How to Encourage Donor Confidence in Your Non-Profit Organization

How Time Tracking Increases Donor Confidence

Donors want to see that a non-profit serves the greater good and doesn’t just benefit the people who run it.

Organizations that conceal their financial information or are unable to show fund expenditure will fail to attract decent funding. They may even fail to secure it altogether.

In contrast, a non-profit that can account for every cent and where/how it was spent will have a much easier time convincing donors. Doing this shows they are a responsible and credible organization.

Inspire Trust with My Hours

Using My Hours to track time will provide you with all the data required to inspire donor confidence.

Full Transparency

One of the biggest ways to build donor trust is by maintaining full transparency. Specifically, on how your non-profit’s existing resources are allocated and how efficiently they are managed.

Donors want to see how much volunteer effort is placed into projects and operations. They are also interested in how the non-profit optimizes its resources for best results.

One of the best ways to demonstrate this is through time-tracking reporting. Detailed reports and visualizations show time spent. They can reassure donors and show you are skilled at managing staff effectively.

My Hours allows you to generate multiple types of reports for this purpose:

• The dashboard report is perfect for giving a high-level overview of time spent and fund use.

• Timesheet reports offer insights into how each team member spends their time

• Detailed reports are best for in-depth analysis of a non-profit’s time management. The data can be customized as needed with work and time broken down by projects, tasks, or a specified time period.

• The Excel team pivot report is also excellent for simultaneously displaying how time is spent by team members, projects, and tasks

Reports can be generated into visual graphs and charts in PDF format, or the raw data can be downloaded into XLS format. Save your report settings and schedule automatic email sending for regular donor reporting.

Acting with Integrity

Your non-profit will be viewed as responsible provided you can demonstrate how it remains accountable. So, making sure all logged hours are verified and approved shows a commitment to honesty.

Part of the My Hours timesheet approval process requires that the timesheets be validated after submission. Supervisors receive the timesheets for approval, and it is their job to confirm their accuracy.

Large non-profits managing high numbers of staff will understand how time-consuming and challenging manual timesheet approvals can be.

However, My Hours has streamlined timesheet validation to make it easy and convenient for approvals to take place:

• The system can automatically send out reminders on a daily or weekly basis to those who have forgotten to complete their timesheets. This avoids gaps in the data and the likelihood of a timesheet getting rejected.
• Supervisors are notified by email whenever a timesheet is ready for approval, and they can approve or reject it with a single click.
• All approved timesheets can be exported as a PDF file for use with payroll and other relevant departments.

Importantly, My Hours tracks all changes to timesheets before they are approved. This creates a full – and transparent – audit trail that can be generated into a report when needed.

Impact Measurement

To attract additional donor funding, you must show how your non-profit’s resources have already delivered results. The positive impact on the communities it serves, for example. 

When donors can see the real results, they know they can continue to keep faith in the non-profit.

Meticulous project management is one way to demonstrate the impact of the end result. Time tracking plays an important role in this. The data accumulated in My Hours gives you essential insights into your non-profit’s performance:

• You can monitor and analyze the time-tracking data you accumulate. This allows you to understand how team members use their time on various projects and tasks.
• Doing this helps you identify time-related issues early on, allowing you to make adjustments to keep the project on track.
• You can also monitor the project's progress. This makes it easier to meet the deadlines and deliverables for each project.

The productivity and performance of each individual team member can also be analyzed. Learn their strengths and when they are most productive. Use this to your advantage. It will increase efficiency across the whole project.

Analyzing this information is even more essential for non-profits with many remote workers. Using time-tracking helps remote workers remain accountable for their time. It also boosts productivity and ensures that work gets done according to deadlines.

Operational Efficiency

Effective resource management doesn’t stop with your staff’s time. Donors want to see that you manage your grants appropriately, too.

Full transparency over fund expenditure is probably one of the most crucial things you need to do to gain donor confidence. Also, you'll need this info whenever your non-profit is audited. So, it makes sense to start tracking it right away.

There’s no need to use a separate piece of software for this. My Hours already has the capability for you to track budgets and expenses against your projects:

• Assign overall budgets for projects or break budgets down and assign one for each of a project’s tasks
• Set labor rates (default or project specific) for each team member so their time counts toward budget expenditure
• To help keep closer tabs on the budget when nearing project completion, the system will notify you when 80% of a budget has been spent
• Set up expense categories for other expenditures (such as equipment, travel, etc.) within projects and tasks. Create custom expense fields for things like mileage and vehicle use.
• Receipts and invoices can be uploaded into My Hours, so you have a full paper trail of expenses.

Team members who have to travel can track expenses on the go by downloading the My Hours mobile app.

Assigning budgets and expenses to tasks will allow you to see exactly how much money is being spent. Importantly, it will also reveal where it is being spent unnecessarily. Using the expense report, you can see precisely where resource management can be improved and optimized.

Data-driven Decision Making

A non-profit cannot afford to make decisions on a whim or a hunch. Every move you make has to be backed by solid data and sound reasoning.

The data that My Hours provides can be used to drive strategic decisions that benefit the organization as a whole. This does a great job of reassuring donors that your non-profit is thoughtful and conscientious. 

For this, of course, there are the various reports that you can download and study. However, the platform also features an analytics dashboard. This always displays the most current data and is updated in real-time.

That means you can use the fresh data as it comes to make proactive decisions. 

Doing this can optimize budget and resource expenditure even further, because:

• You can discover issues early on and nip them in the bud before they become a bigger problem.
• You can be faster at spotting where improvements could be made. Then, you can implement changes almost immediately. 

‍

Final Thoughts

My Hours is set up to make it as easy as possible for non-profits to track time.

Tracking time isn’t a large or difficult job. Yet, doing it can have a profoundly positive impact. This is especially true when it comes to attracting the attention of large funding opportunities.

Besides this, effective time tracking also ensures your organization complies with the stringent rules in grant terms and regulations. Something no non-profit should ignore.