accounting technology in unison gives your team the tools to create sustained fundraising success.
Momentive Software is proud to provide the tools to nonprofits and associations to make this possible. When every dollar needs to contribute to your purpose, our solutions are designed to eliminate administrative hurdles and provide the data needed for proactive fundraising. By automating manual tasks and unifying your data, we free your team to focus on strategic planning and achieving maximum impact.
GiveSmart fundraising software is a full-featured fundraising and donor management solution invested in your success that combines event and fundraising efforts with a Donor CRM for a 360° view of development success.
MIP Accounting is a cloud-based accounting software built specifically for mission-driven organizations. For over 40 years, MIP has helped thousands of organizations track every fund and follow every dollar. Efficiently run core accounting workflows, create, and collaborate on unlimited budget versions, and integrate HR and payroll into accounting.
VolunteerMatters helps mission-driven organizations manage their volunteer base, which is a crucial part of mission awareness and growth. With these tools, organizations can manage their efforts more efficiently, make deeper connections with their supporters, and power their organizations all in one place.
