Annual Reporting

If you’re struggling to find support for your nonprofit organization, you may want to begin tracking certain data to help you build a more compelling narrative. The more you understand what your organization has accomplished, in specific quantitative measures, the more your stakeholders and prospective supporters will be able to grasp the magnitude of the importance your nonprofit has in the community.

Nonprofits that aren’t able to show their value, in both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (narrative) ways often find support lacking in the following ways:

• Board member disengagement and/or dysfunction
• Not enough volunteers signing up
• Volunteers who step forward but don’t commit or follow through
• Donations waning in number and/or amount
• Grant applications rejected
• Partnerships dissolved or waning in commitment

The more data you can collect during your fiscal year, the easier you’ll find it to tell your organization’s story. The method of data collection isn’t important – it can be as simple as a spreadsheet you design. What you collect, however, is vital. Naturally, each nonprofit will need to collect different sorts of data based on what your particular mission is.

The goal is to have as much information as possible that shows your organization is successfully achieving its mission and moving forward toward its vision. In order to gather the right data, it would be helpful for your staff and board to gather for a strategy session (or two). Whether you facilitate this yourself or hire a consultant, you want to come out with a list of data your staff and board believe will be most helpful in proving you’re effectively serving your mission and vision statements.

Ideally, the list of data you want to collect over the next year will have a second column that indicated who in the organization will be responsible for gathering this information. The responsibility should be spread among the staff and board members; it shouldn’t be up to one person to do it all.

In addition to the data, it’s helpful to have photographs of the things you’re doing throughout the year; things like your special events, perhaps a new office or equipment you’re now enjoying, meetings that take place, people availing themselves of your services, etc.

In order to make it easier, try opening a shared folder in the cloud that everyone can access. Then each person can log the data they collect in a place where everyone can see the progress being made in one, accessible, file.

During the course of the year, as your board and staff are collecting information, find a good template for an annual report. The annual report is an excellent way to tell your story to your stakeholders at the end of the year. Annual reports can be distributed in print or digitally to your donors, volunteers, prospective stakeholders and event included in some grant applications. You may also want to put a downloadable version of it on your website. They should have a fair amount of verbal content but a high-level of graphics (charts and other images that give the reader a visually interesting snapshot of your quantitative successes), as well as photos.

Once you get into the habit of collecting data to be reported, the staff and board of your nonprofit will become better equipped to talk about the organization and its accomplishments. Morale, comprehension and pride are elevated as a result as well, which, in turn, attracts more support for your organization.

CLICK HERE to download 10 Things to Track