M+M 010: Telling Your Financial Story

You’ve put in the work to learn about what makes a sustainable financial foundation.

• Solid financial operations

• Established internal controls

• Compliance is under control

• Planning tools are in place

• You’re producing monthly reporting with meaningful analysis

Now it’s time to wrap it all together by telling the story behind the numbers.

This is important because if your board, funders, or community can’t understand your numbers, they won’t act on them.

They might miss warning signs, fail to see the impact or worse…lose trust. 

That’s where financial storytelling comes in.

When you translate numbers into a clear narrative, you build confidence, raise more money, and gain more support.

Let’s walk through how to do that for three key audiences.

🎯 For Your Board: Emphasize Sustainability + Strategy

Board members don’t need every number, but they do need to know:

• Are we financially stable?

• Are we executing on our plans?

• Are there risks and/or opportunities ahead?

A budget narrative in addition to your financial reports (see last week’s newsletter for more detail) can bring your financial story into focus.

This is a short write-up (0.5 - 1 page max) that summarizes how you’re doing financially using plain language.

One way I like to structure this is an overview that includes info about cash on hand and any other major items. Then, a section for Risks and a section for Opportunities. A board member should be able to read this narrative and in 30 seconds to a minute have a good idea of what’s going on financially in the organization.

If you can incorporate these metrics in the narrative it will largely tell the story.

• Cash on Hand (Unrestricted): How many months of expenses are covered?

• Forecast vs. Budget: Are we on track or headed for a shortfall overall?

• Program Impact: Are our programs growing, shrinking, or holding steady?

A narrative like this helps your board focus on their real role of strategic decision-making and oversight, not line-item micromanaging.

⸻

💰 For Funders: Focus on Cost, Impact, and Efficiency

Funders want to see how their dollars are driving change.

It’s not enough to say “we spent $50,000 on programming.”

They want to know what that accomplished.

That’s where tools like unit economics come in.

Let’s take a food bank as an example. XYZ Food Bank shifted their donation requests to better match client needs. This reduced the amount of food they were throwing away that no one was interested in. It also resulted in donations being more in line with what clients wanted.

That meant less expenses (both cash and in-kind) to serve the same number of clients. That might mean you can serve more clients in the future because of this or it simply means you’ll simply need less to deliver the same impact. That’s a win for both financial efficiency and mission impact.

Think about the story this communicates to a big donor or on a grant application. You’re communicating that you’re trustworthy with their $’s and are acting as a great steward over those $’s.

Funders receive impact in return for donations. You’re helping give them more impact for the same money.

Here’s what funders love to see

• Cost per unit of service delivered

• Year-over-year improvement in efficiency or clients served

• Revenue diversification (Are we overly dependent on any one source?)

• How this year’s budget supports a long-term vision

Wrap these into your funder reports and you’ll stand out from organizations that only provide spreadsheets.

🧡 For Your Community: Communicate Impact

For general supporters or the public, it’s all about simplicity and effectiveness.

Most people don’t want your full financial report, they want to know:

• Are you making a difference?

• Are you using money wisely?

• Are you trustworthy?

Here’s how to show that

• Program vs. Admin Ratios (e.g., “85 cents of every dollar goes directly to programming”)

• Scale of Impact (e.g., “We served 2,000 families this year, up 15% from last year”)

• Depth of Impact (e.g., “Here’s one story of 2,000 and how it helped them”)

Keep it simple, avoid unnecessary numbers and make it look clean.

Why This Matters

You don’t need to be an expert communicator to tell your financial story.

You just need to meet each audience where they are:

Board: Show sustainability and strategy.

Funders: Show efficiency and impact.

Community: Show impact and results.

If your reports are sitting unread, or if no one seems to “get” the financials, it’s not because they don’t care.

It’s because they haven’t been invited into the story yet.

Now you’ve got the tools to change that.

That’s a Wrap!

This marks the end of the Financial Blueprint series.

You now have a roadmap to:

• Run better financial operations

• Stay compliant

• Build forward-looking plans

• Report meaningful data

• And tell your story clearly and confidently

If you’ve missed any of the past issues, you can see them all here.

Let’s keep building financially strong, mission-driven organizations together!

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