Executives, board members and donors increasingly want better ways to visualize the performance of nonprofits. That is in terms of both being able to see key performance indicators and to have a measurement of the impact of fundraising, according toThe first trend is visualization of data, basically ways of representing financial performance to board members, many of whom come from for-profit organizations. “Their expectations are to be able to get in and see how an organization is performing,” says McNichol, “Especially for finance directors and CFO. They are looking for it to be visually presented.”
The same use of visualizing information applies to the second trend, nonfinancial reporting. “A younger generation of donors is interested not only how much money they raise but in how many constituents that money serves,” she says.
The impact of the economy is behind the third factor, Entrepreneurial modeling for nonprofits. Because of the recession in 2008 and 2009, nonprofits “really had to think about how they were going meet revenue and fund-raising targets without typical sources. How do we raise money outside the norm,” McNichol says.
In a fourth area, systems integration, NFPs face exactly the same needs as their for-profit colleagues. Even in companies that make a variety of nonprofit software—fundraising, grant management, accounting—the systems frequently don’t communicate well. Behind that, McNichol continues, data “needs to easily flow betweens systems even if they were built on competitors.”
Finally with healthcare, nonprofits and for profits are in the same boat in dealing with the Affordable Healthcare Act. “What we see are questions about whether products are ACA-compliant—particularly for midsize and larger organizations that may have a payroll system,” she says. Employers need to be draw together data from several sources, including payroll and benefits administration, as they face requirements to collect healthcare data for tax year 2015.
