Building a Culture of Effective Budgeting Practice

We need to move people away from thinking that budgets are only an operational requirement and help people to view budgets as a core part of an organization’s culture and aspirations for a brighter future. To make budgets and budget building processes and practices more effective we must focus on interactive engagement centered around making budgets the perfect place and opportunity to showcase a culture of authentic collaboration, sharing of information, and planning for the whole

organization. We must recognize that if budgets that are not meaningful and are missing pride of ownership, they will be ineffective and tend to be ignored.

This interactive presentation will cover useful tactics and options to enhance the effectiveness of your nonprofit organization’s financial budgeting processes and budget communication, engagement, and reporting practices, addressing topics such as adding front-end assessment of budget preparation processes, how to creating a culture of rolling projections, how to apply a funding first budgeting approach, and look at methods for budgeting for salaries and addressing related capacity issues. We will conclude with a set of quick takeaways centered around, adding pre-month-end closing meetings with department managers and exploring the benefits from decentralizing budget building process.

Learning Objectives:

• Discover how adding a front-end assessment of your building practices will be most beneficial and how to use rolling projections as rear-end reassessment of your budget to optimize positive change and innovation.
• Learn about the advantages of using a funding first budgeting approach and how expanding your emphasis on budgeting for salaries can help with managing capacity challenges related to use and allocation of your labor force.
• Discuss optimization tactics and strategies to improve engagement and staff ownership of budgets through practices to decentralize budget building processes and adding pre-month-end closing meetings will benefit both the finance department as well as staff.