Report: Engage Your Stakeholders

The time has come for the fifth and final “R” - Report. We’ve covered how to get the information you need, get it to the right person, make the right decision and get the answer to the right person. The final step in the process is to report all the good your company is doing with your stakeholders, a step that is critically important to you, your company and your brand.  A well-designed report can do a lot of heavy lifting -- communicate data in powerful ways, make it easy to pull together ad-hoc and year end reports without tearing out your hair, and boost perceptions of your company and brand.  Reporting done right will make your life easier, so let’s take a deeper look at the benefits of an awesome report.

Support your decision makers: If your process involves many people and groups (accounting, executives, committee members) it can be really challenging to arm decision makers with the data they need to make informed choices.  It’s hard to keep track of everything, and it also can be incredibly time consuming. Take a regional power company who needed to deliver a very detailed report encompassing all of their giving. This report included a breakdown of the supported geographical areas, the philanthropic focus areas and the date that the non-profit organization was issued their payment.  Sounds complicated, and it was.  Prior to an online system, the corporate foundation staff would pull all of the information together from paper records and gather additional data from accounting -- a two week ordeal.  Now, this process requires the press of a button and about two minutes time to produce the report.

Control your information: A client of ours is a regional bank with many local affiliates.  The company needs to be able to report on the philanthropic efforts of each affiliate  as well as roll up the results into a company report.  The hitch is that each affiliate has a different budget and and the corporate team doesn’t want budget information shared between locations.  They only want what is relevant to the particular group to be accessible when it comes to reporting. With an online system, each user has established permissions that will allow them to only see the data associated with their team or department.

Collect qualitative data: Giving money and goods away to constituents feels good. However, why not get “something” back in return? If you are able to collect anecdotes and pictures from your donation recipients, you will be able to visually illustrate the real impact of your giving program. If your company donates products, collecting this type of information is an especially powerful way to convey impact.

View key data at a glance: If your company supports numerous events in many different locations, you would probably love to find a way to see all your critical information at a glance without sorting through multiple sources.  An online system enables you to pull all event information on the fly so you can see when/who/where with a click of a button.

An online system that delivers awesome reporting -- as well as helps you receive, route, review and respond to requests for support quickly and efficiently -- will give you a philanthropy management program that’s geared for success.  To review all the Five R’s of Great Philanthropy Program Management, download our eBook. Or contact Andy Cummings at 650-212-7264 or andy@versaic.com for more information.