I send my organization’s proposed annual budget to the board today. It’s an annual rite of passage, the budget process. Thinking about it makes me a little nostalgic.
I remember the feeling I got the first time I was trusted with a set of financial statements. Green and white lined sheets, printed out on a wide carriage dot matrix printer (ok, it was a long time ago…). The sense that somehow, encoded in these pages was the secret to running an efficient, effective organization. I still feel this way.
Financial statements will speak to you if you sit down with them and listen carefully. Yes, they can bring bad news. But they also can – in a very ordered way – speak quietly of new ways to see old challenges, unexpected solutions to things that have kept you awake at two in the morning.
Today we print financials on plain white paper, eight and a half by eleven. I wonder if they hold the same magic for new managers that those big green and white sheets did for me twenty years ago.
You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you top the first hill of a really scary roller coaster ride? I got that feeling reading details of the latest Target Analytics Index of National Fundraising Performance, released on January 9.
This report shows that, for the nine months ending September 30, 2008:
1) the number of donors giving to direct mail, online and telemarketing appeals fell two percent compared to the same period a year earlier. This was mainly due to a significant drop in new donor acquisition.
2) median revenue from these appeals fell just over one percent from Q3 2007
The lone bright spot in the report, summarized in The Nonprofit Times: those who gave contributed slightly more than they had before.
It’s tempting to minimize these low-single-digit losses, but it’s likely that most donors didn’t begin to feel the real effects of our current economic crisis until after September 30. I’m beginning to hear stories of really disappointing December campaigns, mainly at newer or weaker organizations. But even at nonprofits with strong fundraising departments and strong brands, nobody’s celebrating.
Hold on, and close your eyes if you have to. The ride is just beginning.
An interesting question during a conversation over lunch with a Pathways board member this week… Will federal funding for social programs rise with Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House?
He was expecting, I think, to hear an unqualified “yes”, but I’m not so sure. Government spending rose in almost all categories during the Bush administration, and funding for most social programs increased as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if tough choices have to be made in the next few years – choices between spending federal dollars on badly needed programs to benefit us all vs. badly needed programs to benefit a few. My bet – not all social programs will survive.
