It was my first day on the job at GLAAD. I sat down to meet with our then Director of Finance, and he nearly wept as I pulled my HP 12c calculator out of my backpack.
Why so much emotion?
At that moment, I didn’t know if it was because he could see that I knew numbers and that maybe, just maybe, I could help save the place…OR if he was thinking, “Holy smokes – she knows numbers. She’s going to get one look at these and get on the next plane back to NY.”
Turns out it was the former.
Now I want to be clear: I did not have a background in Finance… but I didn’t have math anxiety either.
That’s because thanks to a most excellent boss over at MTV Networks, a really nice and awfully smart man named Mayo Stuntz, I learned something very essential — numbers tell a story.
Back then, numbers told us a story that led us to create the MTV Video Music Awards and then its Merchandising Program (pretty darned good stories they were too!).
These days, I meet at least quarterly with my business manager. As she ticks and ties the numbers, I ask tons of questions that usually go something like, “So what’s the story this year-to-date P&L tells me? What’s going well? Where are the red flags?”
When you ask the right questions and learn how to get to the bottom of the story, budgeting actually becomes really simple. Like a finance person I once worked with told me a while back, “It’s only a budget.” I laughed then (odd words coming from the lead bean counter), but now I get what she meant by this:
A budget is just a benchmark. A good, solid set of numbers that reflect what you know and what might be terrific estimates (as well as a few shots in the dark).
And as a nonprofit executive director, it is your job to make your best effort to create this set of benchmark numbers and then (here’s the really important part) tell the story behind the numbers in a way that all board members, regardless of financial literacy, will really understand.
To help you to do that, I have developed an easy-to-use nonprofit operating budget template. You’ll find a bunch of them on the internet but they are just that — templates. What I’m going to offer you is a basic template and also some advice on how to best use it to tell the story behind the numbers. Because as I said above, the numbers tell a story — but you need to learn how to tell it.
