Hi all!
Brendan, I feel like we are in the same spot at the moment.
Revenue forecasting, we use the same methodology as you describe: we use estimate proposals from the fundraising team, weighed by a % of certainty.
Donor reporting: I have tried to standardize our templates, but the truth is every donor is different in gift size, history, purpose, interest... so I have a basic Vena template that gives me the data i need (gift/expenses by project/nature of expenses etc...) and then I tailor my tables and visuals for each one depending on the message the donor manager wants to convey. That's for individual donors or foundations.
Grant management: to be honest, I am not that involved in grant budgeting and reporting at my level, but we are exploring solutions to reduce manual work and integrate grant reports with Vena (for reporting
and planning), or our accounting software.
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Clement Marlin
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-17-2021 13:27
From: Brendan Eger
Subject: Grant Budgeting Best Practice
Thanks Brandon! We have an internal grant template built in Vena, but our users have commented that they find it easier to work directly in a donor provided template, which can vary donor to donor, and feel like they end up having to do double entry to get data back into our Vena template so I'm curios if you've found a good solution for that where the end user only has to enter data once? Sounds like you start with something internal and then add a tab for the donor view, which is a route we're considering.
Our next challenge is in getting the awarded grant data formatted the same way as our operating budget data that includes our flexible unrestricted funding, and which makes up a significant portion of our overall budget (roughly 50% in total). Those operating budgets are based on our FY so our process had been to manually add awarded grant lines to those templates, but that was tedious, required double entry and created more work if the donor budget needed adjustments later. For the past year, we've been combining those separate data sets in our data warehouse for reporting purposes, but we're giving up the real time, consolidated view of the overall budget within Vena. I guess some organizations that are mostly/only grant funded might not have this challenge of managing two datasets/templates, but it could also be that we're making things unnecessarily complicated so I'd be curious to see how others handle this.
For the forecasting, our fundraising teams provide some sort of confidence estimate as to the likelihood of winning a grant and we take a portion of the pending grant to include in the forecast. I.E. if a submitted proposal totaled $500k and our confidence in winning the proposal is 50%, then we include $250k in the forecast. We're able to model that now at a high level, but we're thinking that we could drill down a level deeper if we're capturing grant proposal data in detail within our Vena template, which could help us better plan which future grant opportunities to target or where to shift our flexible funding to cover key gaps in our operations.
Maybe we can connect on a call in December to do a quick walk through of what we've each built and talk through some of the challenges?
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Brendan Eger
Original Message:
Sent: 11-17-2021 08:56
From: Brandon Combs
Subject: Grant Budgeting Best Practice
I can't speak directly into the grant space, but I can say this- the flexibility of Vena's Excel should allow you to build a custom template that will meet your needs. We have done similar things before- take a pre-existing report of our own, add a tab for the donor view, use formulas to populate the donor tab from our database loaded ones. In other words, you wouldn't necessarily need to map the donor template to the Vena cube- it could just exist on the template itself. Bu the donor form would be auto-populated and readily available.
Regarding the incorporation of the grants into your organizational budget- there's some concrete science and some gut here. IF the grant is "in the bag" so to speak, I'd for sure include it in my revenue projections. But if it is pending or under review- not totally secured, I would build a measure within Vena that could capture these types of verbal commitments and likely-but-not-yet grants. You could have a separate section on a template that shows rev/exp without these and projected rev/exp including them. We do something similar with our fundraised capital projects.
Hope that helps!
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Brandon Combs CPA|CGMA
Director of Finance - Camping
Young Life
Colorado Springs, CO
828.773.5371
Original Message:
Sent: 11-16-2021 17:48
From: Truman Tang
Subject: Grant Budgeting Best Practice
Good one Brendan. I believe this may be up @Clement Marlin and perhaps @Brandon Combs alley to share their viewpoint. Be on the lookout :)
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Truman Tang
Original Message:
Sent: 11-16-2021 13:24
From: Brendan Eger
Subject: Grant Budgeting Best Practice
Hi all. I'd be interested in connecting with anyone who has any tips for grant budgeting, particularly how to blend the needs of budgeting in a donor provided template while ensuring that you're meeting any internal checklists before submitting to the donor, as well as how you then incorporate awarded grants into your organizational budget. If anyone is also thinking through how to use proposal data that is pending into organizational financial forecasting, that would be much appreciated as well.
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Brendan Eger
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