Over the past fifteen years, I have led membership and community teams, managed multimillion-pound profit and loss reports, built and grown communities of tens of thousands, and worked inside some of the most operationally demanding environments in nonprofits, technology and political campaigning in the UK (with additional work in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S.).
I have sat in challenging budget meetings, made the hard calls, and felt the pressure of keeping a team financially healthy while delivering on a mission that genuinely matters. And one thing has become clear through all of it: the departments that thrive are the ones that take money seriously. Not at the expense of the mission, but in service of it. What follows are five pieces of practical advice I would give to any nonprofit leader who wants to build an organization that is more resilient, more sustainable, and more capable of delivering the change they exist to make.
Know your numbers.
What is the cost to do your work across all of your budget lines? When you know them instinctively, you make faster and better decisions and earn credibility in every room you walk into. Go deeper than the headlines, too. What makes someone more likely to renew their donation? What does it actually cost to serve a member versus what they contribute? When you understand what drives the numbers, you can do something about them.
Your budget is your campaign plan.
Not a rough guide. Not a spreadsheet someone else owns. In campaigns, the budget is how you stress-test whether your plan is actually deliverable. Building it precisely, line by line, with clear assumptions, forces you to be honest about what you are really planning to do, what you actually need, and whether the numbers hold up against comparable activity.
Talk about money with your teams.
Not in abstract terms, but in real ones. For example, in one of the org’s that I held a senior leadership role in, we introduced TextExpander to the support services team, and it immediately saved the team at least six hours per week in managing routine email responses. As a result of tracking this, we then had a discussion about where to redeploy that time with revenue-generating in mind. When people understand the financial language of their work, they make better decisions, spot waste, and see opportunity.
Make the stakes explicit.
I always asked myself, and my budget holders, to spell out what each line actually meant: What becomes possible if this gets approved? What gets lost if it is cut? This sounds obvious, but most budget conversations skip this part. When you name the consequence, not in vague terms but with specificity, you are more likely to get what you need to deliver on your responsibilities. There is a practical benefit too: finance teams notice when you have done this clarifying and intentional work. This builds credibility with your finance team, and credibility matters when you are trying to get a project approved or defend spending when times get tough.
Track commitments, not just spend.
This one derails organizations more than almost anything else. It is not enough to know what has been paid. You also need to know what you have committed to. I once took on a leadership role in an org where there had been a flurry of spending in the last month of the year because they had lost track of their budget and had significantly underspent, and as a result, made some questionable decisions that didn’t serve the organization in the long-term. Teams that only watch their actual spend against budget can end up making poor decisions late in a cycle, sometimes spending money that should not have been spent, simply because their commitments (and their timing) were not being monitored closely enough.