Webinar: Fundraising Success Starts With Effective Time & Expense - International Development - Humentum

Humentum will continue to organize webinars and other events to support our members in their work. We have several upcoming events in the month of May. The first event will be on building a financial strategy for NGOs, which will be tomorrow. The second event will be the fourth webinar in the locally led development series. In this webinar, we will cover different approaches to locally led capacity strengthening. And then lastly, in the month of May, we will have our third installment in the BNDI mini series. And in this webinar, we will cover decolonization. We encourage you to participate in our roundtables, which provide a space, a safe space to engage with industry peers. And as a reminder, as members, do not forget that you have access to amazing discounts to connect communities and a library of templates and resources.

Housekeeping Notes

A few housekeeping notes. All attendees are currently muted. To ask questions, please feel free to type in the chat box. You can access the chat box by clicking on the chat bubble at the bottom of the screen. Questions will be kept until the end unless it clarifies something like an acronym or if the presenter feels comfortable pulling it into the discussion. So feel free to engage with us throughout the session, and we'll do our best to address all your questions.

Subtitles are available for this webinar. To turn them on or off, click on Caption or Live Transcription on your Zoom toolbar, then show or hide based on your preference. This webinar will be recorded and a recording along with any additional materials will be emailed later this week. Check your spam folder if you do not receive it in your inbox.

And with that, I would like to introduce today's speaker, Torbjorn Nilsen, Business Analyst at DATABASICS. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. Over to you, Torbjorn.

Torbjorn Nilsen's Presentation

Thank you, Halyna and Jessica, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining me today for this introduction to making you more successful in raising funds for your organizations.

As Halyna was saying, I am Torbjorn Nilsen. I am a solutions architect and the director of business analysis at DATABASICS. We are a time and expense software provider based just outside of Washington, DC in Reston, Virginia. We've been a Humentum partner for quite a few years now, which is the culmination of many years of intentional focus on the NGO, humanitarian and development space.

We've done a few of these presentations before and joined you guys in a number of events. So you may be familiar with my story, but the short one is, I suppose you can call me a time and expense reporting nerd in the best sense of the word. When I joined DATABASICS coming up to 20 years ago next year, my very first implementation was with one of your members. And I have had the joy and the challenge, if I may say so, of working with a large number of the Humentum membership in the years since. I do have a little bit of a funny name, but largely I'm a normal person, and hopefully the only thing that will distract you and only just a little bit in the next 45 minutes or so is my slight Norwegian accent.

The Mission-Driven Approach

Today we are going to focus on one of my favorite international development facts. And that is that in Norwegian, my mother tongue, the word for nonprofits and NGOs literally translates to an organization of ideals. And before we go too deep into the weeds today, I want to emphasize that it is your ideals and your idealism that brings me back, invigorated to every engagement with Humentum members. So thank you for what you do, and please don't hesitate reaching out during or after this presentation if you have any questions or if there's anything that I can help with.

The bold statement that fundraising success starts with effective time and expense management is predicated on exactly the idea that it is your ideals and idealism that matters. For those of you who are in attendance, your organization's visions and missions are all different, but I'm pretty confident that not one of you have the mission of providing the world with the finest time and expense reporting tool. That's DATABASICS' mission.

What you want to and absolutely should focus your energy on fulfilling is your organization's mission. It is this focus that will make you successful in addressing your mission, and therefore allow you to be successful in your fundraising. Time and expense reporting is not your mission, but they are very important tools in making you successful. And it is this that will be my focus in our remaining time together.

Today's Agenda

Today we'll talk about what we call best practices. We'll look at what makes international development requirements unique, and I'll give you access to a tool that will allow you to objectively review your own needs and assess them, empowering you in selecting a partner and staking out a way forward in addressing these needs. I want to share a couple of success stories with you as examples of how you can free up your organization's time to focus on your mission. I'm happy to take questions in chat as we go through the presentation. And if I am able to, I'll include them in the Q&A session at the end. If I fail to or if you prefer to reach out directly to me, I would not be at all opposed to getting an email from you with specific questions and things that you want to go into more details about.

What Makes International Development Requirements Unique

You, of course, know what makes international development requirements so unique. Fundraising is critical, and it depends on your contracts and on your donors. It is your idealism, your ideals shared with the donors, whether it's a foundation or grassroots, that makes your mission possible. The transparency and accuracy is essential for fundraising, not just for fundraising, though. It also shows stewardship, of course, to your fundraisers, but for compliance purposes, whether that is local, in-country, or across organizations from an accounting perspective. This international presence is essentially what turns the international development requirements into very complex solutions that need to be managed efficiently.

So typically then these local international requirements for accounting and statutory compliance, they become distractors. They take your focus away from what your ideals, what your mission is. And what we want to do is give you the tools that will allow you to then start focusing more and spend more of your time focusing on your mission.

Managing Fundraising Through Transparency

How do we manage the fundraising? The fundraising itself is not my specialty, but what DATABASICS and what a time and expense reporting tool will allow you to do is to essentially manage your work from a transparency point of view, by validating that the funding is effectively deployed to benefit recipients. You can show and you can build trust with your donor base.

And very often that funding and its deployment will include an overhead pool. I think all donors, large or small, understand that overhead is a part, an important part of making an organization successful. But managing the difference between that overhead pool versus the direct work that takes place in the field, where you define that is important as well.

So by comparing and reporting performances across projects globally, you will be empowered to validate the call for funding in the first place and to show the success. Obviously, you define your goals and your targets, but if you don't have a measure, how can you show that success? And the time and expense reporting is an important way of showing that, because it gives you essentially a global view of labor and expenses across your entire organization. Whether that is across regions, across countries, across types of projects, across funding sources, or down to individual tasks that an individual may be working on. This is all available to you if you have a tool that supports your mission.

The granularity of reporting, whether it is the labor, which is obviously your largest cost that I would imagine, or expenses, which comes from the travel that you do to get into the field, to show that again, you are good stewards and your end users are good stewards of the donated funds will help build a rapport and help build trust with your donors.

Ensuring Compliance

How do we ensure compliance? There are going to be local regulations. And so these statutory requirements, as we refer to them, which control a lot of how you are managing your organization's projects. Some countries might have specific facilitation of breastfeeding mothers, for example. Other countries will have limits as to how many hours a given person can work in a day. Of course, if you're in the Middle East, you have a presence there, you will be familiar with the fact that the weekend doesn't fall on Saturday and Sunday in all cases.

So all of these little differences between countries and between regions and between cultures, to the extent that you can control them and you are aware of them, you want to help your users essentially comply with them.

One thing that is very important in time and expense reporting in today's world is about privacy, and particularly if your organization has a presence in the EU. This is a strictly enforced law about who has access to what data and being able to say that French data can only be accessed by French users. Or that your specific role gives you access to a specific kind of data is very important. Again, because you are, to a large extent, always talking about labor. And it becomes even where this is in the law, it becomes good practice to not have people's salaries, for example, available for everyone to view.

You will, if you are in more than one country, more than likely have a number of languages among not just your end users, but obviously also your recipients. So having a tool that allows multi-language capabilities for reporting on time and expenses gives you more trust with your end users.

Managing Multiple Currencies

Multiple currencies are also common, obviously, in an international development organization. And here we're not just talking about incurring expenses in a local currency and converting that to the accounting currency, whether that is Kenyan shilling or euros or US dollars. But we are also talking about the fact that you may have books in different currencies. So you may have a local chart of accounts and a global chart of accounts, and all of your expenses roll up into that global chart of accounts, into that global P&L, as a summary. And so the currencies and how they interact with each other needs to be managed.

And then we have, of course, compliance as it relates to some of your funding sources. In particular, I suppose, for our U.S. customers, this would be to a large extent, USAID. USAID funding has rules associated with them, which is tightly aligned with the DCI compliance as it relates to how funding is spent and how it is reported.

And those kinds of compliances, you know, USAID is a good example, but there would typically be compliance regulations associated with how money is spent. So the USAID example would be alcohol, for example. And that's not just shared by USAID, but religious organizations may also say that alcohol expenses will not be paid for. And then there are other organizations who probably wouldn't frown towards alcohol consumption, but where that isn't a problem. So the funding source controls some of your compliance requirements as well.

Setting Reasonable Objectives

What do you want? What would be a reasonable objective for revitalizing your time and expense reporting process?

Our goal as an organization, my goal as a professional, is to facilitate for my customers to be more efficient in the way that they are using their time, to be more impactful as it relates to their mission. So what your goal should reasonably be is for people to spend less time and therefore money on the administration of things, to automate to the extent that that is possible some of their regulations, some of their rules, some of the compliance and reporting requirements that are out there, to be able to free up resources to focus on higher impact, to focus on the success of your individual projects, or your individual region or country operations.

What that means is that there are going to be rules. And again, they are not just from a statutory point of view or from a donor point of view, but there will be rules about how to spend money. But there could also be other rules that you have. And again, being based in a number of different countries will have different rules associated with them.

Managing Leave and Expense Policies

Things like leave: what kind of leave, how many days of leave per year, how it is awarded. Do you get a lump sum of days off at the beginning of the year or maybe at the beginning of the fiscal year, or maybe at the hire anniversary? Do you earn your leave as you move through the year? Do you earn your leave based on the number of hours you work? All of those are examples of a very specific rule that can be and should be configurable so that you can control what your requirement is in an automated solution.

Expense policies: we talked a little bit about that in the USAID and the alcohol. There are other examples of allowable expenses that donors and maybe your ideals are saying that, you know, money should not be spent on, and it is important to make that distinction. We talked about how policy can control whether money is assigned to an overhead pool or to a specific project. These are all ways for you to be more transparent in the way that you are recording expenses and reporting those expenses back to your stakeholders.

Building Trust and Relationships

It is all about improving trust and relationships, is all about being truthful of course, and being good stewards. The stewardship of other people's money, which is essentially what drives your mission, is very important not just to you, but also to us. So giving a holistic view of time and expense data is an important part of building that trust and building that relationship.

To have that data available in a timely fashion without delay, to have an almost, you know, right now view of where money is being spent will allow you to manage delays and project overruns as a very practical matter. What you also can do by improving the trust and relationship with your donors is that you will indirectly impact your employees' experience of working on your projects, working for your organization. To make the time and expense reporting as simple as possible for each individual user will further improve that experience.

By facilitating for a real depth of policy enforcement, either by contract or fund or activity or project, whatever your dimensions are, whatever those reporting requirements will essentially be driven by your organization, the depth of an organization's ability to help support their enforcement is very important. And then ultimately to have that time and expense report come into your organization as reportable data supporting further fundraising, and supporting obviously any statutory and other donor requirements as it relates to the use of funds, is further of utmost importance.

The Risks of Not Automating

What if you don't? What if you say, okay, we've done this this way for many years now, and it's all right. It's a little bit of a pain, but it's not that much of a pain, you know. It's not—is it worth it? And it may be worth it. It may be that the effort associated with bringing an up-to-date process in place and rolling it out globally—so there is a weighing, of course, of costs as it relates to a potential rollout.

What we would probably say that you should look at is the risks associated with not automating, the loss of productivity. How much time is spent following up on approvals, following up on adjustments, following up on the submittal of time and expense in the first instance? All of that time is churn that is not being efficiently used towards meeting your missions.

These inefficiencies have risks associated with them directly because you won't be able to provide information as to the health of an individual project, for example, if that data is out in the field or in the mail, or you know, stuck in an approval process. Until you have fully approved data, meaning there is a workflow associated with what has been reported to be validated as correct and as appropriate, you don't have this data to show to management, to show to your other stakeholders, including your donors.

The staff dissatisfaction is probably something that you are working and spending time on today because of the complexities of your requirements. There is a high likelihood that you have bottlenecks in your process. Those bottlenecks would have very practical implications for the end user. Things like the reimbursement time of expenses being unnecessarily long, things like getting data back to stakeholders taking so long that the relationships with those stakeholders are not as good as they could be.

It may mean that you are missing opportunities for additional funding because you aren't able to efficiently gather the evidence of your success to take back to the donor population and show that success and use that as a springboard for additional projects which may be in the same region that you have discovered as part of your work. Or it may be the same work in a different region. So leveraging your experience, documenting your experience, is very important. And then of course, compliance issues. And we're not just talking about your rating on Charity Navigator or whatever those kinds of tools are, but also real compliance issues, maybe even legal issues associated with following the rules in individual constituencies.

Benefits of Effective Time and Expense Management

What are the benefits of effectively managing your time and expense reporting? The obvious compliance rule we have talked about, of course, the operational efficiency allowing you to spend more time on more important aspects of your organization's operations, managing the cost, actually lowering the overall cost of a project by automating. And then, as we have said a couple of times now, your ability to win additional funding from your funding sources.

What does that look like in practical terms? It means that you should consider automating your management of the policies and the procedures associated with your time and expense management. You should have a tool that allows mobile access for all your users, and that mobile access may not necessarily have to be online at all times. You may have work that takes place outside of reach of telecommunication networks.

Best practices suggest that you should be able to facilitate for regular monitoring and reporting, whether that is an accounting auditor or a fund source audit. Those should be facilitated for as efficiently as possible. And ultimately, of course, choosing your vendor, choosing your partner in this work, that is going to be important because once the solution is there, you want to be comfortable with the organization you're working with, and you want to trust that organization to provide best-in-business support of what you are doing, your processes.

Success Stories

What are some success stories? In the last few years, we have had many successful implementations at DATABASICS. These are three examples.

Creative Associates is an organization that I have personally been working with for 15 years now. And what we have done the last two years is we have been implementing additional what we call instances, additional databases, additional applications for individual countries. The way that that organization is organized essentially suggests that everything is managed locally. So each country will have their own application, and in some instances there will be more than one application in one country. So it's a very deregulated—like the responsibility is pushed out into the field for that particular organization.

Pathfinder International and TechnoServe are approaching the global rollout in a slightly different manner. Pathfinder has a very centralized management of their instance with DATABASICS. And what that allows them to do is obviously get access to data very quickly. And by having a centralized administrator or team of administrators, you get a very insightful, specifically I think it relates to the global user community, management of the application.

TechnoServe has a little bit more where they're spreading the administration across a region. So they would have a regional administrator, but they have a central administrator that helps with the overall solution. But things like local rules for leave management, for example, policies are associated with the individual country where the work is taking place.

So these organizations, they are different obviously in their mission. They're different in how they are doing their business. But they have—what they have is a shared benefit from a system that facilitates for a global view of local and regional requirements and the enforcement of those requirements across any dimension that is necessary for them. They are on different accounting systems. They are obviously not in the same space. Their missions are different, but they are benefiting from using DATABASICS in managing their global workforce and their global functions.

The Self-Assessment Tool

What I want to leave you with today is a self-assessment tool. This tool has been developed by us to help organizations identify gaps in their current solutions and to focus on providing and streamlining processes as it relates to engaging with time and expense providers.

What the tool allows and will give you the power to do is to evaluate your needs compared with best practices, to identify gaps in your current processes, potentially leverage this document as a template in an RFP process.

You will be given access to our tool via a hyperlink that will be forming part of our follow-up material. And you can access that at your leisure to essentially review what we have developed as an RFP template. But you can take from that, of course, these elements that you are specifically see as beneficial.

You can use this document as a first step in a discovery initiative to try to establish where you currently are in your own process and maybe have that measured against your goals for the medium to long term. But you can also use it directly as an RFP. I want you to reach out to us if that's—if you feel that need to essentially see what sort of help we can provide to implement changes that will ultimately save you time and money and maybe even change lives, because you are able to focus on your mission, because you have engaged us to focus on ours.

And that brings me to the end of my prepared remarks. Halyna, if you have been peppered with questions along the way, let's go through them.

Q&A Session

Thank you very much, Torbjorn, for that presentation. I have a few questions that have been sent to me. So I think we can start. The first question is, how can organizations ensure compliance with various grants requirements and regulations related to time and expense management?

The way that you can show compliance is—so there are two steps here. The first is to ensure compliance. You ensure compliance by writing rules. And those rules need to be specific for potentially the funding source. They have their own requirements, or for local regulations which will have their own requirements. So the first step is to ensure the compliance and then to show the compliance. That would be reporting outputs, right?

So if you write the rules, if you write the validations, if you write the overall policy and you enforce it in an application, the application can then show you the controls that are associated with that. So one example would be that, you know, the time and expense reporting, very simple, requirement has to be approved and it has to be approved by a defined approver. An application will have a clear what we call audit trail for the record. It will show who approved it and when they approved it. It may have been rejected first and then approved.

In the paper world, you know, that time, for example, needs to be reported with a pen, not a pencil. And the approval needs to be documented as well. So all of that audit trail that a paper trail gives you is available in an electronic system. And both the rules and adherence to the rules can be shown to an auditor or a stakeholder on request.

Thank you very much for that. Another question, how does the tool help with fundraising?

The tool is a possible first step in ensuring that your organization is ready to provide transparency and to enforce compliance, and the benefit of that is going to be that you can then not just increase your fundraising efforts, but you can also show your funds sources this compliance, which may in some instances not just be a nice to have. It's not just always nice to be transparent. Sometimes it's a requirement for certain funding sources like the USAID requires transparency.

Okay. Thank you very much for that. I think the last question was, can the tool be used to make—and I think you mentioned this in your presentation—can it be used to make your own request for proposal RFP?

Yeah. Yeah. The tool was developed originally as a template for an RFP. Now, what is important to bear in mind when you think of using the tool and how you approach the tool, is that it may not all be applicable to your request for proposal, right? So what I would encourage you to do is use the tool as kind of background and maybe, you know, hold on to those elements in the tool that are associated with your requirements and focus on those because that's what's important, right?

If you don't have the multi-currency requirements, then you could take a whole section of the RFP out of your RFP. So I would encourage you to not use it wholesale. And, you know, you don't take this document and make it your RFP. What you want to do is you want to use it as a template. You want to take those elements that bring value to your organizations and to meeting your objectives before you introduce it as your own RFP. But you are more than welcome to use it or parts of it for that, of course.

Okay. Thank you very much. And I think the last question, which I believe you have already answered was, where can they get access to this tool? And I believe you have already shared the link in your presentation.

Yes. And you don't have to write it down here. We'll make sure that that's sent out. We will close afterwards here.

Yeah, we will add it to the follow-up email to ensure everyone can get access to that link. So we'll make sure that is done.

Closing Remarks

All right. Okay. I think those are the questions that I had on my end. I don't think—and thank you, Amanda. Amanda has already shared the link on where to access, on where you can download the assessment tool. And again, as I said, we'll have this in the follow-up email.

So thank you very much, Torbjorn, for this. We really do appreciate having you here and for taking time to speak to our members about this time and expense management tool and how it will be beneficial to them. Before I close out, is there anyone else with a question or a remark or something they need clarification on?

Okay. I don't think we do have anything else. Torbjorn, any last words?

No, thank you again, everybody, for your attention. I hope it has been informative and that you have some actionable things that you can take away. And I look forward to an opportunity to talk with you about the specific questions that you guys may have.

Okay. Thank you very much, Torbjorn. We really do appreciate. And thank you, everyone. If there's no more questions, I think we can end it here and have a wonderful rest of your day. I think Torbjorn mentioned, we will include his contact information in the follow-up email in case you would like to reach out to him and have a more in-depth discussion about this tool.

Thank you very much, everyone, and have a wonderful rest of your day from wherever you're joining us from. Thanks so much. Thank you.