Financial Analysis Grant

Gain a plan for more targeted revenue generation

To make good decisions, you need to know how much it really costs to run your organization. Does it make financial sense to open a new office? Will cutting back on a high-cost program really make a difference in your bottom line? To answer key planning questions like these, you need the right financial information from a team of professionals that knows how nonprofit finance works.

Through the Financial Analysis Service Grant, the pro bono consultant team will help you define the costs associated with important initiatives such as programs, expansion, or revenue generation. The pro bono consultant team’s financial model will equip you with hard data for assessing past financial decisions, evaluating current costs, or forecasting future costs.

Learn About the Financial Analysis Service Grant

What we offer

The Financial Analysis Service Grant is unique in that you can choose which financial cost question you would like our pro bono consultant team to solve. Once the cost initiatives have been identified and framed, the pro bono consultant team performs an in-depth examination of your relevant financial reports and accounting, detailing cost factors relevant to those initiatives. They then prepare a comprehensive report of costs that clearly lays out for you the full costs of taking on a particular initiative.

The final deliverable, which you will be trained to maintain, will be a “living” financial model that you can easily update without worrying about keeping it frozen for usability purposes.

The estimated value of this Service Grant is $70,000.

Results

The impact of each project varies, but you can expect to:

  • Better understand the costs associated with running a particular program
  • Confirm or re-evaluate current assumptions about program costs
  • Strengthen your internal capacity to use and monitor the right financial data (as opposed to more financial data)
  • Articulate your costs more clearly in grant proposals and reports
  • Gain additional information for decision-making on cost-cutting or efficiency measures
  • Use cost information to price event sponsorship fees or estimate new service delivery models

For example, past projects have produced:

  • A Microsoft Excel tool that allows an organization to view total program costs per constituent served as well as total program costs per hour of service. The tool also provides program-specific data for budgeting, annual planning, and actual vs. budget analysis.
  • A Microsoft Excel tool that helps an organization to analyze historical costs across different programs. The tool also serves as a predictive model that helps estimate the costs of different program configurations.

How we get it done

The pro bono consultant team will:

  • Complete in-depth investigation and analysis of the full cost structure around a program, site, or revenue stream
  • Build a financial model that lays out the costs of your initiative
  • Create training and documentation that enables you to use the model in the future
  • Create a report that analyzes the implications of the financial model

Who’s the right fit

To be a successful client for this Service Grant, you should have:

  • An Executive Director and Board of Directors strongly committed to this project
  • Staff who can invest the necessary time to make the project succeed. In some cases, the same person can fill more than one role. Roles include:
    • Executive Director: 10-15 hours total
    • Finance Director: 15-20 hours total
    • Selected Managers: 5 hours total
    • Day-to-Day Contact
    • Board Member if available (not required)

We also ask that your organization meet at least one of the following criteria:

  • Locations in two or more cities
  • Running two or more programs
  • Two or more funding streams (that each constitute at least 10% of total funding)

The Taproot Foundation pro bono consultant team is staffed by strategy management experts who have made a personal commitment to strengthening nonprofit capacity and have a deep understanding of finance in the nonprofit sector. Visit our pro bono consultant roles page for additional information about Strategy Management pro bono consultant roles.

Apply for this Service Grant

If this project appeals to your organization and you have the recommended items in place, please review our grantmaking process and criteria, and then apply. If you have questions about the grant or your eligibility, please contact us.

Apply Today