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News Update:
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Governance as Leadership:
Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards
Offered by Harvard Kennedy School Executive
Education, the program reconsiders the nature of governance in today's nonprofit
organization.
www.hks.harvard.edu/ee/gal1 or call 617-496-0484 for more
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Where Are The Jobs?
By Tom Pope
Patrick Shields was scrambling
to help jobseekers for Global Recruitment Specialists (GRS) in
Norwalk, Conn. As executive director, he lost three clients from
natural resources or environmental groups that pulled contracts.
GRS handles human resource services for non-governmental
organizations with international operations.
What does that mean for
jobseekers? Where are the jobs and which ones offer the most
opportunity in the economic crisis?
To read
the complete article click here... |
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Finance ...
Why your
auditors always seem cranky
Who’s minding the store? Auditors perform an
important function in nonprofits, but management has control
over the risk environment and the process of minimizing risk.
Risk assessment cannot be delegated to an auditor, or the result
could be hazardous to the health of the
organization.
That
was the advice offered by Hilda Polanco, founder of Fiscal
Management Associates, LLC, and Ronald F. Ries, CFO of the
Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, Inc., at
the AICPA Not-For-Profit Financial Executive Forum held in
Anaheim.
New
regulations, as well as heightened scrutiny in general, have
brought about changes in the items that auditors watch closely,
and nonprofit managers have to be aware of
them.
Polanco and Ries said that there are four main areas of
auditor focus:
-
Audit
administration. Auditors are looking especially at the dating of
the audit report and coordination with external
auditors.
-
Financial reporting. Of concern is the inability to
prepare financial statements, significant audit adjustments and
ineffective oversight over financial
reporting.
-
Internal controls and controls comments. Concerns include
inadequate segregation of duties, no safeguarding of assets,
lack of timely reconciliations and no monitoring of internal
controls.
-
Staff
development. Of concern here are the qualification and training
of employees.
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Management ...
Development and finance
must cooperate
Doesn’t it sometimes
feel as though operations inside resemble a tug-of-war rather
than a mutual effort?
Day-to-day responsibilities
can often put different parts of an organization in apparent
conflict with each other, even though they are working toward
the same mission.
Speaking at the National
Catholic Development Conference in Orlando, Fla., Michael P.
Scholl, executive director of development, and Keith Zekind,
director of finance for the Passionists of Holy Cross Province,
offered advice on the importance of collaborating and building a
cooperative relationship. The responsibilities of development
and finance might differ, but the end is the same.
They broke everything down
into three main categories: office collaboration, policies and
procedures and reporting to leadership.
Office
collaboration:
-
Two separate offices -- one
common mission.
-
Developing a sense of
trust.
-
Three key words:
collaboration, communication, education.
-
Establishing a relationship
takes time and work.
Policies and
procedures:
-
Finance as it relates to
development. How is money to be processed and
received?
-
Development as it relates to
finance. What kind of gifts can be received?
-
Procedures flow from
policies for both offices. What are the checks and
balances?
Reporting to
leadership:
-
Understand that finance and
development is a ministry.
-
Safeguard the mission of the
institute.
-
Be responsible to stewards
of resources. |
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Regulation ...
Who is watching the
watchers?
Who’s watching you? If
“you” means a nonprofit or philanthropic
organization, then the answer could be “almost
anyone.”
Transparency and accountability are
necessary and valid for the sector. But as Thomas A. McLaughlin,
a national nonprofit management consultant, points out, charity
watchers have proliferated recently, and they often apply their
own criteria for nonprofit success and accountability before
trumpeting their "findings" loud and wide.
McLaughlin suggests four ways of coping with
these watchdogs in order to ensure smooth operation that still
satisfies the self-appointed.
- Data presentation. Internal inconsistencies
can derail a Form 990, with its line 45C divided by line 12,
management’s costs as a percentage of revenue. When a
crusading newspaper pulled a random sampling of 990’s for
a report, one organization listed government funding as
“public contributions,” and the newspaper reported
this uncritically, thus giving the organization an apparent (and
absurd) cost of fundraising at 1 percent.
- Allocation methodologies. Many costs cannot
be directly attributable to any program or activity and must be
allocated according to a reasonable formula.
- When they’re right. There are times
when the watchers are right. Even if you correct it, don't
expect it to show up in their ratings for a while.
- Communication. Throughout the process of
dealing with an unfavorable charity watcher rating, try to keep
lines of communication open.
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