A heart-felt story about your good works will inspire someone to give you $20. But big donors and foundations want data before they write a check for real money.
Non-profits have data everywhere and about everything from volunteer hours to donor activity. You have to be able to assemble the data in specific ways to support your grant application. How do you handle it all without a fancy data management system and an IT team? Most nonprofits have Excel, and that’s it … and there are some common errors in how Excel is used.
In this class, we’ll go over best practices for using Excel to manage your nonprofit data. We’ll look at many of Excel’s tools that can help:
- Measure the effectiveness of a fundraising campaign (“We raised $3000. How much did that cost us? Was it smart?”)
- Track donor activity (“Who’s donated in each of the past 3 years? Who used to regularly donate but hasn’t been heard from in the past 2 years?”)
- Compare program performance year-over-year (“We’re serving more people but, how many more?”)
Having a grip on this information is vital to making your case for grants and answering questions from donors, Board members, the media, and staff.
After the workshop attendees will receive copies of the spreadsheets shown during the session.
