Spark Synergy: Aligning Fundraising and Finance to Ignite Mission Impact

Our topic today is spark synergy, aligning fundraising and finance to ignite mission impact. So I wanted to lean into the conference theme of Spark here. So here’s the topics we’ll cover today, we’ll talk about Spark exploration here will Read More

Our topic today is spark synergy, aligning fundraising and finance to ignite mission impact. So I wanted to lean into the conference theme of Spark here. So here’s the topics we’ll cover today, we’ll talk about Spark exploration here will define the problem we’re trying to solve for Spark efficiency. We’ll talk about how to drive greater mission impact by eliminating manual tasks and data discrepancies. Spark insight, we’ll look at how to gain a 360 degree view of your nonprofits financial health, Spark opportunity. We’ll talk about how to unleash your nonprofits potential sparks success, we’ll hear how one nonprofit sparked their success by aligning their fundraising and finance and spark action. We’ll talk about next steps. And of course, feel free to ask any questions along the way. And we should have time for q&a at the end. So I want to start today with a look at some market research that’s been done in the nonprofit sector around key challenges that that nonprofit leaders are facing. This will lay the foundation as to why we’re here today talking about aligning fundraising, and finance. So let’s start with a little reality check. First. For the past five years at Sage, we’ve conducted our nonprofit technology trends survey. And one of the questions we always ask our respondents is, what are the biggest external challenges your organization is facing today. So of course, these are challenges that come from outside the organization and are beyond your control. So on the screen, you’ll see the responses we received from this last year survey. And it has economic uncertainty, inflation and competition for funding all tied as the top challenge that our respondents were facing. The uncertainty in the economy, of course, has had significant impact on all sectors, but in the nonprofit sector, it has had an impact shaping operations and funding sources and overall viability. With the economy experiencing volatility, it’s super important that nonprofits have the ability to make fast changes to respond to different impacts and in order to be successful in the climate. So I also want to take a moment to highlight that staffing shortages was also a common concern. And it was a concern that permeated throughout our survey responses this year. And I know that this challenge, again, is is occurring across for profit and nonprofit industries. But we hear all the time from our nonprofit customers about the challenges of trying to do more with less and including less people. So in order to operate in that environment, technology can really be a game changer and helping you free up valuable time for mission achievement, even when you have a small staff or are perhaps understaffed. We also asked our respondents about the implications of economic uncertainty and the effect it will it will have on their organizations. And some of the responses included reduced operational spending, increased demand for services, reduced program spending and staff turnover. These responses demonstrate that, you know, there’s some things that are frankly out of your organization’s control. I see in the comments someone wrote election year as a top challenge. Yes, again, these are things out of your control, but they really highlight the importance of controlling what you can stabilize, controlling what you can write in order to stabilize your organization. And one of those things you can control is your technology and and choosing to infuse automation into all of your processes that helps you to be able to run survey. And consistently every year we have seen inefficiencies and delays due to multiple disparate systems in the list of the top five challenges, along with lack of automation, manual time consuming reporting, and lack of visibility into key metrics, which are things that could also be a symptom of having disparate siloed systems in your organization. So why does this matter? operating with siloed systems can lead to even more significant challenges like restricted visibility into organizational performance. Without a unified view of organizational wide fundraising efforts and financial outcomes. It can be difficult for leaders to assess their overall effectiveness of their efforts, and it can be difficult to make informed decisions to optimize resources, hindered team collaboration, decision making and strategic planning. If your systems don’t communicate with each other, it can impede your decision making and strategic planning, as stakeholders may not have access to the comprehensive data that they need across departments, duplication of effort and potential for mistakes siloed systems often lead to data duplication and inconsistency of data. So for example, if your fundraising data is stored separately from your financial data, reconciling donor contributions and financial records can be a challenge. Staff may also need to manually transfer data between systems which increases the likelihood of errors and consumes valuable time and can also hinder your financial reporting. Missed Opportunities to optimize resources. Often disjointed systems means a lack of efficient workflows and automated processes, which means more manual time consuming tasks that take up a lot of your time that you could otherwise spent on strategy or furthering your mission. Disjointed communication with donors, for example, if fundraising and financial data aren’t aligned, donors could receive conflicting or outdated information about their contributions, which can lead to confusion and sometimes frustration, and potentially even put that funding at risk. And then lastly, growth and scalability changes. as your organization grows siloed systems struggle to scale efficiently. So if you add new fundraising channels or expand financial operations, this can become cumbersome and costly if systems are not designed to accommodate growth and scale. All of these in totality can have a huge impact on your organizational effectiveness and agility. So have you hung up the Nike network, some of you may have heard this phrase before, back before there was the internet and cloud based systems. When you wanted to share documents or information with someone you had to save the data to a hard disk, take the disk out of your computer and walk it may be in your Nikes to the other person’s desk and loaded into their computer. This was fondly called the Nike network. Now for some we haven’t advanced much further than this, even with the internet and cloud systems. across organizations, multiple applications are often used by different departments to make the operation run from finance to development to HR and so on. And data is gets stuck in those silos and isn’t able to be easily shared and optimized across the organization. Well, it just doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Technology with open platforms is available, allowing you to seamlessly integrate your financial system with your other critical business systems, whether that’s your fundraising system, your budgeting system, your payroll system, or any other system you use, that has key data that impacts your financials. At sage, we take a best in class approach to solve this problem. So you will always have the freedom to choose whatever business application you want alongside your financials, since it will always be ready for integration. And we hear from nonprofit leaders that they often find that this suits their organizations better because it allows them to pick and choose the best solutions for their specific needs, versus being kind of forced into going with one vendor for everything. Okay, moving on, let’s talk about sparking efficiency. Now, I’m sure all of you are very familiar with how gift processing works at most organizations, but I’m just going to outline it here, so we’re all on the same page. First, a fundraiser receives a gift from a donor or donors, they then enter the gift or the check into their CRM system. And from there, they might have to do any number of tasks, they might have to copy the check file copies, print report, print reports or prep the checks for the finance team.

Finance then receives the gift information. And typically they have to manually rekey or re enter that information into their accounting system. And because they might not have the level of detail needed for each donation, and they can only recorded as one transaction, they break the audit trail. Finance then deposits the check or records the transaction. Of course, this is the natural flow of money at most organizations. But in nonprofits, we sometimes have unique scenarios that we want to account for like split gifts, or shared giving. But from an accounting perspective, we need that to funnel into one transaction. So then this is not the end. Finance then has to reconcile bank account information with other systems, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, can take a lot of time because sometimes the transactions don’t quite match up. And so they may have to go back to the development office and ask questions, which can have a myriad of consequences, one of which is they could be late in their report preparation for the board. And of course, throughout this process development can get numerous calls, with questions about how the money’s being spent, and it can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration and potentially even conflict between the teams when you don’t have a single system of record. However, with connected systems, both the development teams and finance teams have insight into the information they need in real time. This means the program and development staff no longer have to go to accounting to get insight into transactions at their budget, which gives them more power and autonomy to manage their own budgets and make decisions. On the flip side, the finance team can see if and when the development team has secured the funding, without having to even ask making the reconciliation piece of breeze and there’s a clear audit trail and accountability summaries and fewer errors. Again, connecting the systems means that data is never out of sync, and reduces the reconciliation burden while increasing visibility. And then because of this connection, you have the ability to see your true return on investment. And you can track important KPIs like cost per dollar raised per donor per initiative per campaign per appeal. And those are the metrics that can have a real impact on how you operate and how you better utilize your time. So you can have the most mission impact which of course is what it’s all about.

Just some more benefits of connecting your financial and fundraising systems. First, it streamlines communication and ensures consistency and accuracy across teams. Right development can provide insights into upcoming fundraising campaigns, and then finance can incorporate that into budget planning. Similarly, finance can provide feedback on the financial feasibility of proposed development initiatives. So by aligning development goals with financial resources, you can allocate funds more efficiently, and allow for a holistic approach to decision making to ensure that your fundraising efforts are aligned with your financial goals. Next, it reduces time spent on reconciliation and improves reporting. connected systems enabled better tracking and reporting of financial data related to fundraising activities. This improves transparency and accountability both internally at your organization, and externally to donors and stakeholders. And this also reduces the reconciliation burden that exists when systems are siloed. It also automates data flow to eliminate manual entry and errors by eliminating that duplicate data entry taking the data out of one system and manually entering it into another. Once you eliminate that you are eliminating the risk, you’re taking the risk of human error out of that data entry and ensuring that everyone has access to the most up to date accurate information. It also allows staff to focus on high impact activities. I speak with nonprofit executives all the time, who say they need to spend more time on Trip strategy, but they just simply do not have the time. When your systems are connected. You can then automate key processes like donation tracking financial reporting and budget management, which makes your organization more efficient and frees up time for those strategic activities. And lastly, it provides increased donor stewardship. seamless data flow enables organizations to provide donors with more accurate and timely financial information about how their contributions are being used. This fosters trust and strengthens donor relationships, hopefully leading to potential long term support. Overall, connecting your development and your finance efforts can lead to more efficient fundraising strategies, better financial management and improved organizational performance. Okay, now let’s turn our attention to what it means to gain a 360 degree view of your nonprofit financial health. By connecting your finance and fundraising systems, you are gaining that 360 degree view and you’ll you receive several benefits. The first I’m going to talk about is a tighter audit trail when contributions and pledges are entered into the fund tracing system. The data then flows into the fund accounting system. The Finance Office controls the posting rules and maintains that audit trail from development to finance by eliminating data re entry. The next benefit is monitoring your use of donated assets, contributions and pledges are segregated according to donor restrictions to maintain accountability, and expenses are associated with revenue to demonstrate that gifts were used according to the donors wishes. And then as money is spent, your organization can track the amounts and the timing of net assets released from restriction. Next, let’s talk about reporting. By connecting your systems you establish a secure link between contributions received, and how that money is used by the organization. reconciliation between the contribution details in the fundraising system and accounts in the fund accounting system is streamlined. And then major donor and other inquiries can be easily managed using accountability summaries, dashboards or other reports. The ability to automate manual processes is a huge one. I know I’ve been talking about this. Again, this is always in the top five challenges that we hear. But with this, you are you’re able to you’re reporting to your donors and your funders is more timely and accurate and streamlined. Your reconciliation of accounting ledgers to fundraising and bank records is dramatically simplified, and accounting gift entry is automated, which again frees up your staff accounting time for more high value work. And the last piece of this puzzle is is a reduction in audit expense, your audit prep time because of this and expenses are significantly reduced. It makes it easy for your organization to demonstrate that you are responsible stewards of donated assets. Donors then trust that the organization will use money according to their wishes and are more inclined to give larger amounts or more frequently. Overall, this helps your organization become better stewards of donor dollars, helping you to cultivate a reputation of trust and transparency that will hopefully help you earn more donor dollars and ultimately do market for your mission. Okay, so how can you unleash your nonprofits potential? Are you ready to ignite efficiency, visibility, collaboration and impact? One of the reasons I’m excited to be here today and Darrell alluded to it. Thank you, Darrell, is to talk about the recent partnership that’s been established between sage and DonorPerfect to bring your fund accounting and fundraising together with two products known for their deep functionality and their reputation for helping nonprofits advanced mission impact. This partnership has resulted in the development of sage intact fundraising Powered By DonorPerfect. This is a purpose built solution made for sage intact customers with fundraising needs. It has the look and feel of DonorPerfect with additional reporting capabilities and seamless data flow from DonorPerfect into your fund accounting data in sage intact, which will allow you to spend more time focused on your donors and less on data. Trust the accuracy and completeness of your financial insight. break down those silos and align your team around common goals. Quickly Measure Report on and optimize your performance and most importantly, raise more money and use it wisely to maximize your mission. So we are bringing together the best of fundraising and the best of finance. So some highlights from Sage intact fundraising Powered By DonorPerfect our donor management with centralized donor information making it easier to track interactions donations and communication history, fundraising tools for online fundraising, event management and peer to peer fundraising, Reporting and Analytics to track fundraising progress. automation of various tasks like sending thank you emails, generating reports and scheduling reminders, saving time and improving efficiency for your staff. And then some highlights of sage intact accounting and financial management, our robust financial management capabilities tailored for the unique needs of nonprofits. You can manage budgets, track expenses and monitor financial performance in real time to help ensure financial stability, true fund accounting functionality enabling you to track and report on funds designated for specific purposes or programs. Sage intact also offers robust reporting and analytics features allowing you to generate custom financial reports, track KPIs, and gain insight into financial health to make more informed decisions. It also facilitates compliance with specific nonprofit regulations like tracking restricted funds, and reporting on Grant expenditures. So what are the benefits to you? On the fundraising side, you’ll get stronger donor connections and reduce turnover with personalized communications and targeted outreach campaigns powerful data insights to help you guide that strategic decision making effortless donation forms and automated automated workflows to free up that valuable time for your staff to focus on donor engagement and strategy. And on the fund accounting side, you’ll get a powerful intuitive fund accounting purpose built for nonprofits that helps maximize stewardship by automating grant fund and donor accounting ensures control and compliance and reduces risk and cost with audit trails and internal controls, accurate and timely data for data driven decisions and a complete view of your data in one place. And by combining the two under one roof, you’ll benefit from seamless data flow between systems which is configurable to your specific needs. You’ll get that 360 degree visibility into revenue, cash flow and expenses, the ability to make more data driven decisions to maximize your impact and improved collaboration between finance and development.

And here’s one example of what this looks like when it comes together. So by combining your contributions data from Sage intact, fundraising Powered By DonorPerfect with your fundraising expense data from Sage intact, you get a real time view of fundraising ROI. And this is just one of the many types of dashboards available to you in sage intact. We also have role based dashboards that you can leverage which gives each stakeholder a real time view of the data that’s important to them. So program managers can have instant visibility into budget versus actuals, or executive directors can have insight into program and fundraising efficiency. You can also have an outcomes dashboard that marries together financial and non financial data to track KPIs that matter to your specific organization, whether that’s cost per meal or revenue per member or tuition per student. We are so proud to have partnered with DonorPerfect who as you all know is well established in the nonprofit space with a reputation for helping 1000s of nonprofits. So I want to share a little bit about why sage and sage intact is the right company to partner with sage intact was built by finance experts with finance professionals in mind. We are the market leader in customer satisfaction. We are really proud we have over a 98% satisfaction rating on Jeetu crowd. We are the first and only preferred provider by the AICPA. And we’ve been recognized by Gartner for our innovation in the accounting software industry. So are you ready to ignite the efficiency gain from having all of your data in one place the visibility to give your stakeholders a real time view into the metrics that matter most without having to wait until period end. The collaboration needed to increase the connection between finance and development and the impact to immediately see the results of your fundraising efforts. So you can make those real time adjustments in your campaigns as needed. Now I just want to take a moment to highlight an organization who has sparked success in all of these areas. So this is the Brevard Zoo. They’re in Melbourne, Florida and they are home to more than 900 Animals representing 195 species from around the world. They previously had siloed systems and with that they really struggled with a lot of the things we were talking about today the duplicative data entry. They had to utilize Excel and other workarounds just to be able to present the data they needed to their executives, which as you can imagine resulted in a lack of visibility across their entire organization. After connecting sage intact and DonorPerfect, they experienced improved data accuracy and efficiency and they also increased their overall finance team efficiency by 30%. They expedited their reporting by 50 per sent, they improved data accuracy and cut time supporting their annual audit by more than 50%. And I love this quote from their CFO. He said we monitor daily attendance from our members and the general public and love that we can now marry the zoo’s financial information with these numbers. As a result, we can react quickly versus waiting until month end to see if attendance makeup, food sales per capita or other trends are out of their normal range. Okay, let’s talk about next steps. If you have any questions, you can ask them here. But if you have any questions after this presentation, please feel free to visit the sage booth in the virtual exhibit hall where you can talk to an expert you can schedule a demo and spark a conversation with your colleagues. Right? What challenges are you experiencing at your organization due to siloed systems? Where are breakdowns happening? And how can you work to improve those? All right, we can open it up for questions. Thank you so much, everyone.

That we That was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all the benefits that can happen when you end up connecting your accounting and fundraising systems together. I you know, as you were speaking, one of the things that was coming to my mind was really how many of the nonprofits that are here that are participating are actually doing fund accounting today, we’ve often heard that, for certain accounting systems, that can be a little bit of a hurdle, we know that it comes easily with sage intact, as Bob and I were working on some of the integration. And you were talking about that. Think about the donor who actually goes to the website and makes it that makes their donation for a particular fund, being able to see that the net revenue in that particular fund at the very last day, the impact that that donation is going to have and freeing up the board to be able to make decisions to put expenditures in there. So it’s a really exciting stuff. To see this, this launch, looking inside of our q&a. We had a couple of questions here. So one, the question is whether they’re using sage now would it be easy for her to switch to Sage intact? So I don’t know if you can talk a little bit about some of the other sage products that might be out there if somebody’s using those. Yeah, so.

So sage has a long history in the accounting space. And sage intact is the modern cloud product by Sage. And there are several other products, whether you’re talking about new sage 50 Peach Tree, there’s many names out there, that are great systems for smaller organizations. But as you start to outgrow them sage intact would be the next step for a more modern cloud based solution, and would get you the benefits that I spoke to today.

Perfect, perfect. So their best bet is to reach out to their sales rep, whoever they may be. And they say

yes, yes. And and if you don’t know who that is, feel free to reach out to myself, or Nancy master, will we have our contact information and our virtual booth and we’d be happy to get you to the right person.

Perfect, perfect. And then Ron asked, Can you speak more to how time to save as it relates to reconciliations, maybe even manual reconciliations? I’m sure we’ve all been there from time to time we run a report in one system and record the other system and you go looking for that elusive dollar difference, or whatever the number may be, right?

Yeah, So Ron, admittedly, I’m not an accountant. But what I can tell you from a reconciliation standpoint is when everyone has access to the same numbers, it makes it so much easier, right? Because if someone’s putting in gift information, they can attach notes, they can describe exactly where that’s coming from, if it’s a slip gift, if it’s shared giving so that on the financial side, you have insight into that you can account for that, and then you’re not breaking the audit trail. And then later that makes it much easier to reconcile because you have all of the data in the system and you don’t have to go back person to person and say, Hey, what was the deal with that particular gift again? So from that aspect, that’s, that’s a big improvement. And way to automate that.

Awesome, awesome. Then Marcy asks her organization our users don’t have perfect and sage intact, what would be the next step fee for the to get the two systems talking?

Great question. So we’re kind of working through as this is a new partnership, some of those those types of scenarios so I would speak with your DonorPerfect representative or salesperson and they can probably get you started. Is that right Darryl? Yeah, I

think so. Uh, currently, as I as we see this taking shape as its initially released, the product will only be offered through sage so You would actually be making your purchase through sage. But either place can help you get started with initial conversations. And we’ll make sure that you get your technical questions answered. So great question, Marcy. And I still have quite a few here in our group. Let’s just take a look at the chat here. So somebody thought that they might have had sage 50. I know that you’ve talked about there. Don is asking, is there an additional cost and there is an overall package that gets put together with the integration, as well as a higher tier a DonorPerfect, that is going to be bundled together in a package. And as we talked about, that would be something available through sage. So you would actually be be making the purchase to this overall package through sage at this time. Because like some people will be reaching out to your booth. Some are looking for some are looking to make a decision on accounting software right now. And looking for maybe we could just speak to a little bit of the merits of intact over some of the others that are in the fundraising space today. What would be the benefit of you mentioned, totally cloud based? If any of you are using desktop software, I’m sure intact. We’ve all felt some of that pain as we’ve gone to virtual offices here and there. If you have a remote desktop back into the system, this is a headache. Natalie, can you share any others?

Yeah, and I think I saw that question. And that was around QuickBooks. And I will say we move a lot of folks off of QuickBooks just as their their QuickBooks can be great when you’re a smaller organization. But as you start to outgrow it, and you kind of experienced those pains of essentially on the reporting side. And Darryl, you talked about this right after I was done speaking about just the benefits of having an accounting system that is built with nonprofit functionality in mind right now, QuickBooks is a general system for everyone. We have specific nonprofit functionality to that makes it a true fund accounting system to be able to track those funds and restrictions, and have some of that advanced capabilities that QuickBooks just can’t accommodate. In addition to a lot of the automation pieces, you can get in sage intact, to really free up that time. So you can focus more on strategy. But again, we move a lot of folks off QuickBooks, so it’s something that that our team is really familiar with, if you’re looking to make that transition.

That’s great. That’s great. Good add in there. And I guess a few more pieces that we can maybe touch on, I know that there’s going to be some more webinars, keep an eye out to your email, whether it be your DonorPerfect email, your Sage email, there will be webinars that are going to start covering a little bit more about how this integration works. There is something in sage intact, called a dimension. And if you can actually index mapping your DonorPerfect GL campaign solicitation codes into a intact dimension, so that you can map it to the different accounting codes that you need to, you’re going to see the flexibility in this integration so that you’ve got a very smooth flow. I know that we’ve got Bob in the chat, you can probably even answer some more detailed questions if you wanted to do. And we’ve got just a few more minutes here, Natalie, anything that you would like to wrap with?

No, but I’ll just touch on that dimension piece. And feel free to folks to poker on our website, where you can learn more information. But dimensions are really the heart of the sage and tech system. And it allows you to go from that linear chart of accounts to a dimensional Chart of Accounts, you’re able to tag transactions with whatever matters to you like location or program area so that later, you can then filter those dimensions and slice and dice your data to get that that view of reporting that you or your board or whomever really need to see. And so that’s one of the really big powerful features in sage intact. But I guess just to wrap there. Oh, thank you so much for having us. We’re so excited to partner with DonorPerfect. And thank you so much for everyone’s time today and for joining. I know how valuable everyone’s time is. So I really appreciate everyone being here.

Great. Great. Thank you so much, Natalie, and thank you all for attending attending Natalie’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways Next up is our four o’clock our keynote session with kushana Palmer. She will be igniting spark of leadership at your nonprofit you do not want to miss this so we’ll see you in a few take care of everyone.