Integrating mission & finance to move nonprofits forward
The Claverack Advisory Group pushes non-profit leaders to integrate mission and finance throughout their organizations.
Non-profit CEOs, CFOs, senior program and development leadership, financial function staff, finance and audit committees, and boards should embrace cohesive short and long term financial and mission goals. These goals need to speak to the fundamental, existential questions facing every organization: ‘What would it look like if we didn’t exist?’ and ‘Why it is important that our work continues?” These questions cannot be answered without a clear understanding of the inextricable link between finance and mission.
Our contributors all have experience working within the “belly of the beast” at non-profits as key players in various organizations’ financial function and leadership teams. Through the articles and whitepapers they have written over the years, as well as the webinars and presentations they have given, our contributors offer a wealth of experience about the lessons they learned in those roles and insights on the sector as a whole.
The goal of the Claverack Advisory Group is to turn organizations’ awareness, understanding, and clarity of goals—both mission and financial—into definable action. In today’s competitive environment, it is no longer viable for organizations to continue trudging along on a financial treadmill. Instead, organizations must fully integrate their financial functions into mission decisions and prioritize strategic mission investment if they want to be successful in the present and sustainable into the future.
We bring together compelling non-profit financial function innovations, ideas, & strategies
to empower stronger non-profit leadership & imagine new futures for the sector.
Featured Articles
Sisyphus Looks Inward: Nonprofit Short and Long-Term Decision Making Starts with Honest Self-Assessment
This article is the second installment in a series produced for the JMT Consulting Blog. Click the following link to read the first article in the series, "Sisyphus Had It Easy: The Case for Nonprofits to Prioritize Long-Term Solutions...
Sisyphus Had It Easy: The Case for Nonprofits to Prioritize Long-Term Solutions Even When Short-Term Challenges Abound
Philosophers would contend that Sisyphus had it rough, rolling his rock up a hill only to see it roll back before he reached the top – then doing it all again, over and over, in perpetuity. As agonizing as Sisyphus’ plight may have...
The Sustainable Nonprofit Business Model Depends on Mission Independence
The Business Roundtable, an association made up of CEOs from major for-profit corporations, recently announced that their companies plan to invest more attention and resources into addressing social impact issues. Their goal is to make...
Nonprofit CFOs Shape their Legacy by Defining and Communicating the Big Picture
You are the CFO of a nonprofit that’s focused on long-term mission fulfillment, financial sustainability, and organizational independence. How do you guarantee that your legacy is aligned with the organization’s long-term success? You...
The Nonprofit Auditor and Mission-Infused CFO: Building a Strategic Partnership for Success
The role of the nonprofit auditor needs to evolve to become more holistic and mission-integrated if nonprofits are going to succeed in today’s competitive environment.
Three Roles of the Mission-Infused Nonprofit CFO that Lead to Organizational Success
As the leader of an organization’s finance function, the nonprofit CFO makes a critical contribution to overall mission success. While this has always been an understated reality, it is especially important in today’s climate as...
An Unsurprising Revelation—The Nonprofit Business Office is Closely Linked to Mission Success
Why are nonprofit organizations in business? It is to achieve their societal missions. To do that, nonprofits must define their programmatic, financial, fundraising, and strategic goals. They must invest in their business to achieve...
How An Enlightened Finance Team Creates A Culture Of Mission Investment
The enlightened nonprofit finance team is critical to building a nonprofit organizational culture of investment in today’s fast moving, complicated, and competitive philanthropic world. Gone are the days when a risk-averse interpretation...
The Mission-Infused Nonprofit CFO: Aligning Mission & Finance For Success
The nonprofit financial world is changing quickly, and the isolated CFO has been rendered obsolete. The future nonprofit CFO is a mission-infused, proactive leader who interacts with a finance-driven program and administrative team....
A Countrywide Non-Profit Call To Action
The current difficult economic times present a unique challenge and opportunity to the once growing non-profit industry in Columbia County. Non-profit organizations which comprise social service organizations, hospitals, arts and...
Nonprofit CFOs: Visionary Protectors of the Bottom Line, or Myopic Bean Counters?
The advent of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) era in nonprofit governance is often interpreted to mean a phalanx of bookkeepers accurately accounting for every organizational penny, and keeping all interested parties informed in a timely...
To Save Baseball, Make It Non-Profit
My life took on meaning when the Baltimore Orioles swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1996 World Series. Since that epiphany, the fate of the Orioles, and baseball in general, represented an integral part of my psyche, an allegiance...
Featured Webinars
The Sustainable Nonprofit Business Model Depends on Mission Independence
Can your organization keep up with the challenges of building a sustainable nonprofit business model that can define, measure, and ultimately meet long-term mission goals? Join nonprofit finance expert, Russ Pomeranz, for a dive into the...
Nonprofit Finance Committees – What They Are Doing Well, Where They Need to Improve, and Why It Matters to the Mission
The growing influence of Nonprofit Finance Committees on nonprofit finance and mission effectiveness cannot be overstated. These committees approve organizational budgets, defining the short and long term financial mission of the...
Getting Aligned on Finance and Mission Strategy
What do finance and development have in common? A goal to keep the organization on the path to successfully fulfilling its mission. So, it's critical that finance and development are aligned, not only on this overarching goal, but also...