Effective board communication and collaboration are crucial for informed decision-making, clear communication, and streamlined operations. 

From defining how your organization will allocate resources to highlighting operations at year-end, showcasing how your organization meets the needs of your community is a crucial step in advocating for more resources, soliciting sponsorships, finding corporate partners, and, most importantly, demonstrating how your organization achieves its mission. 

One crucial stakeholder is your board. From reviewing strategic priorities and quarterly performance to advocating for new initiatives and upgrades, properly telling your organization’s story requires clear communication, visibility into processes and goals, and well-developed arguments.   

Follow these three practices to improve board communication and collaboration:  

1. Tell Your Story

Storytelling isn’t just for fairytales. When your finance team tells its story, it shares how your organization: 

• Contributes to fiscal sustainability 

• Breaks down
interdepartmental barriers  

• Highlights the relationship between programs, finances, and impact 

• Defines key performance indicators and ties them to future growth 

When telling your organization’s financial story, it’s essential to keep the narrative simple. Financial leaders must tailor information to board members who may not have accounting backgrounds, presenting data visually whenever possible to enhance comprehension and engagement. Focus on key metrics, such as liquidity, restricted versus unrestricted funds, and year-over-year trends, and elaborate whenever necessary.   

Board members want to know if the organization is financially healthy and able to fulfill its mission. Provide a bird’s-eye overview, accompanied by reports that delve deeper into the finances. Always provide context when appropriate. Whether through adding a few sentences or by supporting finances with goals your organization accomplished in the quarter or year, adding context to financials strengthens stakeholder trust and helps the board with informed, strategic decision-making.   

2. Break Down Data Silos  

Too often organizations unintentionally build data silos. From not properly communicating strategic priorities to using disconnected software, these silos not only prevent full visibility into an organization but limit operational efficiency and present mixed messaging to board members if left unresolved.  

When your team approaches communication and collaboration thoughtfully and intentionally, they break down data silos, yielding substantial benefits for organizations. These advantages include: 

Better Decision Making: Collaboration offers diverse perspectives and a more comprehensive understanding of various aspects of the organization, resulting in more informed and effective decisions.  

Clear Communication: Intentional collaboration naturally fosters clearer communication channels, reducing misunderstandings and ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding processes and goals.  

Efficient Operations: Identifying opportunities for collaboration helps streamline processes and eliminate redundancies, resulting in more efficient operations.  

3. Unify Technology

Meeting Organizational Goals: Ultimately, improved collaboration drives significant improvements in operations, ensuring that the organization’s mission and strategic goals are achieved.    

Another key area to focus on is disconnected systems. Research shows the importance of properly leveraging technology. Too often nonprofits use separate systems for overlapping tasks, creating more data silos.    

Fundraising and developmental departments are often unintentionally guilty of developing and maintaining a data silo. When finance teams lack complete visibility into fundraising efforts, they can’t properly align goals with fiscal information, and vice versa.   

To break down these silos, it’s crucial to identify pain points with your current processes:  

• Does your team have manual processes for reporting?   

• Is it difficult to generate specific reports (e.g., budget-versus-actuals by grant or department)?   

• Do you have easy access to real-time data?   

Creating a plan to address these issues is essential to break down the silo and unify the department. Here, your board is a critical stakeholder, as they will decide whether your organization will upgrade its technology.   

It’s important to create a strong argument about why you need to upgrade.  When left unaddressed, these data silos can severely impact an organization’s efficiency, compliance, and ability to make informed decisions. Some common pain points upgraded systems solve include:  

Long Delays in Reporting: Disconnected systems often lack the automation and flexibility needed to generate specific, detailed reports quickly. This causes finance staff to spend excessive time manually compiling data, causing significant delays in providing crucial financial insights to the board of directors. Such delays hinder the board’s ability to monitor financial health, track progress against strategic goals, and make timely, informed decisions.  

No More Manual Reporting: When a system isn’t designed for nonprofit accounting, you often must make numerous manual adjustments to categorize and track funds, grants, and restrictions properly. This adds complexity, increases the risk of errors, and makes the financial reporting process more cumbersome and less transparent.  

Inability to Make Timely, Informed Decisions: Without a system that provides real-time, accurate, and granular information (e.g., how much has been spent on a specific grant versus its budget), organizations struggle to measure the effectiveness of programs, manage cash flow efficiently, and make strategic decisions based on the most current financial picture. This can lead to missed opportunities, inefficient resource allocation, and a diminished capacity to respond proactively to financial challenges or opportunities. 

When presenting to your board, remember to add in context when appropriate, highlight the risks of not upgrading software, and show how breaking down these silos can unite departments in pursuit of your organization’s mission.  

Your organization can improve board communication by embracing storytelling, breaking down data silos, and unifying technology.   

Prioritizing board communication not only fosters a cooperative environment and streamlines operations but also makes the board a key strategic partner in advancing your organization’s mission and ensuring long-term success.