It’s time to don a grey suit – fundraisers need to be more like accountants and learn how to read a balance sheet, says Andy Taylor.

Stories of the mistrust between fundraising and finance departments are legion. Some are apocryphal and quite comical while others are all too real.

And all too often this mutual antipathy causes problems that seriously affect how much money we can raise. It’s time we stopped, and the responsibility to do it lies very much with us.

That accountants don’t understand how fundraising works is the usual complaint and often it’s true. I’ve worked with many finance pros in my career and many times I’ve had to explain the basics of fundraising to them. But should we really grumble? HR and IT professionals probably don’t know much about how fundraising works either.

Let’s be really honest here – how many fundraisers, hands on hearts, know much about finance and accounting? How many of us can read a balance sheet and tell what it implies for their charity and their fundraising? How many know exactly what double-entry bookkeeping is and what it’s for, what a net movement in funds means, how to calculate a payback period that accounts for the marginal costs of each donation and why we need to use an equivalent-risk discount factor when we work out our return on investment?

The answer I suspect is not very many. But we should do. What right have we to complain that people don’t know what we do when we know so little about them? None whatsoever, so it’s high time that fundraisers started to don the grey suits and make more like our cousins on the dark side of the great divide.

There are three very good reasons why. Firstly, it means we’ll get more credibility and, at a senior level, credibility is everything. A fundraising director who can write a business plan with rock-solid financial projections that tick all the boxes that any finance professional would tick for themselves, will find the trustees’ door half open. Such a person will stand a far greater chance of winning extra investment to grow income than one who struggles with a basic spreadsheet.

Secondly, we’ll make better decisions ourselves. Choices are made at many levels and important calls often delegated to levels where little or no formal training is required. Give people the concepts and tools to make better financial decisions and they’ll raise more money. Give them too many people who then raise a little extra money each and all together they might just raise a lot more.

Thirdly, senior fundraisers have a role in managing not just their own departments but in running the whole charity as well. A fundraising director can have a huge influence on the policy, systems, culture and ultimately the success of an organisation. One who really gets good financial management and how everything depends on it will make a bigger and better contribution to good and wise governance than one who doesn’t.

Fundraising is an enormously responsible job. Making bad decisions doesn’t just make us look silly, it can mean the difference between life and death for some of the people who depend on the work we fund. But where is the requirement that says all fundraisers – especially those that aspire to reach the top – must be expert at using financial techniques? I don’t see a great deal of it around to be honest and I know many bright and talented fundraisers to whom finance is a baffling mystery. They are poorer for it, they know it, but they don’t do anything about it because they’re too busy taking potshots at the bean-counters in their trenches across no-man’s land.

Complaining that no one understands us while staying blissfully ignorant about them and how they might help us is not a sustainable position. With so much resting on the financial decisions we make it’s high time that all fundraisers started to think and act more like accountants. And it’s time for the education and training to be made available for us to do just that.