Fall Fundapalooza: Tips for Accounting and Development Team’s Fall Fundraising

Fall is a crucial time for donations, with many donors and nonprofits determining their year-end giving plans. This is also an important time to ensure your organization’s accounting and development teams are in tune with each other’s goals and needs. From budgets and planning to collecting donor information and accounting for fundraising dollars, your organizational operations can be in perfect harmony.  

Grab a light jacket and your pumpkin spiced latte and explore tips your organization can use to turn this fall fundraising season into a record-breaking world tour of success.  

Opening Act: Pre-Fundraising Preparation 

Every concert needs a good opening act, and every fundraising season is the same. While accounting is busy prepping reports and ensuring budgets are on track, donor development and fundraising teams are working to create campaigns and develop new income sources.  

Prior-year reports and budgets help development teams create more honed-in campaigns and set realistic goals and expectations for the funding your nonprofit can expect from this year’s campaigns.  

From estimating costs associated with fundraising events to showing how your organization will use the funds to make a difference before any fundraiser takes place, your accounting team can kick off the planning efforts and set realistic expectations and goals with the development team.

Explore this step-by-step guide for inspiration to reach your year-end fundraising goals. From planning to execution to post-campaign analysis, this guide will make your fall fundraising season the most successful to date.

Once you have worked with the development team, it is time for your campaigns to take the stage.  

Headliner: Kicking Off Your Year-End Fundraising Campaigns  

As the development team kicks off its fall fundraising setlist, the accounting team will be backstage collecting donation data and helping shape the ongoing campaign.  

Once dollars come rocking and rolling in, accounting will be tracking donations and expenses and reconciling bank accounts to ensure transactions are completed and preparing financial reports on the campaign’s performance. 

How you track and manage the funds is crucial to your nonprofit’s success. To be successful, your team needs easy access to:  

• Fundraising data to optimize fundraising efforts and empower donor stewardship 
• Top-level finance reports to show campaign effectiveness  
• Automated processes to eliminate data silos and provide real-time insights quickly and accurately 
• Unlimited fund tracking to demonstrate campaign effectiveness  

As the campaign and fall fundraising season ends, the data your teams collected is critical to creating future campaigns and telling your nonprofit’s story. When your organization incorporates fundraising data into the financial planning and analysis processes, it drives better development outcomes. 

A successful fundraising campaign positions your nonprofit to achieve its mission, take the stage for an encore, and conduct more successful fundraising campaigns in the future.  

The Encore: Continued Nonprofit Success  

Just like an iconic band headlining a festival can do nothing without a sound and lights guy, your nonprofit needs a combination of fundraising and accounting technology to position your team to enter its continued fundraising success era. 

Using fundraising and accounting software together creates an end-to-end solution that helps your nonprofit raise, account, allocate, budget, and report on those funds better through streamlined reporting and significant insights into fundraising and accounting. 

An end-to-end fundraising and accounting solution is the key to nonprofit success. GiveSmart fundraising software is a full-featured fundraising and donor management solution invested in your success that combines event and fundraising efforts with a Donor CRM for a 360° view of development success.  

MIP Fund Accounting is a cloud-based accounting software built specifically for nonprofits. For over 40 years, MIP has helped thousands of organizations track every fund and follow every dollar. Efficiently run core accounting workflows, create, and collaborate on unlimited budget versions, and integrate HR and payroll into accounting.  

Begin your fundraising world tour and see what’s possible with GiveSmart and MIP Fund Accounting.