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Five new members join Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council

The Board of Trustees of the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) has appointed five new members to the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC).

Spotlight

Global Solutions Initiative

The Global Solutions Initiative (GSI) provides a new, permanent, supportive advisory structure to G20 and G7. Independent of the official processes, yet firmly connected with official engagement groups and working groups, the GSI delivers independent, long-term oriented policy briefs for world leaders. The Global Solutions Initiative was established during the German G20 Presidency. It brings together leading think tanks and stakeholders to provice policy solutions to the most relevant global institutions.

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Fundraising

Proactive Asset Maintenance for Nonprofits

Article | July 15, 2022

For small nonprofits struggling to keep pace with day-to-day work, planning ahead can seem like a luxury. Especially when it comes to IT asset maintenance: If everything is functioning well right now, why mess with it? But a little work now can save a lot of work in the future. It can also prevent downtime, security incidents, and other issues that can hurt your organization.

Read More
Nonprofit Management

What Does the Health of Your Nonprofit Website Mean and How Can You Improve It?

Article | July 13, 2022

Poor website health may be impacting your non-profit organization's business. Without a question, the basis of your digital presence is a high-performing website. However, it is easy to let other concerns take precedence over website health, especially if it is not your area of expertise. Healthy websites guarantee long-term success, increased reach, and more engagement. This is critical for organizations in terms of community involvement and giving. Healthy sites are also optimized for all users and free of flaws that might degrade the user experience. Poor website health, on the other hand, might result in a loss of visitors and search engine ranks. When it comes to search engine optimization, website health is equally vital (SEO). Sites that load quicker and have fewer difficulties will rank higher in search. How to Improve Website Health? Speed up your site pages: Visitors will not wait for a sluggish site to load in this day of immediate gratification. If your pages do not load immediately, you will make a poor first impression. Fix 404 errors and reduce redirects: Broken links are ones that produce the error message "404 Page Not Found." Error pages might disrupt the crawling of your website, lowering your search ranks. This informs search engines that you are not giving a decent user experience, which will lower your search rankings. Decrease image file sizes: Image files are huge and consume a lot of storage space. Large files might cause your site to slow down and take a long time to load. Reduce file sizes and compress all photos to enhance website health. Optimize for mobile: Google has stated that mobile speed is taken into account by the ranking algorithm. Your website should ideally operate on all devices. Create grammar-free, relevant content: Content is important in all marketing activities, so it's no surprise that it affects website health. Great content is the key to success since search rankings, engagement, and conversions are all dependent on it. Optimize for search: SEO is the process of improving your website's ranking on search engines. This is one of the most crucial aspects of maintaining a good website. A good SEO strategy brings traffic to your website without costing any money.

Read More
Nonprofit Management

Utilize an Email Marketing Strategy to Drive More Donations

Article | July 15, 2022

When creating your nonprofit fundraising and donations strategy, email marketing should be on the top of the list of channels to use to support your efforts. However, 70% of nonprofits do not have an email marketing strategy, despite 26% of online donors saying email marketing is what inspires them to give. Email marketing can help nonprofits reach their fundraising goals by helping expand reach, develop a loyal donor base and drive more donations. Build an Email Marketing Strategy Implementing email marketing may seem intimidating to some, but once you have an effective strategy in place, it will act as a blueprint and support all your goals moving forward. When you start building your strategy, it’s important to spend time developing a unique strategy that aligns with your mission and goals. Consider these questions: Who is your target audience? How are you collecting email addresses? What types of emails will you send? What types of content do you want to share in those emails? What will your emails look like? What is the layout? What is the design based on? How often do you plan to send emails? What platform will you use? Does it integrate with your donor database and have all the features you need to implement your strategy? Email marketing is the most effective and successful when there's a strategic plan in place. Creating a detailed strategy that answers the questions above will provide your nonprofit with the stepping stones needed to set your email marketing efforts up for success and help meet your overall fundraising goals. Send Emails Once you have a strategy and execution plan in place, you’re ready to start sending your messages to your audience. Email subscribers want to hear from you, but you need to be sure you are sending engaging messages to the right audiences. When you start sending your emails, plan to send a mix of different messages to your audience. Email marketing is an effective channel to not only fundraise but to help subscribers stay engaged and keep donor retention high. A great example would be to include advocacy emails in your plans. Advocacy emails include newsletters and impact stories. These types of emails help your subscriber feel valued as a donor as they’re seeing the direct impact of their support. As you start and continue to send emails, always track each email's performance. This helps you determine what is working and what is not working. By tracking key metrics, like click-through rates, conversation rates and donations per email, you will be able to continuously improve your strategy and the emails you are sending. Follow Best Practices As you begin to execute your email strategy, there are a few key best practices I recommend following to help increase engagement, donations, and overall performance of your emails. Personalize the email for your subscribers. Personalized emails can generate donations up to six times more compared to a generalized email. Make sure your emails are well-designed with compelling imagery that helps the donor visualize your mission and the impact of their donations. Provide clear calls to action in each email you send and always include a “Donate” button in all your communications. Include social sharing buttons and links to your social channels in all your email communications. Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by as much as 158% and help expand your reach by allowing donors to recommend and share your nonprofit with their network. Create an email cadence so you are regularly communicating with your audience throughout the year. For every 1,000 fundraising emails delivered, nonprofits raised $78, so it is in your best interest to continuously send messages to your subscribers. Start by sending emails monthly and then experiment with increasing the frequency of emails per month and see what works best for your nonprofit. Utilizing email marketing is key to having a successful fundraising strategy for your nonprofit. By building a well-thought-out strategy and implementing it, you will be able to engage, retain and convert subscribers into a loyal donor base.

Read More
Nonprofit Technology

Prioritizing Money Builds Fake Donor Relationships

Article | December 21, 2021

The relationship costs too much money, so I will save money and not pursue it. And the result of that decision is disastrous. Relationships take time. You know that. Your boss knows it. But we ignore time because that is how we have set up things. There is a budget to manage. A forecast to make. So, we go for the fake relationship. One where we pretend to care, but only if we get the money. We do that — not because we believe it’s the right thing to do but — because we can’t see any other way to deliver on expectations. And that is the dilemma in major gifts. The push is for instant gratification. We are dealing with a situation right now where the authority figure does not value relationships. She says she does. She even claims to have a value set that cherishes relationships. But the money is the real value. And the need to grab it is the central drive. So, she is pushing on her major gift officers (MGOs) to get the money and is even threatening to do away with the major gifts program because it is not delivering. But when we uncover what “not delivering” means in her view, it is not that each MGO is not producing revenue from the same donors over and above last year. Nope. It is that each isn’t producing enough revenue quickly enough. The real story in this organization is that some of the other fundraising programs are not performing, and major gifts needs to be the scapegoat. It’s all about the money. This is so sad because these are good people — all of them, including the authority figure. It is sad because the plan to move major gifts into real relationships is facing failure. And that bothers Jeff and me — not because it’s our plan for the organization. No, it bothers us because there are good MGOs and good donors who must revert back to a fake relationship. And that is not good. One of our major objectives is to influence fundraisers and nonprofit leaders to highly value and respect donors. When we succeed at that, and we do, more often than not, it brings donors, MGOs and leaders a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction. And, it brings the money. You should see the celebration! But when money is valued over relationship, it is a dark and depressing time for us. That is why the situation I described earlier is so disturbing. It’s not that we are going to lose something. No, that is not it. It’s that some very good MGOs and some very good donors will be forced to live in superficiality and shallowness. And that is not good for anyone. And it certainly is not good for the economic well-being of the nonprofit. Make a commitment today to real relationships with your donors. And if your organization does not support that, try to influence it to change. If the organization will not change, move on. You have a choice.

Read More
Fundraising

The Power of Film for Philanthropy

Article | July 15, 2022

For small nonprofits struggling to keep pace with day-to-day work, planning ahead can seem like a luxury. Especially when it comes to IT asset maintenance: If everything is functioning well right now, why mess with it? But a little work now can save a lot of work in the future. It can also prevent downtime, security incidents, and other issues that can hurt your organization.

Read More
Nonprofit Management

4 Challenges that Large Non-profit Organizations Face

Article | July 13, 2022

Poor website health may be impacting your non-profit organization's business. Without a question, the basis of your digital presence is a high-performing website. However, it is easy to let other concerns take precedence over website health, especially if it is not your area of expertise. Healthy websites guarantee long-term success, increased reach, and more engagement. This is critical for organizations in terms of community involvement and giving. Healthy sites are also optimized for all users and free of flaws that might degrade the user experience. Poor website health, on the other hand, might result in a loss of visitors and search engine ranks. When it comes to search engine optimization, website health is equally vital (SEO). Sites that load quicker and have fewer difficulties will rank higher in search. How to Improve Website Health? Speed up your site pages: Visitors will not wait for a sluggish site to load in this day of immediate gratification. If your pages do not load immediately, you will make a poor first impression. Fix 404 errors and reduce redirects: Broken links are ones that produce the error message "404 Page Not Found." Error pages might disrupt the crawling of your website, lowering your search ranks. This informs search engines that you are not giving a decent user experience, which will lower your search rankings. Decrease image file sizes: Image files are huge and consume a lot of storage space. Large files might cause your site to slow down and take a long time to load. Reduce file sizes and compress all photos to enhance website health. Optimize for mobile: Google has stated that mobile speed is taken into account by the ranking algorithm. Your website should ideally operate on all devices. Create grammar-free, relevant content: Content is important in all marketing activities, so it's no surprise that it affects website health. Great content is the key to success since search rankings, engagement, and conversions are all dependent on it. Optimize for search: SEO is the process of improving your website's ranking on search engines. This is one of the most crucial aspects of maintaining a good website. A good SEO strategy brings traffic to your website without costing any money.

Read More
Nonprofit Management

The Advocacy versus the Activist Functions of Non-profits

Article | July 15, 2022

When creating your nonprofit fundraising and donations strategy, email marketing should be on the top of the list of channels to use to support your efforts. However, 70% of nonprofits do not have an email marketing strategy, despite 26% of online donors saying email marketing is what inspires them to give. Email marketing can help nonprofits reach their fundraising goals by helping expand reach, develop a loyal donor base and drive more donations. Build an Email Marketing Strategy Implementing email marketing may seem intimidating to some, but once you have an effective strategy in place, it will act as a blueprint and support all your goals moving forward. When you start building your strategy, it’s important to spend time developing a unique strategy that aligns with your mission and goals. Consider these questions: Who is your target audience? How are you collecting email addresses? What types of emails will you send? What types of content do you want to share in those emails? What will your emails look like? What is the layout? What is the design based on? How often do you plan to send emails? What platform will you use? Does it integrate with your donor database and have all the features you need to implement your strategy? Email marketing is the most effective and successful when there's a strategic plan in place. Creating a detailed strategy that answers the questions above will provide your nonprofit with the stepping stones needed to set your email marketing efforts up for success and help meet your overall fundraising goals. Send Emails Once you have a strategy and execution plan in place, you’re ready to start sending your messages to your audience. Email subscribers want to hear from you, but you need to be sure you are sending engaging messages to the right audiences. When you start sending your emails, plan to send a mix of different messages to your audience. Email marketing is an effective channel to not only fundraise but to help subscribers stay engaged and keep donor retention high. A great example would be to include advocacy emails in your plans. Advocacy emails include newsletters and impact stories. These types of emails help your subscriber feel valued as a donor as they’re seeing the direct impact of their support. As you start and continue to send emails, always track each email's performance. This helps you determine what is working and what is not working. By tracking key metrics, like click-through rates, conversation rates and donations per email, you will be able to continuously improve your strategy and the emails you are sending. Follow Best Practices As you begin to execute your email strategy, there are a few key best practices I recommend following to help increase engagement, donations, and overall performance of your emails. Personalize the email for your subscribers. Personalized emails can generate donations up to six times more compared to a generalized email. Make sure your emails are well-designed with compelling imagery that helps the donor visualize your mission and the impact of their donations. Provide clear calls to action in each email you send and always include a “Donate” button in all your communications. Include social sharing buttons and links to your social channels in all your email communications. Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by as much as 158% and help expand your reach by allowing donors to recommend and share your nonprofit with their network. Create an email cadence so you are regularly communicating with your audience throughout the year. For every 1,000 fundraising emails delivered, nonprofits raised $78, so it is in your best interest to continuously send messages to your subscribers. Start by sending emails monthly and then experiment with increasing the frequency of emails per month and see what works best for your nonprofit. Utilizing email marketing is key to having a successful fundraising strategy for your nonprofit. By building a well-thought-out strategy and implementing it, you will be able to engage, retain and convert subscribers into a loyal donor base.

Read More
Nonprofit Technology

Prioritizing Money Builds Fake Donor Relationships

Article | December 21, 2021

The relationship costs too much money, so I will save money and not pursue it. And the result of that decision is disastrous. Relationships take time. You know that. Your boss knows it. But we ignore time because that is how we have set up things. There is a budget to manage. A forecast to make. So, we go for the fake relationship. One where we pretend to care, but only if we get the money. We do that — not because we believe it’s the right thing to do but — because we can’t see any other way to deliver on expectations. And that is the dilemma in major gifts. The push is for instant gratification. We are dealing with a situation right now where the authority figure does not value relationships. She says she does. She even claims to have a value set that cherishes relationships. But the money is the real value. And the need to grab it is the central drive. So, she is pushing on her major gift officers (MGOs) to get the money and is even threatening to do away with the major gifts program because it is not delivering. But when we uncover what “not delivering” means in her view, it is not that each MGO is not producing revenue from the same donors over and above last year. Nope. It is that each isn’t producing enough revenue quickly enough. The real story in this organization is that some of the other fundraising programs are not performing, and major gifts needs to be the scapegoat. It’s all about the money. This is so sad because these are good people — all of them, including the authority figure. It is sad because the plan to move major gifts into real relationships is facing failure. And that bothers Jeff and me — not because it’s our plan for the organization. No, it bothers us because there are good MGOs and good donors who must revert back to a fake relationship. And that is not good. One of our major objectives is to influence fundraisers and nonprofit leaders to highly value and respect donors. When we succeed at that, and we do, more often than not, it brings donors, MGOs and leaders a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction. And, it brings the money. You should see the celebration! But when money is valued over relationship, it is a dark and depressing time for us. That is why the situation I described earlier is so disturbing. It’s not that we are going to lose something. No, that is not it. It’s that some very good MGOs and some very good donors will be forced to live in superficiality and shallowness. And that is not good for anyone. And it certainly is not good for the economic well-being of the nonprofit. Make a commitment today to real relationships with your donors. And if your organization does not support that, try to influence it to change. If the organization will not change, move on. You have a choice.

Read More
MORE ARTICLES

Spotlight

Global Solutions Initiative

The Global Solutions Initiative (GSI) provides a new, permanent, supportive advisory structure to G20 and G7. Independent of the official processes, yet firmly connected with official engagement groups and working groups, the GSI delivers independent, long-term oriented policy briefs for world leaders. The Global Solutions Initiative was established during the German G20 Presidency. It brings together leading think tanks and stakeholders to provice policy solutions to the most relevant global institutions.

Related News

Nonprofit Technology

Aplos Joins ASG to Scale Up Industry-leading Nonprofit Software Platform

ASG | February 24, 2022

ASG, a portfolio company of Alpine Investors that buys and builds vertical SaaS companies, announced that it has acquired Aplos, an industry-leading platform for nonprofits of all kinds, including faith-based organizations, K-12 schools, arts and cultural associations and more. Aplos provides a full suite of SaaS and FinTech tools, including fund accounting, financial reporting, donation tracking and fundraising tools, and people management. Through one unified solution for nonprofit management, Aplos empowers nonprofits to advance their missions and serve their communities. Our goal from day one has always been to meet the software needs of the full nonprofit sector, but to get there we needed to find the right financial partner. I am excited to have found a partner in ASG that believes in the value of serving nonprofits as strongly as I do. This new partnership equips Aplos to ramp up our team, fuel our product development, and invest in the future of this incredible community.” Tim Goetz, Aplos founder Aplos was founded in 2009 in Fresno, Calif. after Goetz couldn’t find a simple, affordable fund accounting software for his church, where he served as executive pastor. Since then, Aplos has grown to a team of over 65 employees who are deeply committed to making an impact with nonprofit organizations. From its initial launch as a web-based fund accounting software, Aplos now includes solutions for church management, donor management, event registration, websites, and fundraising. Today, over 10,000 organizations utilize Aplos to engage over 5 million donors and supporters around the world. Aplos marks the 44th acquisition for ASG and its first in the nonprofit software industry. Aplos will also welcome Anush Vinod as CEO, who was most recently an executive at a high-growth e-commerce business and a member of Alpine Investor’s CEO Program. “Aplos is an exceptional platform, built by innovators who care deeply about serving nonprofits and churches,” said Vinod. “The team’s passion to innovate for their customer is a worthy and inspiring mission. Nowhere is this mission more apparent than in the products, which carry the spirit of this relentless commitment to delivering great technology. For these reasons – and many more – I’m excited to lead Aplos in its next phase of growth.” About Aplos Aplos is a cloud-based system designed specially to serve the needs of nonprofit and church organizations of all sizes. The Aplos all-in-one platform takes the stress out of finances and creating reports, streamline administrative tasks, and make giving faster and more effective. Users can fundraise with the use of online donation tools, custom communication, donor database reports and event registration. Aplos enables organizations to manage all of their financial, donation and donor information in one place. About ASG ASG, backed by Alpine Investors, is a unique and fast-growing software business that buys and builds market-leading vertical SaaS companies. ASG believes deeply in the power of people and data to grow great organizations, and that sharing knowledge, expertise, and resources across its community of businesses drives exponential growth. Founders of leading SaaS companies continue to trust ASG to grow their businesses and build even stronger legacies for the future. About Alpine Investors Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building enduring companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine specializes in investments in middle-market companies in the software and services industries. Its PeopleFirst strategy includes a CEO-in-Residence program which allows Alpine to bring proven leadership to situations where additional or new management is needed post-transaction. Alpine is currently investing out of its $2.25 billion eighth fund.

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BDO updates guide to nonprofit financial statements

BDO USA, LLP | March 13, 2017

BDO USA has released the third edition of its guide to nonprofit financial reporting, updated to include the recent changes by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

Read More

Novogradac & Company LLP Promotes Seven to Partner

Novogradac & Company LLP | January 02, 2017

Novogradac & Company LLP, a national accounting and consulting firm, welcomes Nat Eng, Chris Jones, Andrea Killeen and Angie Taylor of the San Francisco office; Rachel Denton of the Kansas City, Mo., office; Bryan Hung of the Long Beach, Calif., office; and Amanda Read of the Cleveland office to the partnership. The firm, which specializes in affordable housing, community development, historic preservation and renewable energy tax credits and other areas, has 56 partners in 25 offices nationwide “I am excited to announce that Amanda, Andrea, Angie, Bryan, Chris, Nat and Rachel have been promoted to partner,” said Michael Novogradac, the firm’s managing partner. “Their dedication to the firm and expertise in their respective fields has helped Novogradac & Company continue to be a leader in the tax credit, accounting and valuation industries, while continuing to find new ways to better serve our clients.”

Read More

Nonprofit Technology

Aplos Joins ASG to Scale Up Industry-leading Nonprofit Software Platform

ASG | February 24, 2022

ASG, a portfolio company of Alpine Investors that buys and builds vertical SaaS companies, announced that it has acquired Aplos, an industry-leading platform for nonprofits of all kinds, including faith-based organizations, K-12 schools, arts and cultural associations and more. Aplos provides a full suite of SaaS and FinTech tools, including fund accounting, financial reporting, donation tracking and fundraising tools, and people management. Through one unified solution for nonprofit management, Aplos empowers nonprofits to advance their missions and serve their communities. Our goal from day one has always been to meet the software needs of the full nonprofit sector, but to get there we needed to find the right financial partner. I am excited to have found a partner in ASG that believes in the value of serving nonprofits as strongly as I do. This new partnership equips Aplos to ramp up our team, fuel our product development, and invest in the future of this incredible community.” Tim Goetz, Aplos founder Aplos was founded in 2009 in Fresno, Calif. after Goetz couldn’t find a simple, affordable fund accounting software for his church, where he served as executive pastor. Since then, Aplos has grown to a team of over 65 employees who are deeply committed to making an impact with nonprofit organizations. From its initial launch as a web-based fund accounting software, Aplos now includes solutions for church management, donor management, event registration, websites, and fundraising. Today, over 10,000 organizations utilize Aplos to engage over 5 million donors and supporters around the world. Aplos marks the 44th acquisition for ASG and its first in the nonprofit software industry. Aplos will also welcome Anush Vinod as CEO, who was most recently an executive at a high-growth e-commerce business and a member of Alpine Investor’s CEO Program. “Aplos is an exceptional platform, built by innovators who care deeply about serving nonprofits and churches,” said Vinod. “The team’s passion to innovate for their customer is a worthy and inspiring mission. Nowhere is this mission more apparent than in the products, which carry the spirit of this relentless commitment to delivering great technology. For these reasons – and many more – I’m excited to lead Aplos in its next phase of growth.” About Aplos Aplos is a cloud-based system designed specially to serve the needs of nonprofit and church organizations of all sizes. The Aplos all-in-one platform takes the stress out of finances and creating reports, streamline administrative tasks, and make giving faster and more effective. Users can fundraise with the use of online donation tools, custom communication, donor database reports and event registration. Aplos enables organizations to manage all of their financial, donation and donor information in one place. About ASG ASG, backed by Alpine Investors, is a unique and fast-growing software business that buys and builds market-leading vertical SaaS companies. ASG believes deeply in the power of people and data to grow great organizations, and that sharing knowledge, expertise, and resources across its community of businesses drives exponential growth. Founders of leading SaaS companies continue to trust ASG to grow their businesses and build even stronger legacies for the future. About Alpine Investors Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building enduring companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine specializes in investments in middle-market companies in the software and services industries. Its PeopleFirst strategy includes a CEO-in-Residence program which allows Alpine to bring proven leadership to situations where additional or new management is needed post-transaction. Alpine is currently investing out of its $2.25 billion eighth fund.

Read More

BDO updates guide to nonprofit financial statements

BDO USA, LLP | March 13, 2017

BDO USA has released the third edition of its guide to nonprofit financial reporting, updated to include the recent changes by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

Read More

Novogradac & Company LLP Promotes Seven to Partner

Novogradac & Company LLP | January 02, 2017

Novogradac & Company LLP, a national accounting and consulting firm, welcomes Nat Eng, Chris Jones, Andrea Killeen and Angie Taylor of the San Francisco office; Rachel Denton of the Kansas City, Mo., office; Bryan Hung of the Long Beach, Calif., office; and Amanda Read of the Cleveland office to the partnership. The firm, which specializes in affordable housing, community development, historic preservation and renewable energy tax credits and other areas, has 56 partners in 25 offices nationwide “I am excited to announce that Amanda, Andrea, Angie, Bryan, Chris, Nat and Rachel have been promoted to partner,” said Michael Novogradac, the firm’s managing partner. “Their dedication to the firm and expertise in their respective fields has helped Novogradac & Company continue to be a leader in the tax credit, accounting and valuation industries, while continuing to find new ways to better serve our clients.”

Read More

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