Do you understand the costs of your initiatives?

Understanding the costs of running your organization is essential to success, but standard financial reports do not give you the cost information you need to make informed decisions. Grant accounting can help you manage grant fulfillment, but it will not articulate revenue generation costs. IRS accounting might outline your functional expenses, but it will not tell you how much it actually costs to run each of your programs or sites. In our Financial Analysis Service Grant, our team will help you define the costs associated with important initiatives such as programs, expansion, or revenue generation.

In our Financial Analysis project, our team works with you to identify and frame the cost initiatives you must define to answer a pressing strategic question. The team performs an in-depth examination of your current financial reports and accounting, teasing out cost factors relevant to those initiatives. Then they prepare a comprehensive report of costs that clearly lays out for you the full costs of taking on a particular initiative.

The impact of each project varies, but a Financial Analysis Service Grant is best suited to a nonprofit that wants to:

• Better understand the costs associated with running a particular program, or…
• Make a decision about expansion such as whether to offer services in a new city or scale back services due to cost considerations, or…
• Build a plan for more targeted revenue generation by understanding the costs of generating revenue across different streams, or…
• Gather the financial information necessary to answer another pressing strategic question

• Investigation of the full cost structure around a program, site, or revenue stream
• Development of a financial model that lays out the costs of an important initiative
• Discussion of the financial implications of certain decisions as they relate to your particular cost sitution
• Development or updates of a strategic plan, or updating of financial systems, is expressly out of scope for this Service Grant

• In-depth analysis of current financials and accounting information related to a key strategic question
• Financial model that provides the most detailed possible answer to that question
• Training and documentation that enables you to use the model in the future
• Report that analyzes the implications of the financial model.

Our Financial Analysis Service Grant is most likely to be successful under certain circumstances. We recommend you apply if your organization has:

• An Executive Director and Board of Directors strongly committed to this project
• Staff that can invest the necessary time to make the project succeed:
  • Executive Director: 10-15 hours total
  • Finance Director: 15-20 hours total
  • Selected Managers: 5 hours total
  • Day-to-Day Contact: 3-5 hours each week
  • Board of Directors Representative: 5-10 hours total

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 (streams constituting at least 10% of total funding)

Your Taproot Foundation Financial Analysis team will be staffed by strategy and management experts who have made a personal commitment to strengthening the nonprofit sector. Visit our volunteer roles page for additional information about Strategy Management volunteer roles.

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

• Competitor/Collaborator Analysis
• Strategic Planning Prep
• Strategic Scorecard