The Growth Equation: Fundraising + Finance = Healthy Growth

Room to Read envisions a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that prepares them to be fulfilled and makes positive change in the world. Hi, I’m Sheri Friedman, and I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at Room to Read. And because I have a team in India, I Read More

Room to Read envisions a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that prepares them to be fulfilled and makes positive change in the world. Hi, I’m Sheri Friedman, and I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at Room to Read. And because I have a team in India, I wake up very early, around five in the morning. I really try to give them a couple of hours. I have to get my daughter off to school, and then we have our two dogs, Sky and caviar, who we recently adopted. I think the finance organization plays a huge role in achieving our mission. It took us a couple of years to sort of get to a place where the different parts of the organization are completely aligned around our mission. There are 750 million people in the world today who can’t read and write. Two thirds of them are women and girls and Room to Read. Believes that this is a reality that we have to change. Having the sage intact books has really made a difference for us in our organizations. We complete our audits in a very timely way. Things like nexonia for our time and expense and our timekeeping, they integrate fully into sage Intacct, and the organization is now more efficient and effective at producing reports. When we did the analysis, we came up with a 400% return being able to really be more transparent. I mean, we’re always transparent, but being more transparent, being able to tell our story in ways that donors are really interested in seeing it. What we would do with the money if we had it, and how are we doing with the money that we have because of the work that we’ve done with sage intact, we can now focus on our people and our processes, ensuring that our staff are supported to do the good work that we’ve been hired to do. I’ve always been engaged in some form of service, and I wanted to figure out how I could go one step further. For me, I was a single woman, and I wanted to be a parent, and I thought there are so many children in the world, so the international adoption process for me worked really well and aligned with who I was and who I am in terms of wanting to add to one child’s life. When Rachel travels to these countries, she’s really moved. You know, Rachel’s education is part of my passion, and ensuring that she herself is a lifelong reader. Not

only is she doing something that she’s really good at, but she’s also helping a bunch of kids get an education. She’s willing to help as many people as she can, and she’s the greatest person my life.

When I think about what sage Intacct has been able to do for us, it’s helping us contribute to utilization of our resources in a more effective way, the amount of savings we’ve put into the organization, the resulting number of children that got impacted by that was a little over 100,000 kids. But the truth is, is that you really begin to push your own organization. And the thing that I loved about sage Intacct was that they have this customer for life philosophy. They’re right there with you.

All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I’m a senior Training Specialist here at DonorPerfect, and I want to welcome you guys to Michael blakens from Sage with the growth of equation fundraising and finance equals healthy growth. Session, here’s a little bit about Michael. He is a technology marketing leader with nearly 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and public sector space as a senior director of Industry Marketing at Sage, he helps nonprofits and healthcare organizations optimize operations with Sage’s financial software. Michael has led marketing and product strategies at companies like Blackboard and open gov, where he’s helped double the customer base to over 19,000 institutions. And earlier in his career, he specialized in healthcare financing at GE Capital, a recognized thought leader. Michael has driven 30% plus growth at multiple admission driven companies. He holds an MBA from Emory, a BS from the College of Charleston, and lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Before we start the session, a few housekeeping items you can download today’s presentation from the details section to the right of your presenter view. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab so we can address them during the session, and all sessions will be recorded and made available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. So with that said, Michael, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Thank you, Amanda, so much, and thank you for that fancy intro. And I see some people from South Carolina. Thanks, Ruby, you gave me the warm welcome, and then you said you’re from South Carolina, so that makes me feel at home with your southern charm there. We’re super thrilled to be with you. I know it’s been a great conference so far, and you’ve had some wonderful content all. Ready, excited to be part of that. We’re thrilled to be joining donor that you know, the overall conference as a presenting sponsor again this year for the second year running. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with sage, where we obviously showed the intro a second ago, but we’re the software company behind sage Intacct, which is the most widely used Cloud financial management system for nonprofits today, and have enjoyed being strategic partners with DonorPerfect so far. It’s funny, as we were watching that video, I kind of forgot that that video chokes me up a little bit when her daughter says that she’s so amazing. So we should have started with another one. So I keep my face straight here. The sustainable growth equation is another way to title this session today, and I think it’s really fit to describe the importance of the relationship between finance and fundraising. And we’re going to explore some technical concepts and some organizational ones oriented around the better collaboration required from these two functions to thrive in today’s environment, with a particular focus on how we can get better information flow between systems, using the example of sage Intacct and DonorPerfect. So exciting to go through that with you. Please chat. You know, as we go through, I try and keep an eye on that, and we’ll have some polls as we go through as well. We kind of already had an intro for myself, but I am based in South Carolina, and have enjoyed working with nonprofits and public sector works for quite some time now, and so was familiar with both sage prior to joining it just recently. I’ve only been at the company about a year and with DonorPerfect, and I’m just thrilled to be interacting with both of these great technology companies, which I know have an impact for your organizations. So in our agenda, I want to start with some high level macro context. I think it’s important to describe the challenges we’re all facing together in finance and fundraising on behalf of the overall organization. Then we’ll talk about some of the challenges that organizations tend to face as related to disconnected systems. We’ll talk about the benefits of unifying fundraising and finance systems and then better collaboration overall, again, using sage and DonorPerfect as an example, and I see the Carolina folks chiming in there, so I thought it’d be cool to just kind of tee up today’s discussion with some macro data from a recent survey that we conducted at Sage about some of the shared challenges that I mentioned Finance and fundraising and your organization overall are facing with the idea that this can provide some context into why alignment is so important at a strategic level. And for this quick section, I’m going to actually draw from Sage’s 2025 Nonprofit Tech Impact Report, which is a resource you can find on our website. We may be sharing in the context of the event here, and it’s a survey of over 350 nonprofit leaders from both finance and fundraising and executive roles. So when you think about external challenges we’re facing, and we did this survey at the start of at the start of this year, the top external challenges that organizational leaders were facing were staffing and competition for funding. And you can kind of see the top five shown here, and I put a little bubble at top, because, you know, since we collected this data in the last five months, for many organizations, uncertainty may be the biggest challenge that they’re facing, or at least the most pointed. And from this list of challenges, you know, we know that the key question for leadership is, how can we grow our mission this year, in particular, in the face of major funding uncertainty, while we know that operationally we’re going to continue to face limitations due to the very, very difficult time it is to staff roles in the nonprofit sector right now, which is something that I think I just wanted to highlight as really Important for the entire organization to keep in mind as you go about progressing your work that these are the kind of combination of challenges that folks are facing externally from an internal perspective, the key challenges from our same survey came back to manual processes, and sadly, this has not changed. We’ve done the survey for many years, and nonprofits are really continuing to face similar challenges now as they did five years ago, in terms of shedding manual processes. So the number one challenge generally voiced here was just a general lack of process automation and organizational efficiency that results from that with a particular focus on reporting, because that’s one of the most difficult processes that nonprofits do. And while we all struggle to some extent with manual processes, these pains were more accentuated in the finance office. So as you look to get on the good side of your finance team, keep in mind that the easier that you can make their lives for how we get them information, potentially the better relationship that you’ll have as a result of that. And if you’re like me, the next time you have to complete your expense reports, just remember that the process is probably more painful for your finance folks than for you today, but I know it can, can often be difficult. One area that finance and fundraising. Off in a line around and work together on is forecasting and planning. And you know, in this survey, we ask a number of questions about what revenue projections look like for orgs. And last year, we did something interesting in that we took the question, which said, Hey, what are you predicting for next year’s revenue, and we mapped it up against what actually happened from a revenue perspective, and this can be a little bit difficult to understand. So just to walk you through the right hand image here, what you’re seeing is the forecast from 2024 survey that we did against what actually was reported in 2025 so in 2024 about 60 odd percent of organizations thought that they would grow revenue significantly as they looked ahead at the next year, but at the end of the year, we came back for our 2025 survey and asked them what actually happened, and only 40% or less organizations reported that they actually grew significantly during that year. So that is, you know, there’s a number of assumptions wrapped up in that, but at a high level, it really indicates that we have a very, you know, significant opportunity to improve how we’re forecasting overall, that organizations tend to be overly optimistic about what’s happening in the current year, and you know that there’s opportunities, in general, for these departments to collaborate more effectively when producing those types of forecasts. I’m gonna do one more kind of macro comparison here from that same survey, which is breaking down some of the responses we got by titles. So as you look at this slide, the numbers in white are the percentage of finance leaders who said who responded positively responded to this question saying it was, it was an issue or an initiative, and then in green are the percentage of executive or development department leaders who said the same so to walk left, left to right on this page. So when we asked folks about their key priorities for the coming year, 48% of finance leaders voiced that they were concerned about a lack of process automation and organizational efficiency, okay? And only 33% of executive or development leaders said the same thing. So there we see again, that pointed kind of reference point for finance maybe having more manual process pain than others today, in the middle of the page, everyone is interested in getting better at strategic planning, finance owns the process. So you see that 53% of them were looking to advance budgeting and planning this year as an initiative, whereas 42% of those other titles were but maybe what’s most interesting is the far right hand side of the page, which is the question of, did as far as your top initiatives go, are you looking to enhance financial sustainability and diversification of revenue sources, and only 28% of finance leaders said that this was a key initiative for them, and 59% of executives or development leaders said it was a key initiative for them. Obviously, if it was development leaders, you probably have that number even higher if it was them exclusively, but that really indicates a disparity on that kind of last piece, and I do think it’s understandable that finance and accounting leadership are going to spend more of their time thinking about costs and processes than they will about revenue. But I also think in today’s environment, and according to data that we’ve seen in this report, in other questions, there’s an appetite, an interest and probably a positive impact that can be had from bringing finance into the conversation more as it relates to strategic revenue growth, how to diversify that, and how to really unify that with the overall organizational strategy in terms of managing financials in general. So that was a theme that came up in our report, and I kind of just wanted to share to tee up today’s conversation. And I think we have a poll that Amanda’s going to pop up here in a second, how integrated is your finance into how integrated is your finance department into your revenue diversification or growth strategy today? Just three broad answers here.

There it goes. Yep, seeing the middle kind of bubble up there. And Amanda, I think we can however you long you think we need to hold this? It’s like we got 80 votes. All right, I think I’ll go ahead and end it.

Okay, thank you. Survey says everybody can see this, right? So 52% can everybody see those results?

Yes, no. Nobody can see results. How do we show sorry, let me see here. Doo. Doo, doo, let’s see. Can we see it now? Now we can see awesome.

Okay? Thanks everybody. Yeah. So 52% have somewhat, 23% highly, and 24% barely, okay, so we’ve got a mix, but clearly some opportunity to improve, all right, and we’re gonna keep going, just in the interest of time, here second, okay, so let’s take a break. Let’s talk about the challenges of disconnect and maybe why we want to continue to improve that relationship. And I’ll start first just from a technical perspective, problems that come in particular from disparate systems. Most of you have felt the pain from your finance office when things aren’t going well when communication is not flowing seamlessly, and these are some of the biggest challenges that we hear from from nonprofit finance teams or folks in general about this relationship. One is data silos, right? So general fragmentation of data makes it difficult for anybody to get a comprehensive view of your overall organization’s financial health, donor activities or just performance standing in general. So what you see on the finance side is they struggle to get a full picture and accurate reporting of what they need for strategic planning or for board communications. You of course, struggle to get the full story for for your constituents as well manual processes in general, just spending a lot of time on reconciliation, on data entry, that could be spent on better, more strategic activities. And of course, for me, first thing that comes to mind is the finance office keying in data. They are chasing down data. But of course, when they are doing that, you are likely also getting questions from them or doing the same thing. So you feel my pain, I’m sure, or can resonate with that. The lack of real time insights I mentioned as well, which is just if you cannot communicate your impact or what’s happening in the moment, you’re hampered in this environment from telling your real, real story. Right? How many things are happening right now in the public sphere that you would be much better served to be able to tell your story about how you’re relevant in that moment in real time. And if you do not have the data flowing the way that you need to, there’s absolutely no way you could do that. And by the time you do have that in hand, oftentimes the dynamics in the environment have changed. Of course, reset resource allocation is important, making sure that our financial strategy is lining up with what’s happening in the initiatives and spend in the organization. And then, of course, compliance and audit concerns come into play anytime you’re talking about data that is not moving in unison. I had never heard the term Nike network before somebody at Sage mentioned this to me, but the idea behind the Nike network is that, basically, back in the day before cloud based systems could integrate all this stuff together. If you wanted to share information about your major gift or anything related to the organization, more broadly, that had to be collaborative. You had to strap on your Nikes, and you had to walk around the office, going from cubicle to cubicle or door, office to office, sharing hard disk, downloading information, maybe taking some paper around to different people in the organization, and going back and forth really, kind of wearing out the carpet in between those places. Some of you probably are not old enough to recall that, like I am, but the modern equivalent of that, of course, is when you don’t have integrated systems, often you’re just doing the same thing over email, right? Or over teams, or over slack, whatever tool you choose. And in many ways, it’s similarly inefficient, right? Because you’re going back, talking, manually, exchanging information over text, and a lot of back and forth questions result from that. And if you really step back, it’s also, you know, very, very inefficient, and you know, maybe not so much better than those original Nike Nike network days that we had. So I’m sure many of you are familiar with how gift processing works or do it regularly, but I wanted to show this example for how it looks in many organizations, just because it’s so indicative of this relationship and it’s really important to our conversation today. So generally speaking, in many organizations, you know the workflow for you know, gift entering and processing looks something like this, where first you know the fundraising Development Office is receiving a gift, they’re entering that gift into their own system, fundraising CRM, whatever that revenue source may be, and then from there, they might have to copy the check or make print files or print reports or anything else that might be required depending on the type of funds that were raised. Finance then receives that gift information, and they are manually re keying or re entering information into their accounting system, which presents a host of challenges. It’s a different system, so it consumes different information. They may need, you know, certain transactional level information for how they categorize that gift, because they might not have that level of detail from the system that it’s coming from, or from whatever way in which you’re communicating. It. It just creates a cycle of back and forth. It. Also, importantly, breaks what’s called the audit trail, as it relates to how that money is flowing. So from a compliance perspective, on the accounting side, kind of a big deal. And then ultimately they’re going to be moving that check or record, you know, into a final deposit type of mode. And of course, that’s the natural flow of this process. It’s not necessarily the end, because often in this scenario, finance has a lot more work to do, particularly if it’s a complex gift, you know, or unique scenario where you’ve got split gifts or shared giving or anything like that. But there’s also work that’s going to ultimately happen as it relates to reconciling information, reconciling bank accounts trying to match up transactions that didn’t ultimately kind of look the same. And it kind of tends to come back in this circular fashion, back to the point of gift entry and back to you guys for lots of questions, which, of course, is not something we tend to want. Meanwhile, you’re getting questions from your funders about how that money is being spent, which can hardly be articulated if you’re not getting an information flow between the systems to tie it back to programs and costs. So question for you, and we’ll pop up this poll here. Now, do you have automated data flow between fundraising and your CRM today, and your financial systems. And if you don’t know the answer to that, I would just put nothing for now.

So templated Import Export would be, you know, someone has gone through your cells, and your peers in finance have gone through and kind of defined, you know, a way to import and export that that data, that it in a way that’s slightly more efficient than just being manual. Okay, I got a no in the chat. You guys are also free to, you know, if you guys have comments on this stuff, please chat it in. I’m sure everybody would be interested to hear how your process works and and all that good stuff. And like we’ve got enough responses. Can you share that?

Give me one second here.

All right. Is everybody seeing the result?

Perfect. Thank you so much. So 62% said, Nothing, wow. That is higher than I actually thought. You know, I thought there’d be a bigger, bigger bit. Jim says, Yes, wow. I thought there’d be a bigger percentage there in the middle, so less than 10% you know, are saying they have a fully automated process today. That would be an interesting thing to double click into. I want to keep moving in the interest of time. And yeah, understand, you know, all of you may be in different places. You might have brand new systems. So there’s an intention to integrate these things. But I think that snapshot is obviously relevant of what’s what’s happening right now in this situation. I was going to share one more just example. I think it’s pretty basic, but you know, to click up about and talk more about the relationship versus the systems for a second. You know the importance of being aligned with your your finance department, in this example from a youth services nonprofit about what can happen if you’re not aligned. And yes, this actually happened in real life, believe it or not, but so major, a major donor, pledged a new half a million dollar gift towards, you know, a renovation, so capital, capital project, for whatever reason, this was not clearly taken into account that the gift would arrive in installments over three years. So that’s not blaming either department, but for whatever reason, that information flow did not happen because, you know, it’s part of of manual conversations that were expected, and people get busy and people get distracted. So finance team ended up booking the full amount as immediate revenue and planned as such, and that cascaded a series of events of misalignment. So development assumed the money was coming. Finance assumed the money was there, and they started spending down without really understanding that picture, which created a cash shortfall for a variety of expenses. It resulted in delays and penalties for some of the folks that this organization was working with, and unfortunately, probably the biggest impact, right? You know, the level of confidence that came as a result to their constituents in their board. So this is just one example of, hey, it’s really important that we be talking regularly and that we understand each other’s rules and regulations. So question back to you guys again, I know I’m keeping you busy with the questions here. How well does your development team understand gift acceptance rules today? So if we can publish that poll real quick, we’ll take a look at this response. 

You want me? Are you okay? There we go. Sorry, it took a second to get that up there. I’m putting you through too much here. Amanda, sorry about that. Oh, no, it’s okay.

Yeah, and totally, you know, there might be people on your team who highly understand this stuff and have new people who are still getting used to it. So don’t, you know, just kind of looking for a macro picture from you guys here. 

I think we could publish it. All right, perfect. I think can everyone see the poll, wonderful. 

Okay, awesome. All right, so more than half saying basic understanding, good news, about closer to 47% saying fully aligned here, and then just a few not at all awesome. Thank you guys. This is great and helpful information for me as well. Okay, we’ll keep us moving. We’ll talk quickly about the benefits of unifying this approach, and it really begins. So we’ll start with first, with that systems perspective, so connecting your finance and fundraising systems together today, that piece that very few poll that we were just and it starts with streamlining communication, and that just brings everybody onto the same page. Development can provide insights into upcoming can cash flow planning perspective. Similarly, back to your organization, those development initiatives ring, you know, honestly, the biggest thing for all of you, Michael, just to give you a heads up, we’re getting some feedback that your audio is going in and out.

That is strange, okay, I would maybe try turning your mic off and on, and then we can try to keep going. Okay, hello. Is this better?

So far so good. It happens when I move my head. Good thing. I’m not standing on a stage right now. I am struggling here to stay still. Okay, I will be more robotic here. And I actually pushed forward a slide while we were doing that, so I want to quickly recover my ground, just in the interest of time here. And I was just mentioning so reconciliation as well. And the thing that I think is biggest to call out for your organization is if your finance team is spending less time reconciliation in reconciliation, in doing manual reporting, that that is more time that they can be providing value to your organization overall in the form of maybe more strategic form of planning more effectively with you to help the organization grow. So we really are seeking out a 360 degree view of your nonprofit’s financial health. I see I’m cutting out again. Um, okay, I’m going to try the mic on and mic off one more time, guys, and then if that doesn’t work, I’m going to change my setup. 

Victoria says I’m still moving here. Okay, the 360 degree view of the organization’s health is really what we’re shooting for here. When you connect contributions and pledges and they’re entered into the fundraising system, data would be flowing automatically into your fund accounting system. Finance Office controls the posting rules of how these transactions go into their information, into their system of record, and it maintains, and this is maybe most important thing we’ll look at on this page. It maintains that audit trail, from development to finance, from start to finish, and eliminates double double data entry. You’re able to monitor the use of donated assets. You. And as you know, if these integrations are set up appropriately, you’re able to connect your efforts back into what’s happening with those dollars after the fact in a much more efficient and less manual way. As money is spent, you can track the amounts and timing of net assets being released from restrictions and all types of levels of details around what’s happening with those donated assets after the fact, which is so important to your storytelling from a reporting perspective, by connecting these systems, we’re establishing a secure link between contributions received and again, how that money is being used. And so what it really does is provide details in the fundraising system as well, and accounts in the fund accounting system are streamlined between those two, so engagement with major, don’t major donors, or other inquiries that may come your way can be easily managed by using accountability, summaries, dashboards and other reports that can be produced after this integration is established, general automation of processes we know about the importance there, largely around reconcile, reducing that burden of reconciliation, which is dramatically simplified. And it all comes back to, you know that seamless audit trail, helping your finance team reduce that audit prep time, and also any risk that comes with that audit process overall, helping the organization become better stewards of donor dollars and helping you cultivate a reputation of trust and transparency that will help you earn more dollars and ultimately do more good with your mission to be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, every finance director’s dream state looks something like this, which is they have a capable system, and in this case, Sage Intacct is the example that can do the reporting that they need, which means it’s dimensional in nature, and it has robust reporting capabilities that also will benefit you, by the way, right? If they have a system that has good dashboarding, for example, and they’re looking to automate all the transaction flow from from different sources into a unit, unified environment from which they can report on those elements, whether it’s in summary, in detail, but but definitely in real time, because that information flow is happening all the time. So a setup like this hugely empowers your finance organization and allows them to produce better insights for your leadership, your board and you and better manage your organization. So I’m sure many of you want more detail and understanding from your finance team around your own performance and around your own spend in your departments. And part of the reason you may not be getting this today is that they’re still held back by all the manual processes we’ve been discussing. So another poll is your team. Do you feel like your team is well informed by financial reports on your fundraising performance or fundraising efficiency today, or, if not performance? You know? Well, let’s just keep it to performance. I was going to say about about where, where funds are being used, but let’s keep it to performance.

Okay, so a lot of you pretty well informed. That’s great. Okay, occasional insights. 

Okay, great. I think we probably got enough responses on that one. You guys tell us if we’re giving you too short of time with the polls here, we just don’t want to go go over our presentation time and everyone should be able to see the results.

Okay, awesome. Everybody can see those results. Yep. Okay, cool. I you know, we want you to see them because we think it’s obviously, you know, interesting for you to be able to benchmark against the other folks in the audience here. So 32% highly informed, 55% occasional insights. Unfortunately, a few of you in the dark, so we should make sure you’re connecting with folks afterwards about about that. Okay, so we’re gonna end the rest of the conversation really talking about better collaboration overall, with a particular double click into how sage and DonorPerfect work today as examples. But before we do that, just you know, some general thoughts around how better collaboration between these two departments can be impactful to your organization, separate from from just that, that that technical stuff we were just talking through, and really, there’s so many areas that can be impacted. The most strategic of these, generally speaking, I believe, is a more connected relationship means better revenue growth strategy, one that is more sustainable, one that takes into account those things around fundraising efficiency, but also compliance concerns and. In gift restrictions or gift rules that are set in place by the finance organization. And so you’re aligned, then you’re really executing on the overall vision of of your organization towards your mission. It also improves planning and forecasting, which we talked about at length, so regular communication between those teams. You know, when it comes to revenue, that is the hardest element of finances to predict, and so your insights into the finance office are obviously a critical component of that. And as we saw, there’s plenty of room for most organizations to improve on that element. None of these things really become optimal unless you’re aligned operationally. And I think that starts back with the processes that we talked about that allow you to have data to flow seamlessly, so you can react together to what’s happening, and so you don’t spend the majority of your time in the relationship with your finance peers, reconciling two sets of information or otherwise having combative discussions around data related to your fundraising efforts. So sage Intacct and DonorPerfect, we’ve been partnering together a little over a year because obviously we presented this conference last year as well, and have been bringing to market this integration between these two systems, which we really believe brings the best in class nonprofit accounting system with the best in class donor management system that you all know and enjoy today. And just organizationally, we came together largely because of of we valued the the overall company culture of software and of DonorPerfect. And so when you look at the the matchup of the systems, obviously that’s there, but just by way of the benefits that you get from customer service and just how much DonorPerfect cares about your mission. And that was really important for our relationship as we’re really only partnering with DonorPerfect at this altitude today, at this level of depth for sage Intacct, when it comes to Sage Intacct as a system, just a couple things for that we would know it’s number one is customer satisfaction, much like I believe DonorPerfect is in terms of fundraising systems. And you can see that really clearly on g2 which is a peer review site where the first and only provider of financial management applications, preferred provider, excuse me, of financial management applications by the AICPA, which is the major governing body and association of accountants and CPAs in the country, and the undisputed leader and largest provider To the nonprofit industry today for cloud accounting systems.

I uh, okay, I was just looking at the chat there. Excuse me. So this image I wanted to sit on for a second, because this is one example of an integrated dashboard of which many can be configured that’s benefiting from the in the integration between sage Intacct and DonorPerfect today. So we’re going to sit on this and just kind of talk on about the benefits here. So what if you could have this unified dashboard that can inform both your finance organizations and of course, because it’s shareable to other folks in the organization, it would be something you could look at daily in real time as well, and with connected systems, both teams can have insight into that real time information. This means program and development staff no longer need to go to accounting to get the insight into transactions as it relates to their budget, right? So you you know if you have a particular budget you’re managing to instead of asking for that or having to wait for it on a monthly basis. This is a real time perspective, once everything is set up with that integration gives you much more power in your hands and decisions in autonomy as it relates to managing your own expenses and strategies. The finance team on the flip side can see if and when the development team has secured the funding without even having to ask, right, making reconciliation and making those conversations, you know, much easier. Again, connecting those systems means they never get out of sync. It’s reducing that manual burden that we talked about, and then because of this connection, and because you may have this unified kind of visually appealing and interactive so you can drill in, Sage Intacct today, you can drill into any of these components I should have mentioned earlier. Obviously, when integration is fully built out, your finance folks are often able to drill into detail, into your system as well, if needed. And so because of this, you have the true ability to see your return on investment and track KPIs like cost per dollar raised or per donor, per initiative, per campaign, per appeal, whatever those may be, and see how they’re really impacting your operations, so you can better utilize your time and prioritize appropriately. Okay, this. A list of kind of more, more tactical things that come as a benefit of those that integration. I mentioned the term accountability summary before. Think of that as a report that kind of gives you a perspective of what’s actually happening with with with those major gifts or those restricted funds. So you’re you’re able to see in more of a profit and loss style format, what’s happening with with those development funds? And so this is some of the specific, tangible kind of user benefits, if you will, of the integrations. For example, your finance office can click into those gift details, as I mentioned. Okay, we are at the point in our relationship where we have some successful, successful customer references to point you to as examples if you’re interested. These are also published on the sage Intacct website. First Baptist Church of Milford is a recent example, and I spent some time with the staff there talking about some of the efficiency gains they had as a result of this relationship. And it really honestly, the biggest impact as it related to First Baptist Church of Milford was on the development office, and the amount of information that they were no longer having to kind of double key into certain systems. And actually, the integration was set up in a way where they weren’t having to re key information into their own CRM nearly to the extent that they had previously so an overall increase of 20% efficiency for all the folks involved in this process, particularly Barry, who was the project development manager, who really kind of steward the overall information capture for their organization. Brevard zoo is another example now, and Brevard actually independently implemented sage Intacct and DonorPerfect separately, and went to the effort to integrate those two systems, and as a result, just got dramatically better visibility between their finance and fundraising departments and improved that relationship overall. Because prior to having invested in that integration, we’re not able to really bring together things, and we’re struggling with their manual processes. And in combination with both that integration and sage Intacct, their finance team saw a 30% increase in their overall team productivity with sage Intacct basically paying for itself in less than three months post implementation. Just pretty impressive. Okay, so that was a little bit of a plug for the system there, and we went through it quickly. We do have time for some Q and A but before that, we have one last poll, which is when you think back to the image that I showed a minute ago. And it doesn’t have to be that exact image, because I mentioned it was flexible, but what would a unified, shared, real time dashboard that you in your finance organization had access to do for your organization? Would it be a game changer? Would it be an incremental improvement, or would it be something that you just don’t know that I see the value of that? 

Yeah, thank you, Angela, for saying it’d be a game changer. I definitely think it can be. And unlike most of the things that you guys, you know, probably have to, you know, put an investment request in on this is something, you know, how nice is it to focus on an initiative that the finance team can agree on, as they’re often the ones that you’re making that justification argument to? Okay, so it looks like about 60% upper 50 saying game changer, and about 40% saying incremental improvement. Do you want to share those? Want to share those results again?

Yeah, let’s do that, and you guys can let me know if you can see the results or not. Okay, thank you for confirming that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, awesome. Great information. And these, you know, this, this one, to me, kind of maps back towards, you know, the state of integration that we talked about earlier. So many of you kind of really see that as an improvement area and feel like it would be a game changer. And I would say, just to reiterate, so that dashboard example that I gave, which can be modified, that’s the image that we’ve been using in a lot of our discussions and demos. Is that image? But that dashboard is, is really something that is pre configured based on our relationship with DonorPerfect as well. So by default, that would be something that kind of comes with with with that integration through the implementation process, okay? And with that, we’re kind of done with the presentation side of things, and I think we have about 10 minutes left for questions. Yeah, absolutely.

Let me just go through and see if I can find the questions here. Alrighty, so our first question is from. Anuja, and she asked at cam, we’re currently doing most of our consolidation for grant reporting in MS Excel, a similar process that you’re talking about. We are a small nonprofit with 24 employees. Could you please suggest an effective tool to increase our efficiency?

Yeah, um, and I’m sorry. Cam was the or I was forgetting the first name. Who asked that question? Let me go into the Q A, it was Anuja. She’s sorry.

Thank you for the question. Um, I think I understood it correctly in terms of so you’re doing, you have, you have grants today, and you’re doing the the compilation of the grant reporting today in Excel, small nonprofit, 24 employees. I mean, when you’re thinking about a solution for grants, and I assume many of you out there have grants as part of your overall contributions, it’s part of your revenue mix, and sage Intacct is actually, you know, a system that is used regularly to manage grants. I think, you know, they’re actually a rather large percentage of our customers today do not have a lot of fundraising operations and are working more exclusively with grants, some of which are federal, you know, grant funded organizations in nature. And we have some dedicated functionality. Our own grant tracking and Billing module in sage Intacct is really a complete post award grant solution. So if you’re looking for better ways to go out and do kind of the fundraising aspect of grant management, obviously that’s something that’s more in the wheelhouse of doing or perfect today. But for that, reporting and compliance, whether it is tracking that grant information back to employee expenses, and managing indirect cost allocations and looking at the grants across different time periods. Those are all things that intact. Sage Intacct helps customers do today, and I would say probably one of the better options for your team out there.

All righty, and let me see here. So I have a question from anonymous, how do you set up a process when each donor or grantor donates and grants differently with their own process?

Um, well, I think you know, as it comes to the integration, and this is where I, you know, I would refer you to a deeper conversation, because I am not a technologist or an implementer myself, but when we typically think about those integrations, there’s enough flexibility in the configuration where it can recognize, obviously, the attributes of those funds that are being raised. So you are probably in some way, shape or form, as you bring those different types of funding into your organization, you’re entering that into a system today. And sage and tech largely can recognize, you know, those attributes as they come in, you know, as part of the implementation you kind of set up for that. So there may be some weird, you know, attributes that would need to be discussed, etc, but by and large, the integration is meant to be more holistic, capturing the various types of funds that would be raised on your side, perfect. And then I have another question from an anonymous user. They’re asking, would the finance team not be able to see the information in in DonorPerfect that, oh, I can’t read today. Would the finance team not be able to see this information in the DonorPerfect dashboard and need their own dashboard on a software like sage? So I think that’s probably in reference to the dashboard slide you showed earlier. Yeah, yeah, and I’m not myself hyper familiar with the dashboards you have available in DonorPerfect today. And if you’ve got something set up that is really covering all the elements that your finance team is using, then that’s amazing, and you’re doing your job as a great partner to that organization to give them that visibility. But I would say within sagentec, what that’s bringing into the equation is any of the data that matters to them from an expense perspective. So if you really want to bring together the narrative, both for your team and for the finance team, and we talked about those accountability summaries, we talked about how those those funds were being spent, that is where that can happen, within sage intact, because it’s going to consume all that revenue information. It’s going to allow that information, either manually, or, in many cases, in an automated way to attach transaction or what, what we call in the finance system dimensions, which are really attributes around that transaction automatically so that they can view it in the finances particular ways that may not be applicable today in how you look at things good or Perfect, but in particular, what you’re going to benefit from is you’re going to be able to combine it with other metrics. So at a minimum, right? You’re bringing in the expense information that you may lack today. But if you’ve got a finance office who’s really been focused on integrating other tools into sage and tech, you may be able to bring in other operational data. So think about your mission. Think about the output that you provide today, let’s say a case management solution. Those are things that are often integrated and brought into sage and tech as well. If you’ll recall, I kind of showed the finance manager the finance director’s dream state. And if they’re already doing that, then it can be really interesting, because you can be bringing those three different types of data together, both your fundraising, your operational and your financial.

And do they have the ability to customize that dashboard at all, or, like, add their own custom reports? Yes, yeah, yeah. And as I mentioned, you know, I think the example was, was one that we worked together with the DonorPerfect team on as kind of the standard so that is, is kind of the pre, pre templated version, if you will. But that’s all part of the implementation discussion, you know, depending on how creative you want to get, obviously, there’s some flexibility in there. Very nice. All right? And how is sage better than QuickBooks? Are they similar? 

Um, Mueller, you know, it’s funny. I’m sure, I’m sure, that the best canned sage response to that would be, well, they’re similar, only in that they’re accounting systems. You know, I think the biggest thing for nonprofits coming off of QuickBooks would be the visibility in the reporting that come with a more rich, more kind of mature system, like a sage Intacct, which is really meant to serve those organizations who are graduating, so to speak, off of QuickBooks and really have entered a point where they need to report on, you know, the different types of funding sources they have, at a more granular level, maybe different entities. It’s really that dimensionality that folks are often looking for when they leave QuickBooks, and that’s what sage in tech does, really, really well. Of course, there’s also just a host and a range of general accounting concepts that QuickBooks is very well designed to do for very small organizations, but doesn’t necessarily focus on at you know, the processes that would be necessary for larger works.

All right, and I think this might be our last question. Have you experienced development teams or database administrators that are hesitant to integrate DonorPerfect and their financial CRM? What advice do you have for them?

That is a great question. I suppose. I haven’t experienced many of them, because they probably haven’t been pursuing the solution and been talking to us too much if there’s that much resistance to it, but I will, I will have to maybe take that as a follow up. And you know, we talk regularly to to Darrell and Russ on the DonorPerfect side, and they probably have some stories that they can share as it relates to that. But was the question Amanda as well, kind of how to go about breaking down that barrier a little bit the second part of the question.

I would argue, yeah, I’m doing a bit of interpretation here, but I would say yes, yeah. And if so, you know, I mean, obviously today’s conversation was meant partly to address that, you know, I think that for some reason, you know, particularly on the finance side, there’s resistance to wanting to build this out, you know, because of maybe not wanting to provide a certain level of visibility. There’s just so many benefits that would counteract that. So I think you really bring it back to the ROI justification, and you’re trying to convince your finance team. Look, if you can eliminate transaction, work and reconciliation from their lives, and they have to be a little bit more open and forthright because of that, I think it’s, I think that that you’ll get them there eventually, amazing. Well, I think that’s all the time that we have today. So I do want to thank you all for attending Michael’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways. And our next session is going to be our keynote session with Floyd Jones talking about the power of connection. How do you unite your project people and purpose for lasting impact? We’ll see you guys in a few and thank you. Michael, thank you, dear.