127 – How to turn Data into Donations with Stephen Newland

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Feeling unsure which of your campaigns are actually paying off? Stephen Newland, a non-profit fractional CFO, reveals how to make smarter marketing and fundraising decisions by understanding your real costs and financial data. So stick around. This episode can change how you fundraise forever.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about financial clarity for marketing and fundraising decisions I’ve got Stephen Newland here with me. Stephen is a fractional CFO and the founder of Money Path. He helps 1-10 million… $1… Not $1. How are you going to help $1 non-profits? Maybe we should take it. Kind of funny. You helped 1 million to $10 million non-profits gain clarity and confidence through forecasting. You’ve got a track record of leading finance teams at startups and fast-growing non-profits. Stephen’s mission is to prove that finance doesn’t need to be complicated, especially when it comes to evaluating what’s working in your financial and fundraising and marketing efforts.

Stephen, thank you so much for joining.

Stephen Newland: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here today.

David Pisarek: Let’s start simple. How can non-profits actually know which marketing or fundraising channels are pulling their weight?

Stephen Newland: The first place I always start is data. It’s not the sexy place to start.

It’s not the fun place to start, but it’s where everything in finance and analysis and everything, raising money, it all goes back to how clean is the data? Do you have good data processes? That’s the first place to start.

If you’ve got a donor CRM? Are you tracking campaigns? Are you tracking, ‘Hey, this donor gave as a result of the gala event or because of this mailing campaign, or because they came through the lead gen on the website’ and that led to a recurring donation?

That’s always the first place that I like to suggest people to start.

David Pisarek: I love that idea, being able to tag accounts. Most CRMs have the ability to add tags or categories, things like that to people’s accounts. If you’re not doing that, I think you’re missing a very big opportunity.

One of the other things, I guess data points instead of things, but one of the other data points that I like to recommend is to look at time of year that people are donating as well. We know, in the non-profit world, you’ve got Giving Tuesday and End of Year giving. And as a registered non-profit, you can issue tax receipts. So there’s a really big reason for people to make End of year donations and a very compelling argument to say, ‘Hey, if you to donate now is the time because tax season, take advantage,’ all that type of stuff. But, if you are an organization that’s focused on… One of the ideas that always comes to mind for me, anyways, is children going back to school, needing school supplies, needing meals, things like that, do you get a bulk of donations in August, right? Right before school starts? If that’s the case, how can you lead up your marketing?

Nobody wants to be hit with marketing effort and for specifically for fundraising. You need to build the case for support, and that takes months and months and months before. If you’re thinking, ‘All right, August,’ just back to my example, you might want to start that at the end of May and start talking about this past school year, here’s how we helped, etcetera, and start building the case to lead up for the ask come August.

Stephen Newland: The other thing I would add to that is

people love to feel like they’re part of what’s going on in the broader society at the time.

And so if it’s back to school season, that’s top of mind. They may even have somebody in mind that says, ‘You know, I know they’ve been struggling this year,’ and they can almost picture who that donation is going to go to. But they also love the idea of tapping into just broader culture and here’s what’s going on in the world. And yeah, I love to hop into that and be a part of what’s going on, broadly speaking. So I think that’s a great perspective.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I love that idea. People want to be connected to the cause and know that these are the people that are getting support or the animals or the country or the planet or whatever your specific area of cause is.

Stephen Newland: The next step here is once you’ve got good data, and I would even say, too, this is data on the donor CRM side, but it’s also financial data. Just by nature of what I do, I’ve come in and I’ve seen financial information, and there’s just categories that don’t really make a lot of sense, or there’s things that maybe one month got put in this category or this line item, and the next month they found their way into another one. It’s cleaning up that data, too.

But then, what you can do with that is now, if you’re able to look at your ‘How much money you raised from a campaign?’ Let’s just use a gala, or let’s just use a mailer, for example: here’s how much money I raised directly from this mailer, and I know how much money I spent on that mailer. It’s a pretty easy calculation to say, was that ROI worth the effort and worth the money, right? And so that’s essentially all you’re doing, but you’re looking at this across the different channels, events, digital, physical mailing, emails, major gifts. So that’s where the next layer of this comes is going to play.

David Pisarek: In terms of tracking, anybody that’s doing a direct mail campaign or an email campaign, if you’re going to use a QR code, don’t use a QR code for email campaigns. Nobody’s going to scan a QR code from their phone, from their computer. Nobody’s doing that. They’re going to click a link.

If you’re sending out a piece of mail, a postcard to a specific set of postal codes that are in your local catchment area or something like that, have the QR code go to a secondary URL that will redirect, and then you can track all the access from that that’s going through and filtering through, because then you can actually know how many people went through.

If you can’t do that, I would just make a secondary landing page or a different donation page that you’re driving that traffic to. That way you can track, specifically, this came from the mailer versus email versus the hero image on your homepage or even from social media.

Stephen Newland: Yeah, it’s a great point. And I think the other aspect to this analysis that I always like to caveat because naturally, I’m the finance person, so I’ll go towards the numbers side of it. But there’s also a pretty big nonfinancial component, too. So let’s say that mailer, maybe on that landing page, if you click that QR code, maybe there’s a link for or a volunteer and donation. Well, you can track a nonfinancial conversion there. Maybe that’s muddying the waters. Marketing is not my… You’re the expert in that area. Maybe you wouldn’t muddy the waters and do a campaign that has both, but maybe you would. And if so, you can track nonfinancial outcomes, too.

And so there’s always the… I like to say there’s the numbers side of this analysis and there’s the vibe side of the analysis, just because is not, the numbers aren’t always going to capture the true true value of the ROI.

And so maybe some of my other fellow members people are out there saying, What are you saying? Don’t say this. But that, to me, is a good way to think about this.

David Pisarek: When you think of your brand as an organization, it’s not just your logo or your wordmark. It’s how you’re also perceived in the community.

Do people want to engage with you? Do people want to donate? Do they want to volunteer? Are they looking to join your board of directors or whatever? I think that’s definitely It’s an important piece, the name recognition, understanding that people might not know who you are, but they might get this thing and then try to see what you’re about to be able to help and get better.

I love that idea of being able to track, ‘Okay, yes, so they didn’t make a donation. What did they do when they went through?’ That’s where analytics will definitely provide a lot more insight of the non-monetary value.

Okay, so let’s take a step back for a second. People think of campaigns. To your point, here, they send out a mailer. They know the cost of that from the postal service. They know the cost of it from design. Maybe there’s an internal person and took them 2 hours to design it and a senior executive to approve it. You can calculate the time roughly and go, ‘Okay, here’s the actual cost for this thing.’

What are your opinions in terms of the actual calculation for the all-in pricing of a campaign or an event? Is there something usually that you know gets overlooked?

Stephen Newland: Yeah, absolutely. This is a big one because not all campaigns, not all ways of raising money are the same.

You could put on a big gala and you could raise a ton of money, but what you don’t see is how many staff hours went into just getting to that room that night before you even get to that room in the months of planning and all that. I would say staff time is a huge one. Most of the time when we’re looking at this type of analysis, a lot of the times people will just say, ‘Oh, yeah, that mailer cost me $1,000, and it raised me $4,000.’ Perfect. That’s a 4:1. Well, if that was maybe your first time doing it and you spent hours overanalyzing and analyzing, ‘Okay, but do I put the QR code here? Did I use the right verbiage here?’ Maybe you spent, I don’t know, 5, 10, 20, 30 staff hours doing this, and all of a sudden, okay, when you put a price tag on how much time was spent on doing that, maybe it wasn’t nearly as good of a ROI as you thought.

That’s one huge one that is often overlooked, especially I would say for events, is it will make events look much less, I’ll call it ‘profitable’ on paper.

David Pisarek: I love your point about tracking people’s time and understanding the time and effort. And through the coaching that I do with the non-profits and non-profit consultants, one of the areas that we focus on is how are you tracking your time? Do you really know your true cost for delivering X, Y, and Z? A lot of times we donate our time to the causes because you’re not actually properly tracking the time.

Employees, they’re there, let’s say, full-time employee 35 to 40 hours a week. What are they doing with their time? It’s interesting. I was at a conference back in November 2024, and there was a speaker there talking about how much effort should we expect from our employees. It’s really about 65 to 70%, right? They need time to play. They need time to do other things, and getting 70% effort out of an employee is the realistic number. If you go, ‘Okay, so they’re working 40 hours a week.’ I can’t do the math in my head. Let’s say 70. You could probably do this. Let’s say 70% is 32, maybe. Yeah. So it’s going 30 to 32, something like that. Maybe my brain is working better today than normally.

But being able to go, ‘Okay, in the 32 hours, what was it that was produced? What was it that was done? How many meetings were there?’ And being able to track that. I think for most organizations, they don’t have a project management tool. We use one. We use a product called ClickUp. Tell people about it, they can use it, they cannot use it, whatever. There’s all kinds of tools out there.

But knowing where you’re spending your time, not holding people accountable to it to go, ‘You only tracked three hours today. You were here, I’m paying you for eight to be here.’ No, that’s not what it is. It’s about identifying where the time is being spent so that you know, ‘Okay, this department is coming to marketing because they want to do X, Y, and they want to have a skating event two months from now. We did this last year. We know how much time it takes, so we can properly plan and schedule for it.’ That’s part of that. You’re probably looking at me going, but there’s a cost to that.

Stephen Newland: Yeah, but it can drive incredible insights. If one organization is willing to do that and the other is not, that can produce an insight that could raise more money or make your organization just that much more efficient where you’re able to deliver your services a little bit more efficient than the next one.

You highlighted on something that’s really, really important. We oftentimes look at the salary line as just like, ‘Yeah, we’re paying the salaries. It is what it is.’ But we don’t often take until it’s almost too late, a lot of the times take a look at, ‘Okay, how is this time truly being spent? And are we just adding more and more busy work on top of it? Or are there ways to reallocate this time?’ Really, most organizations, and I would say this is the same for non-profits, your salary cost is usually between 50 to 70% of your total expenses. If you think about not having some oversight in that area or not factoring that into analysis like what we’re talking about today, that’s a huge miss because that’s such a big area of expense that’s going out the door for every organization.

David Pisarek: It’s okay. Everybody listening. All right, pay attention here.

It is absolutely okay to tell people that you have administrative costs.

A lot of organizations are afraid to say, ‘You know what? We’re spending this much on admin time.’ I don’t know anybody that would think that an organization is operating at like 90% of money going towards the cause or 95%. There might be some, there might be a few. I’m not saying all, but you’ve got to be honest with people and say, ‘We need to accomplish this. We want to help 30 more countries with clean water.’ Great aspiration. How are you going to do that if you don’t add more staff? It’s very hard. I think people need to start thinking about being, not being, I don’t think they’re being dishonest, but just being outright with it and being open about it because people know that there’s costs for that.

Stephen Newland: 100%. I used to do a lot of work with startups and small businesses.

No startup investor that I would ever talk to would say, ‘Don’t invest in your future organization,’ the infrastructure of the organization, because they know you need that in place to sustain the growth that you hope to achieve. Without it, it actually costs a lot more later on when you’re trying to catch up and all your systems are behind and your database is mess, all the things.

That’s a great point to double click on.

David Pisarek: You’ve been working with non-profits. I’m curious what maybe you’ve got in terms of a surprising insight that you’ve seen in how a non-profit might calculate real costs?

Stephen Newland: Yeah. Again, I think I’ll go back to it’s just leaving out.

I’m going to use the event as an example. Because a lot of times it’s big events is where we raise all of our money. But then you really look into that and you factor in the staff time. That event, you may net, you may have raised, I don’t know, let’s just say $50,000. Well, what if you had used hundreds of staff hours to go find other grants or go through your network and have coffee meetings or identify businesses in the community that are really interested in your cause? Could you have had a different result with a fraction of that time? I don’t know. It’s more of that I’m just asking the question, and that’s what this analysis does, is it just asks the question. It gets these thoughts out of your mind.

Data challenges assumptions is a good way to think about it, and so that’s why this really matters. But a couple other… I went on a little tangent there. A couple other things that I would say.

There are things like paid channels that can look expensive. If you’re doing direct mail or even ads online, they can look expensive at first, but if they can drive current donors, over time, that cost for that same donation goes to zero or very low.

You’re just maintaining that relationship. That’s something to pay attention to is some of these the acquiring of the first time of their donation, direct mail, paid ads that can look expensive, but over time, it can get cheaper.

One thing that I will say, this is true of startups and non-profits, is digital campaigns. I have seen a lot of money wasted on paid ads. But here’s been the most common thing that I’ve seen as to why. It’s typically because they’re not working with an expert. They’ve got a big budget and they say, ‘Yeah, we get this $10,000 grant from Google Grants every month, or our investor gave us a bunch of money to go put it in paid ads. We can probably figure it out. Facebook, Meta or whatever, we can play with the algorithm, and we know who our target is.’ I have seen a lot of money wasted on that, but significantly less often, when there’s an expert behind it driving that strategy. That’s another thing that I always like to put out. There’s a lot of organizations getting that $10,000 Google Ad grant, I think a lot of times they’re like, ‘Why is it not working?’

There’s a lot of tweaks to make it work well.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

There’s two notes that I made as you were talking where you touched on it, but I just want to hit it straight on. One is CAC, and the second is LTV. You need to know your CAC, the cost of acquisition. How much does it cost you to bring in a new donor? How much does it cost you to bring in a new major donor? Where are your thresholds with regards to regular donor versus major gift? Okay, so you need to understand that. You need to understand the time and effort. Part of that is the lifetime value, the LTV. How long are they donating to you for? They’re giving $5 a month. Are they with you for 10 years, 20 years, 6 months.

You need to be able to understand those numbers. Having a CRM of some sort or donation platform of some sort that can easily show you these number is a game changer.

There are some free platforms, but once you start wanting some of this data, you really do need to go into one of the paid systems.

Stephen Newland: Yeah, big time. You’re exactly right. That’s exactly what I was referring to.

If the lifetime value of a recurring donor, let’s say they give $1,000 a year for five years, and maybe you had to spend $1,000 of ads or whatever that is to get a direct mailer $1,000 to get to that one person, well, that’s still a five to one payoff in terms of the donations they’re giving you versus what it costs. If you can repeat that over and over and over again, that is a great way to fund your organization.

A lot of times, I think one other thing that I would say is another surprising insight, I’ve seen this in businesses and non-profits, is the temptation to want to just try to dabble in a bunch of different fundraising areas versus using this type of analysis. This is to say this is working really well. We should double and triple down in this area because we’re tracking it, because we know it works. A lot of times with a lot of different areas of fundraising, there’s maybe a lot of fruit at the top of the soil, and it looks easy to get there.

But then you start digging down, you’re like, ‘Gosh, this is getting harder and harder.’ But the further down you go, you might find, ‘Oh, there’s a lot more down here.’ We just had to get there. We had to unpack the analysis a little bit.

That’s another thing I’ll throw out don’t be afraid to double and triple down on an area that’s really working.

David Pisarek: That is sage advice, regardless of whether you’re a non-profit or a for-profit, being able to niche down or niche down, depending on where you are, you’ll say one way or the other, being able to focus on the thing that’s actually working.

And one of my mentors always talks about pulling levers. If you are putting, let’s say, $500 a month into to ads on Instagram and you’re seeing traffic come in, here’s the best way to test it: Put in a thousand, double it, and see if what happens on the other side doubles or more. And if it does, you have a proven way of generating whatever it is. It might be leads, it might be subscribers, it might be donors, it might be people signing up for whatever program service, showing up to an event, etcetera. Whatever it happens to be, it doesn’t matter.

But if you know that you’ve got something and it’s working, get permission to double the amount of money. If you can’t get double, maybe you can put an extra 50%. So instead of 500, you put in 750 and see what flows on the other side. If it works, you know that you have a proven method of doing whatever. So when the time comes for the next event or the next thing that you need to promote, you can put more money in and you’ll see more reward on the other side.

Stephen Newland: Spot on. Yeah. I can’t really add a whole lot more to that. It’s exactly my experience, and it sounds like exactly your experience as well.

David Pisarek: Let’s talk about digital tools. We’ve got email, we have social media, websites, and a lot of times, they feel free. You can take your phone and you can shoot a video. I do this all the time. Come check me out. I post videos all the time, but shoot a video and you could post it on social. How should organizations factor email social websites into cost-benefit analysis?

Stephen Newland: I’m really curious to hear your insight on this, too, because you’re probably a lot closer to this, I’ll cover the financial side of it.

With anything free, and I’m even thinking about this through my own business, I’m thinking about the time investment more so than the cost investment. There’s going to be maybe if you got some scheduling software that’s 40 bucks a month, whatever. That’s pretty cheap. But if you’re spending 5, 6, 7 hours doing LinkedIn posts or doing newsletters every week, that adds up over time. Really, there’s the constant theme through this is evaluating both the direct cost and the time cost for all your efforts, marketing efforts across the organization.

To do that, all you’ve got to do is just assume if it’s the executive director or your development director, just assume whatever their average hourly rate for their salary is. That’s a great place to start. Time’s a rough amount of hours being spent on that activity. You can go super granular, but I even say, ‘Hey, go very high level.’ If you’re plus or minus 10% on the hours, you’re still in the ballpark of what… Start putting a value on all these different activities in your organization.

Here’s why: there’s a finite amount of time, staff time and your time and money to allocate to what’s working or what’s not working.

And there’s nothing wrong with experimenting and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to try this for a period of time, and then after three months, we’re going to see, or whatever.’ You have to give things time to breathe, right? I’m sure you’re used to hearing this where it’s like, you just turn on marketing thing and why are sales going elsewhere? Why are donations coming in immediately? But I think it’s okay to experiment. But then it’s also good. What happens is we add the newsletter, then we add the social post, then we add this other campaign and that campaign. And then over time, you’re doing seven different things in not doubling down on what might be working.

David Pisarek: That’s exactly what it is.

In my agency, we track the work that we do on projects because we need to know how profitable we are or aren’t and whether we’re going over budget on any projects, that type of thing. We also track the time we spend internally, and we’ve got maybe about 20 different tasks, and we are a little bit more vague about the tasks. So, we have a marketing task. Anything related to marketing we have there. We have a financial and invoicing one. We have one around email and messaging. We have one for sales effort. So it’ll be networking and putting proposals together, and and meeting and presenting. We can look at the past year, the past two, five, eight years. How much time did we spend doing this? And was the time valuably spent? What was the return on that? There are some things that we need to do as non-profits.

You have to be on social in some way. Which social channel? That’s the key. You really need to understand the psychographic of your ICP or Ideal Customer Profile or consumer profile or client profile, whatever you want that C to be. Episode 16 of the podcast, I talk about psychographics. So finish listening to this and then go check out episode 16. But-

understanding where your audience is spending their time and what matters to them, what they’re thinking about, that will help me focus in on, here’s the one channel or the two channels that we should be spending our time on because that’s where our ICP is hanging out.

So I think I think that’s probably one of the better ways of thinking of how you can spend your time more efficiently.

Stephen Newland: I love that. I think the time part is the cost side of the equation. I know where I’ve seen some non-profits get tripped up is on the how do we measure the benefit side of the equation? Oh, our followers grew 10% or 5%. Is that a vanity metric or is that a true… That caused a good result for the organization?

I think, thinking through, and this is where I’m actually very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is it click-throughs, conversions, donations, signups? I think that, to me, is the true benefit side of the coin. It costs me back to this customer acquisition cost or CAC, maybe you’re trying to get volunteers. Well, maybe you spent 30 hours last month on social posts, but you got 20 volunteers that signed up. You can easily calculate the cost to get those volunteer signups directly, and you can attribute it back directly to a link in a profile on Instagram or something. Anyway, I’m curious, your thought on the benefit side of that equation.

David Pisarek: There’s this intangible benefit, which is the awareness of what you do. It’s really hard to put some numbers around that.

I’m actually working on, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it. I’m working on an ROI calculator for web and for branding. That should, by the time this episode goes live, everybody, it should be available, we’ll have it in the show notes, so don’t worry about it.

But yeah, there are some, je ne sais quoi, some things that we can’t really put our finger on that are important. It might be three, four years before somebody takes some action, but they need to know about you. They need to know about your organization. They need to be aware. How do you figure out the cost of awareness? You can’t. Three years down the road, ‘Hey, Steven, how did you hear about our organization? Thank you for coming to, you filled out a volunteer application form? Awesome.’ I don’t remember, right? Yeah. That’s what you’re going to get, and that’s okay. The senior executives need to know that this is the reality that we live in.

I remember years and years and years ago, I was working at the hospital. I’m not going to name names, but I was asked to track social media accounts of similar organizations in the city. So how many followers do they have? How many posts do they put up? There was a point where you were able to see other organizations through Facebook, the number of, not followers, whatever they call it, the number of people that have liked. But I was tracking all that and graphing it, and it didn’t really make a lot of sense to me, I guess, in terms of how are we doing compared to, okay, but what is our focus? Do we care how these other organizations are doing? Does it really matter? That was a good 14, 15 years ago.

Nowadays, if somebody’s asking you to track that, I would question them, why? What’s the validity? It’s going to take time and effort to do it. I was spending maybe about a half hour a week tracking that. I think my time could have probably been spent better doing something else. Now, certainly, with the massive onslaught of AI, you could probably automate a lot of that reporting.

Stephen Newland: One thing that I was thinking about in terms of the ROI, and I was having a conversation conversation with somebody else who does a lot of branding, and the conversation was around if your website or if your annual report is clean and crisp and designed really well, or does it look old-school and out of date? How likely or unlikely is a donor to donate to one or the other? If you showed them to them separately, is it the clean, crisp one? Is this 80%? And the not-so-professional is this 30%? That’s one easy way, not easy, but that’s one way to start to measure the possible ROI of some of the branding.

Even on social media, I think a question could be asked. Again, I don’t know if this is a focus group of your existing donors or what this looks like, but did you check our social media page before considering donating to our organization or before signing up to be a volunteer? If the answer is yes, and maybe it’s nine out of 10 said yes, bingo, there’s your ROI. It may not have been the thing that pushed them over the edge, but maybe it was.

But it certainly didn’t hurt that, maybe it was like step four of seven in the process. But had they not gone through step four, they would have probably not got to step five. But anyway, that’s just one way, a focus group or an easy, like some way to get a measure on what is the ROI of that softer benefit.

David Pisarek: A number of organizations that are subscribed to the podcast, follow us, listen, see our stuff on social, they have smaller budgets, which usually means that they’re probably wearing seven or eight different hats and really, really stretched for time.

Is there one low effort step that they could take to make more data-informed decisions?

Stephen Newland: Yeah.

If I were to pick one, it would just be focus on the data, how clean your data processes are, because a lot of these tools, whether it’s Quickbooks or Xero for the financial side, or pick your donor CRM, a lot of them have really good canned reports that are prebuilt. You just click a button or you can build a dashboard, and it’s there for you. You don’t have to get fancy and do all this crazy analysis.

But one thing is true, whether you’re doing this analysis or whether you’re doing these canned reports and these dashboards, if the underlying data, if it’s messy, none of it matters, and it will actually might give you bad data that you’re making decisions off of. If there’s one thing to focus on, it’s just do, whether that’s a duplicate search on your donor database. A lot of these have tools where you can run a duplicate. But putting some check in place on your donor CRM and on your financial data for data cleanliness, I think by far will be the best ROI if you’re stretched thin. Then using these prebuilt reports, they’ll give you a lot of insights that you wouldn’t normally have.

David Pisarek: I love that idea. Invest in a tool that will give you the insights so that you don’t have to spend your precious time trying to figure out how to get the data, how to get the report, how to clean it, how to do any of that stuff. There’s a whole bunch of tools out there. Are there any that you might recommend that you’ve seen that work pretty well?

Stephen Newland: Yeah. I mean, really on the financial side, I’ve got a few things that I have everybody do every single month.

One of those things is doing a reconciliation between your financial system and your donor system, your donor database, because if information is in one but not the other, or then you’ve got two different sets of data and it’s not telling the same thing. That’s one step.

Then on the donor side, signing up for one of the CRMs. A lot of the CRMs that I’ve used, I’ve used Neon, Virtuous, a few of the other. I’ve used some of the bigger ones. A lot of them have really great built-in data cleanliness tools already. I will say that is the pro of getting out of spreadsheets is you’ve got a tool that can come on top of your data and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got two Mary Smiths that are at the same address. Why is that the case? And one has a donation in 2024, one has a donation in 2025.’ Well, maybe we should combine these two, and then you can get a better donor profile for that person. Those are just a couple of examples.

David Pisarek: I love that idea, being able to consolidate your data and make it all work better for the organization. That’s really the goal is how can we leverage the data to make better decisions? It’s not going to be perfect. Maybe you’re at a 60% now. Maybe you can get it to 70 or 75%, then you can go to 80%, then you go to 83.

So whatever it happens to be, get some time in your calendar to look into some tools, some product demos, and just see. You can also call some organizations that are similar to yours or that are local to yours that are bigger than you. Find out what they’re doing. Talk to them over there. I’m sure they’d be more than willing to give you some insight, some advice, maybe point you in the right direction for what’s working for them.

Stephen Newland: 100%. That advice is so critical.

Don’t spin your wheels trying to figure out the perfect solution when some other organization and team has already been through that and figured it out and most are willing to share.

David Pisarek: Steven, amazing insights around the gap and bridging the gap between the finance and marketing and operational oversight. I hope people that have been listening to this and to us have gotten some great advice, some great pointers today. I know I have. I’ve got some ideas that I’ve made notes of that I’m going to take back to my team and to my clients. If you were to… I’m going to put you on the spot here. If you were to give everybody listening to this, a this is what you want them to do in the next 24 hours, a task of some kind, what would that be?

Stephen Newland: Oh, man. The first thing that comes to mind, and I’m just going to speak on financial side of the coin: I would jot down your top, I’ll just say top three financial stressors, because if you’re at a growing organization, you likely have some financial stress that you’re carrying. And that’s just whether that’s in the back of your mind or not. I would write that down, and I would take a step on whatever one.

If there’s one for a lot of people, it’s cash flow. So if that’s keeping you up at night and stressing you out and preventing you from making decisions, talk to somebody. Shoot me an email, shoot me a LinkedIn message, and I can give you some more specific pointers on that. But just start to map that out.

What is my cash going to look like over the next six months? so that you can start to ease some of that.

The reason I say I went to financial stress, it’s because I have seen that is a pretty common thing that I’ve seen across a lot of executive directors or leaders at growing organizations is they carry some financial stress, and it holds them back from making clear decisions in other areas of the organization.

That’s why I say, write them down, get them out of your head, and then just start to take action on one of those top three. I would say your action step is, shoot me an email, shoot me a LinkedIn message, and I’ll be happy to give you some more tactical steps depending on what that stressor looks like for your organization.

David Pisarek: Love it. Here’s the ultimate question is, you mentioned shoot you an email. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, what do they need to do?

Stephen Newland: My email is steven, S-T-E-P-H-E-N@moneypathfpa.com. Then also, obviously, my website is moneypathfpa.com. If you go there, top left, there’s going to be a button for free resources. I’ve got a cash flow template. If you’re worried about cash flow, I’ve got a whole template and a video on how to fill it out, that would be a very easy step to take. I’ve got a grant tracker template there. I also have a list of 150 non-profit discounts available, so check it out. I think there’s a lot of great resources on there.

David Pisarek: You definitely want to check out the non-profit discount list. As Stephen just mentioned, there’s 140, 150 or more resources on there, so definitely want to grab that and get the link.

Also, just so you know, for everybody listening, we’ve got a massive resource database on our website as well, where we have all the resources and links to all the speakers and guests that have been on the show, categorized and tagged, so you can search and find things that you’re looking for. If you’re looking for fundraising, we’ve been talking a lot of financial. If you’re looking for anything around fundraising, you could go. We’ve got a category for fundraising. These resources that we were talking about will be in there and added to that when the show goes up.

Stephen, thank you so much for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast.

Everybody listening, if you want any of the links, the resources that we talked about on this show, on this episode, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!