A Little Working Capital, Please!

We are writing to make sure that you have signed up for our webinar next Tuesday. Prepare to have your financial management practice transformed!

Earlier this week, I wrote a newswire about the Colorado Symphony, which, after 26 years, finally managed to end the year with not just a surplus but a commitment toward an endowment.

It took the Symphony years of struggle to get there—and the thing is, their story’s not that unusual. All over this country, there are nonprofits that count themselves lucky to have squeaked by yet another year of almost-but-not-quite subsistence. They live essentially “paycheck to paycheck” because they have no emergency fund, they don’t have enough working capital to stay current with the environment, and they can’t always meet their own cash flow requirements…among other things.

Perversely, this often happens to nonprofits even as their budgets and purviews expand. Much of the problem can be traced to the ways we practically ignore the various components of “full costs,” even though this core competency is absolutely necessary for nonprofit financial managers and boards. Much of the revenue for many nonprofits is not fungible, and when our money is not fungible, we become less agile and relevant over time—and that is not a good thing.

This coming Tuesday, September 20, we are presenting the second in a series of two webinars on how to use an understanding of full costs to dig even the most stuck of organizations out of that rabbit-hole of self-enforced scarcity. Claire Knowlton of the Nonprofit Finance Fund will join us and present the full costs paradigm, and we will also talk to one nonprofit and one funder about implementing this new framework and how it can transform your thinking.

I am looking forward to seeing you there. Sign up today while there is still space, and invite a friend!