Dear Rad Ops: Pivoting Budgets, w/ Nat Smith

In this episode, Sha Grogan-Brown talks with guest Nat Smith, Finance & Development Director with House of gg and facilitator with A Bookkeeping Cooperative to offer advice to organizations needing to make major pivots to their budgets.

In these wild times, many organizations are needing to revisit their organizational budget, either due to loss of funding, pivoting their work for rapid response moments, taking a strategic pause to tend to internal tensions and challenges, among other reasons. 

Dear Rad Ops received a question on this topic, with this context: Our organization is currently facing a series of internal conflicts and disruptions that is calling for us to go inward to tend to these challenges. As a result, we're pausing on a lot of our current activities and adjusting most of our original org-wide and departmental goals/work plans for this year. We're currently drafting an organizational development process to tend to these tensions and there's a good chance that this work (ie OD process, skilling up/facilitation on navigating conflict, etc) will also continue into next year. Our 2025 budget was approved based on our initial work plan, but these recent pivots mean we also need to make adjustments to both our organizational and departmental budgets. 

Question: What advice can you offer on how to best reflect these changes within our budget(s)? Are there any other budgetary considerations that we should be aware of for both this year and as we plan out next year’s budgetary process?

Resources from this episode:

• Take a training with A Bookkeeping Cooperative - engage in conversation and take home tools
• If you really don’t have time to take a training and need something quickly, you could try out this Nonprofit Budgeting Scenario Planning Tool from Nonprofit Finance Fund:
  • Watch Instructional video
  • Download Nonprofit Budgeting Scenario Planning Tool
• National Council of Nonprofits has a lot of free resources on their website, in particular in the Budgeting for Nonprofits section and this 10 step budgeting checklist.
• Lastly, Nat recommends you check with current funders about what resources they have to support you in this process. They may be quick to recommend and/or share packets or tools they have.

Discussion questions to take to your team:

• Before reviewing the budget together, discuss these questions:
  • Based on the current conditions of our work, what are our hopes and dreams for this organization’s mission?
  • What are the top 3 values we want to lean into during this time? Which aspects of our work will best support us to meet those values?
  • What are the commitments we have made to our constituency? Which aspects of our work will best meet those commitments?
  • Which aspects of our hopes and dreams for our organization do we not have the capacity to take on during this phase of our work? 
• Based on the discussion of the questions above, what are the 2 scenarios that we should consider for revising our budget? Nat encourages us to frame this scenario planning as Alternative Futures work.
  • Once you identify the 2 scenarios, use the budgeting scenario planning tool.

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