Other stuff

More good stuff on overhead ratios and “worst charities” – 10-16-13

I’m adding a new category of good stuff, which will be called “impact” for the time being.

Here are some more articles worth attention but I don’t have enough time to comment in a full post. Here are the headlines, with links and a brief comment below:

  • When Good Is Not Good Enough –
  • To Get to the Good, You Gotta’ Dance With the Wicked
  • Why I Think Nonprofits Should Act More Like Businesses
  • Revisiting America’s worst charities and rethinking overhead: Interview with Kendall Taggart  
  • Investigators say police charity hired felons to raise donations

 

Impact

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Jim Ulvog

Guest Post – Cash Conversion Cycle of Donors

Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.

He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog.

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Would it be helpful to more thoroughly understand incoming church attendees, their giving, and if they feel accepted, welcomed, and a part of the local church family? This post will explore analyzing how long it takes for someone to give as a means to understand the newcomers.

About tracking trends, there are some considerations we need to ponder. When someone first shows up at church, they rarely give the first day. If they do give, they rarely would give their “normal” amount unless they felt part of the church, as if they had some sort of relationship or ownership.

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Jim Ulvog

Overcome fear and keep going

Mark Williams shares the amazing story of his grandfather.  What an encouragement to all of us to persevere in the midst of life’s trials.

The ship carrying his grandfather to the new world, the S.S. Norge, sank crossing the Atlantic in 1904. Eskild Alfred Eskildsen helped women and children get into the lifeboats. When the boats were full, he helped get life jackets on the remaining women and children.

When the ship was about to go under, he got a life jacket and swam out to the furthest boats. Why?

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Jim Ulvog

Guest Post – Forecasting Annual Church Revenues: Using Trends and Cycles to Help Predict Future Revenues – part 4

Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.

He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the fourth post in a series.

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Part 4– Final thoughts

Introduction is here. Description of forecasting model is here. Calculations discussed here.

Okay, once the research is complete, we can put together a fair and reasonably accurate estimation of tithes and offerings for budgeting for next year.

Next, the smell test. I have learned the necessity of this. So if the model says next year will increase by 5-10%, I should look at what has happened in the past (at least with the past I won’t have to make any guesses since it already happened!).

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Jim Ulvog

3rd blogiversary

Last week, August 28th, marked the third blogiversary of my lead blog.

Many thanks to those who have stopped by to read. By now you have sensed that I’m having a blast in this blogging journey.

In celebration, I’d like to provide a few stats for my three main blogs. I realize my sites are infinitesimally small in the overall blogosphere. Yet I hope in some small way stats from a small site might be an encouragement to current bloggers and others thinking of jumping into the fun world of blogging.

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Jim Ulvog

Guest Post – Forecasting Annual Church Revenues: Using Trends and Cycles to Help Predict Future Revenues – part 3

Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.

He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the third in a series.

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Part 3 – Calculations

Introduction is here. Description of forecasting model is here.

You still with me?

Good.

Trying to figure out how to forecast revenue for nonprofits is quite a sticky issue. After all, it is much simpler to try to forecast revenue for a company that sells some product, say, bread, soda, or gasoline. There is a reasonable understanding that people need (or want) those items.

For a financial model, there is the term “financial driver” which means anything that affects the rise and fall of revenues, expenses, etc. The four categories for revenue drivers are: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Charity pushes back against CNN and Tampa Bay Times. CNN stands firm.

The charity at the top of the America’s Worst Charities list compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, Center for Investigative Research and CNN, Kids Wish Network, is pushing back against the methodology. You can see the detail about the Times’ reporting on the charity here.

(This post will be a deep inside-baseball discussion.)

You can see the rebuttal here.

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Jim Ulvog

“Your help is hurting” – More unintended consequences

“The world is complicated.”

In a video from PovertyCure, Peter Greer tells the story I mentioned earlier of how in just one summer help from a U.S. church destroyed the egg market in a small Rwandan village.

Second hand clothes sent to Kenya destroyed the textile manufacturing industry and the cotton farms. Sad unintended consequences.

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ii_k_AUqo8I&t=197]

 

Superb quote from the video: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Guest Post – Forecasting Annual Church Revenues: Using Trends and Cycles to Help Predict Future Revenues – part 2

Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.

He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the second in a series.

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Part 2 – Philosophy and foundation discussion

Introduction and encouragement to pastors is here.

We were forecasting revenue for the next year and knew we needed to be accurate. We needed to do our best to discern changes (be that attendance, economic changes, etc.) in the church that will affect revenue.

After the first year or two of using a flat percentage increase by looking at the past few years and trying to make a determination for the entire year’s revenue in under an hour (yes, that happens frequently in churches!), we realized our mistake to make it such a hasty and cursory decision-making process.

We then then took a different road. One that required more work but—hopefully—would be worth it in the end.

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Jim Ulvog

Guest Post – Forecasting Annual Church Revenues: Using Trends and Cycles to Help Predict Future Revenues – part 1

Mr. Jeff Beaumont is a CPA working for a firm that focuses on serving the nonprofit community. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of his firm in any way. Because he speaks for himself, I won’t identify him or his firm in any more detail. He doesn’t speak for me either.

He has about seven years experience as an auditor working on the issues discussed on this blog. This is the first in a series.

By Jeff Beaumont, CPA

Introduction and encouragement to pastors

I found myself with a group of others only a couple of months before that church’s year-end was over to discuss the seemingly never-ending debate on how to set a budget. The good part, everyone agreed that expenses should be less than or match revenues. But then we needed to figure out revenue.

How do you determine that? I found myself holding in tension believing in faith that He will deliver what we need and, sometimes seen as “at odds”, being responsible and wise to take care of what we have been given. I was working in spreadsheets. I didn’t—still don’t!—know how to factor those concepts into budgeting. After all, God doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet.

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Jim Ulvog

Improved self-governance is key to development in Africa

That is the core point made by Dr. Mo Ibrahim on how to develop the economies of all 57 African countries. He explains his ideas at: Mo Ibrahim On How (And Why) Africa Should Solve Its Own Problems.

He wonders why African people are so poor. He thinks of where Ghana, Egypt, China, India, and Singapore were 50 years ago. Then, Ghana and Egypt were the richest countries of those five. Look how far the other three have advanced.

The problem is bad governance in both the public and private sectors.

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Jim Ulvog

Unintended consequences – “Your help is hurting”

How would you like this to be your legacy on the missions committee?

After the genocide in Rwanda, your church decides to help the village by providing eggs to everyone. Great idea, right?

Absolutely.

You help for a while and then you sense God is leading you to help in another area now that things are settling down in Rwanda.

Cool, right?

Sure.

Unfortunately, what you didn’t realize is there was an entrepreneur who had bought some hens and sold eggs in the community. He was growing his business and providing food to more and more people.

No business can compete with free, so when you started helping with your ministry of giving away eggs, his business went under. He moved on to another business so he could feed his family.

When you pulled out of the town, there were no eggs. That protein was unavailable.

Not so great.

Not so cool.

You drove out of business the guy who was previously meeting local needs and then you disrupted the food supply.

You left the community in more distress than when you first arrived.

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Jim Ulvog

12 situations when it might matter to you that the Feds are tracking everything you text or email and making note of everywhere you go.

Recent news reports indicate federal intelligence agencies are gathering up a lot more information than we knew. That data is available to undisclosed lists of unknown people and will be retained for a very long time.

So what?

Here’s just a few circumstances in which you might not want access to your data by a long list of unidentified persons from various federal, state, or local agencies who were granted access to various unidentified parts of the various databases: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

When a soldier comes home – – thanks to all who defend our freedom

Thanks to all who fight for and defend our freedom. My time on active duty didn’t involve any of the things on this list. No one ever shot at me. My duty was so easy compared to this. 

My gratitude goes to those who have returned and those still in the field. A big thanks to the 50 million who have served over the last 237 years.

WHEN A SOLDIER COMES HOME

 

 

4th 1

When a soldier comes home, he finds it hard….

..to listen to his son whine about being bored.

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Jim Ulvog