How to Effectively Communicate and Present a Budget to Stakeholders
Learning how to communicate your budget to stakeholders and present financial information and proposals to interested parties is a critical skill for any nonprofit leader, and should be part of your budgeting process.
Most people who sit through your presentation will have seen similar budgets before. You need to get to the point quickly, and make your points easy to understand. Doing so ensures donations will continue to flow into your nonprofit and that critical partners know how you are spending your limited resources.
These stakeholder communication plan best practices can help ensure that you are maximizing the impact of your budget presentation.
Provide context and show trends
Budget communication without context or financial trends information is ineffective. You need to show how your organization is doing, how it has performed in the past, and how things are going compared to other nonprofits in your sector and/or geographic area.
This communicates to stakeholders that you understand what your nonprofit’s strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities are within the broader scope of your field. It allows them to better understand how you are using limited funds and ensures that donors and funders will continue to believe you are spending their money wisely.
What does this look like in practice? You want to include context alongside your income and expenses for the upcoming year:
Show your nonprofit’s specific trends, including how your income and expenses have changed when compared to previous years as well as your objectives.
Discuss the specific trends that are occurring throughout your sector. This can help explain any problems your organization is experiencing while giving you a chance to pivot to the changes you believe your organization needs to make.
If the trends are negative, demonstrate how you are going to turn things around. If they are positive, show how you are taking advantage of them.
Use technology to engage, not bedazzle
There is no question that technology allows for much more robust presentations. You can show slides, graphs, and spreadsheets, but also use interactive data visualizations and videos.
Remember: Your stakeholders came to hear your presentation and feel your energy and excitement, not read a slide. Presentations are most engaging when you as a presenter add to the data on the screen, give it appropriate context, and provide information that could never be gleaned from a simple bar graph.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re building your presentation:
Don’t put everything you are going to say in your presentation slide deck. You can certainly write down what you plan to say in your own notes, but don’t put every word on the slide.
Don’t overuse fancy animations or transitions. Those make it look like you are relying on technology to carry the day, not your words.
If you are using a slideshow presentation, run through it at least once to ensure that all of your information and components are in the right order and work correctly.
Allow for questions
Nonprofit leaders can become so absorbed in their budget presentation that they steamroll right through it, neglecting one of the most important components of their presentation: the audience.
Waiting until the end of your presentation to take questions results in a lack of stakeholder interaction, who end up feeling like they are being talked to instead of conversed with. Take a breath at the end of every slide and look at your audience to create a nonverbal cue that allows them to ask questions.
You can also ask if there are any questions at appropriate points in the presentation, making it clear that you value their feedback and giving you a chance to gauge your audience’s response to your presentation as you go.
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