Cherrise Wilks Recommendations

Tuesday December 8, 2020 comments Tags: nonprofit, accounting, mission, vision, tools, infrastructure, systems, capacity building, budgets

Any accounting business or tax advice in this podcast is not intended as a thorough in depth analysis of specific issues, nor substitute for a formal opinion, nor is it sufficient to avoid tax related penalties. If you need any help with that, please reach out.

Ready, Set, Process. This workshop will help you to reduce the overwhelm of running your nonprofit organization. There is alot of things happening and hardly ever a time for you to sit down and just say, what do we need to do to move forward over the next year. Well, Ready, Set, Process is the workshop just for that. By focusing on the next 12 months, we help you build out a plan of action to make it easier for you to delegate to your staff and volunteers. By participating you'll leave with:

a dashboard to help the financial process go a little better
steps to improve your grant management needs
a 12-month calendar with all your due dates for a more practical handle on what's going to happen

Head over to our website cnrgaccountingadvisory.com/workshops. The link will be in the show notes.

Chyla Graham:

There's a couple of questions about how CNRG works, and I'd love for you to be able to share one tool because here, we think of how do we help people, their tools, their priorities [inaudible 00:00:15]. For you, what is one tool that you wish more nonprofits took advantage of or tried to use?

Cherrise Wilks:

For nonprofits, I would say at a minimum, in terms of your strategic planning documents, start out by creating a logic model for the programs that you plan to build. Then, the second thing is even though you are a nonprofit, you are able to earn revenue.

Chyla Graham:

Thank you.

Cherrise Wilks:

Create a business canvas, which is a one-page document that spells out your business model. You need both to be effective. Your organization has to understand it's great to go after grants, but the grants landscape has been changing for the past 12 years, and it's getting harder and harder, tougher and tougher to have people part ways with their money, so you need to focus on other ways to earn revenue into your organization through either fundraising or helping empower your participants to empower themselves or be a part of the organization or whatever the case may be. So, whether you sell some things that the participants make and provide as a part of the nonprofit, that's a way for you to earn revenue. Let them run a store. If you create meals or that sort of thing, those can be sold to the public. Just think outside of the box in terms of where you receive your funds from.

Cherrise Wilks:

Grants really should not be more than 50%. Honestly, I feel like they should be less than 50%, but they shouldn't be more than 50% of your total operating budget. So, these are things that haven't changed over time, and I think organizations need to keep that in mind so that if a funder decides to change their priorities for the year like we're experiencing now with COVID-19 and the political unrest or just, we'll say civil unrest that's happening with persons of color. They change their priorities on a whim, and your organization needs to be prepared for that by being diverse and having a diverse revenue stream. So, at least, start out by plotting your journey with a logic model and that business canvas, so those are the two tools.

Chyla Graham:

Yeah.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Nonprofits Nugget Podcast.

LINKS:

Visit Us On The Web

Join Our Newsletter

Schedule a Strategy Call

Sign-up for Six Week Course: Impact Basics

Like us on FaceBook

Connect with us on LinkedIn

Connect with Cherrise Wilks