How We Serve Our Clients: Multi-Year Financial Scenario Planning
If your organization isn’t bringing financial analysis into your strategy conversations, you may be missing out on a big opportunity—and you wouldn’t be alone. Understanding various financial scenarios and making data-informed decisions is vital at times of great uncertainty. Even the most seasoned nonprofit leaders and their boards have trouble making the connection between strategy and finance, especially given the current uncertainties. The Tangelo Tree team can help with that.
As a consultancy with nonprofit finance expertise, we are sometimes thought of when organizations have a technical need, but our work isn’t about setting up charts of accounts or advising on regulatory compliance—it’s about strategy that moves social impact. We work to measure mission impact alongside financial sustainability, plan for possible future scenarios, and support financial planning for new programs. We know this work is successful when we hear that it has supported leaders in communicating with the board and engaging them around strategic options grounded in financial data and analysis.
“We bridge strategy and finance conversations, helping leaders see vital connections and make more confident decisions.”
Organizations working for change are constantly negotiating a gap: there’s what it costs to create the intended impact, the revenue available to make it happen, and the difference in between. And various contingencies, foreseen and unforeseen, crop up to change what the picture looks like, as we’ve been painfully reminded in recent weeks. Multi-year Financial Scenario Planning is an approach we use to help organizations see that picture and make strategic choices, even in the midst of massive upheavals within our ecosystems.
When implementing strategies for impact, organizations need to answer questions like:
At what scale can we implement these strategies?
What are our expected costs and revenues, and what is the gap in between?
What if our expenses, the cost drivers, change?
What if we fall short of our fundraising goal? Where might we have to cut back in order to find solvency in other areas?
Considering a range of plausible scenarios, what choices might we make?
If we lose federal funding, how will we respond?
Multi-year Financial Scenario Planning is both a process and a tool.
Co-creation
We partner with the executive director, finance director, and relevant board members to look at the organization’s north star—its mission, values, and strategies—and the financial drivers behind these strategies to build a dynamic financial planning tool.
Capacity building
We use Excel because it is both practical and powerful. Our tools help organizations visualize a range of financial scenarios in a way that is customizable and accessible, and we help you understand how to use and adapt the tool over time.
Decision Making
We engage in using the tool we built together in strategic conversations among board and staff, modeling how it can inform practical decision making and preparing them to manage the strategic changes ahead.
As our sector faces threats that could dismantle our essential work, Tangelo Tree Consulting is here to help ensure that your work continues. We’re facing big picture strategic challenges with real financial consequences. We bridge strategy and finance conversations, helping leaders see vital connections and make more confident decisions.
With Care,
Tangelo Tree Consulting