Telling your Organization’s Story
How Mission-driven Organizations Use Financial Storytelling
Telling your organization's story is crucial to supporting your mission.
From defining how your organization will allocate resources to highlighting operations as the year progresses and at year-end, showcasing how your organization meets the needs of your beneficiaries is crucial.
Storytelling:
- Contributes to fiscal sustainability
- Breaks down interdepartmental barriers
- Highlights the relationship between programs, finances, and impact
- Supports mission delivery
- Defines key performance indicators and ties them to future growth
- Allocations for more resources
Financial Storytelling
Your organization’s finances fuel mission success, highlight the positive contributions you make to your beneficiaries, and demonstrate needs to potential donors.
There are two components to effective financial storytelling:
Budgeting
Your organization’s budget is its North Star. Your budget guides program development and shows your board and donors where funds are being allocated. Follow these best practices for budget planning:
Reporting
Where your budget shows what you’re planning, reports show how you’re executing your strategic plan. From reviewing financial reports quarterly, to closing your finances at the end of the year, financial reports demonstrate impact, and how your organization meets its goals. Follow these reporting best practices:
Impact Reports
Impact reports humanize financial reports and tell your organization’s whole story. When creating impact reports, it’s essential to unite your nonprofit’s financial, development, and operational sides to tell the complete narrative.
These reports are the narrative side of your annual report but shouldn’t be limited to influencing only that. Pulling snippets to include in letters, text messages, emails, social posts, and other similar forms of outreach shares your organization’s story and presents data in a digestible format.
Impact reports demonstrate the importance of your organization’s work to external stakeholders, and empowering the people who keep your mission moving forward. Sharing impact encourages your team to do their part and meet their goals. It holds them accountable but also gives them the recognition they deserve for the hard work they do.
12 Strategies to Demonstrate Impact
Follow these 12 strategies to demonstrate the impact of your organization through impact reports.
Account more. Report more. Thrive more.
Momentive’s MIP Accounting handles intricate financial processes and supports finance operations to boost efficiency, improve visibility, and bolster operations. Bring on Better for your organization’s finances.