May 12, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
Financial Leadership for Nonprofit Executives: Guiding Your Organization to Long-Term Success
by Jeanne Bell Peters and Elizabeth Schaffer
Few nonprofit executives choose their work because of a love of finances, but charity leaders who rely too much on bookkeepers or accountants to do the number crunching will have trouble helping their organizations reach their full potential, say the authors of this book.
Jeanne Bell Peters and Elizabeth Schaffer, both consultants to nonprofit groups, say that charity executives should play a leadership role in managing financial resources. While financial leadership doesn’t require an encyclopedic knowledge of financial jargon, they write, it does mean that executives need to know how to obtain timely and accurate financial data; assess the monetary health of their organization; develop financial goals and plan with them in mind; and communicate progress on those goals to employees and trustees.
The authors describe how nonprofit executives can build their skills in each of those four areas. For instance, their chapter on financial planning offers tips on how to estimate costs, forecast potential income, anticipate emergencies, and draw up a balanced budget. Throughout the book, the authors use a fictional charity to demonstrate how nonprofit managers can respond to the challenges of developing financial leadership.
Publisher: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, 919 Lafond Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. 55104-2108; (651) 659-6024 or (800) 274-6024; fax (651) 642-2061; books@wilder.org; http://www.wilder.org; 134 pages; $32.95; ISBN 0-940069-44-x.
