[Mark_Hager_Forum_Moderator]

Gwen: Back when I was writing my graduate thesis (late 1990s), I interviewed a number of nonprofit reps who had been in an organization that had closed down. Sorry to say, I don’t have or know about helpful guidance on costs of closing down. From my recollection of those interviews, this wasn’t a topic that came up much… costs tended to dwindle at the end (as tasks wrapped up) rather than ramp up. That is, my sense is that the stuff at the end tends to be administrative and social, things that don’t bring unusual costs.

What kind of costs are you imagining might crop in?

[Mark_Hager_Forum_Moderator]

Michael: I’ve kept one eye on the nonprofit dissolution question the last couple decades, but I can’t say I’ve seen clear legal guidance on what must be kept. The National Council on Nonprofit keeps a pretty nice summary of general considerations (https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/running-nonprofit/governance-leadership/dissolving-nonprofit-corporation), but there’s nothing in particular there about how long records must be kept. I’d guess there might be general guidance relating to corporations that could vary from state to state.

If you were in the big city, I’d suggest hiring a vendor that would scan all those documents down into a thumb drive. I don’t know if that’s an option where you are —

Mark

[Mark_Hager_Forum_Moderator]

+1 on Wade’s response. This is a colloquial use of “budget” that I avoid precisely because of this confusion. Budget means allocation of resources to strategic aims, but that’s not what people are asking when they say “what’s your budget?” They probably just want to know about how much money you spend in a typical year. They’re just asking about your size.

[Mark_Hager_Forum_Moderator]

Chad: Below is some of the reactions in the chat from our January 30 webinar on individual giving. We’d love to get additional reactions on this question, since organizations wrestle with it all the time. We’ll send this out in our periodic email to see if we can generate more traffic on this —

• We use Neon CRM…. I’m curious what others use that they’ve liked

• We use MonkeyPod. It’s been great for us – integrated CRM, nonprofit accounting, e-comms, online giving, events & many other functions. Easy to use & low cost.

• We have a custom-built CRM that folks are invested in, but that I sincerely wish I could trade for an out of the box system that can play well with others…

• We use Give Lively & Salesforce

• We use Neon CRM and I really dislike it, had a much better experience with EveryAction and Salesforce in prior roles

• Katie, I dislike it as well… purely because of the difficulty I’m experiencing with automation and the extra tasks needed to realize gather and analyze donor data

• We also use Neon and I would echo Jena’s comment!

• We also use MonkeyPod and have been happy with it, although we’re still on a learning curve on integrating it with functions beyond the donor database.

• From my experience – be very careful of customizing! The long-term support and challenges for integrating other components can add expense both in time and money. Working with a client now that over-customized their CRM and increased their total cost of ownership of the software.

• I’m curious about experiences with Little Green Light? I have a few smaller nonprofit clients that use it and love it.

• Deborah I’m also curious about Little Green Light!

• We use LGL, and like it a lot.

• New to Little Green Light, but like it so far! It is intuitive and has great training videos/sessions.

• I’ve used LGL, and it’s really easy to use on the back end. I’ve heard from donors that it is hard to use on their end, the checkout process has a lot of steps, and it sometimes deters people from donating. It also makes recurring donations difficult.

[Mark_Hager_Forum_Moderator]

Holly: I don’t think you’ll find this. It’d take some lifting by researchers, and I don’t think there are either thorough or quick/dirty takes on these models as NFC has defined them. The one big source of mission and spending info is from Form 990s, and these would have some limitations in answering your question. For one, there’s no reliable indication of whether an organization is a membership association or not. For another, government revenue is notoriously difficult to suss out of the 990, since earned income from contracts isn’t divided by source. This is a road we may try to get down a bit, but the data presents an assortment of challenges.