Financial SCAN for Grantmakers and Funders

What do you get when you combine GuideStar data with Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) expertise? Financial SCAN, a new standard for assessing a potential or current grantee's financial health and funding needs.

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What You Can Do with Financial SCAN

• Simplify your financial due diligence
  Save time and resources with Financial SCAN's standardized, automated analysis. The financial health dashboard identifies the indicators that are most relevant to an organization's long-term stability and effectiveness, analyzing them for up to five years. The peer comparison dashboard reveals the financial dynamics and structure of up to five nonprofits that you select. Thirteen charts and graphs let you examine trends and ratios more deeply, and an accompanying educational guide helps you interpret the analysis.

  "We have a small staff, so adding an in-depth financial review to our due diligence was close to impossible. With Financial SCAN, it's almost as if we hired a part-time staff member to do financial analysis for us. It's really streamlining our efforts in a tremendous way."

  —Anonymous corporate funder

• Have more productive discussions with grantees
  Use Financial SCAN to engage your grantees in conversations about their financial health, funding needs, strategic direction, and capacity building priorities. The analysis helps you know what to look for and why it matters, helping you make the connection between money and mission in your discussions.

  "Financial SCAN helps us foster discussion internally and with our grantees about the issues they are dealing with. It raises red flags that warrant further discussion and helps us understand trends in profitability, liquidity, liabilities and restricted funds. In combination with audited financials and organization and project budgets, Financial SCAN paints a powerful, comprehensive and visual picture of risks and opportunities associated with a potential grant. It provides great value for the cost."

  —Jonathan Goldberg, Surdna Foundation

• Have more productive conversations with your board
  Financial SCAN creates supporting documentation for your funding recommendations. It brings meaning and insights to financial information, using language that is direct and accessible, so that you can talk frankly with your board aobut the financial issues your grantees are facing.

  "I hope this will be the end of 'one size fits all' measures, such as the overhead ratio, that were easy to generate from aggregated data but almost meaningless in real life. Financial SCAN takes a broad slice of data and puts it in context so you can understand it. ... It helps users understand what data means, what financial signs to look for, and how to assess the 'health' of the organization from a series of independent 'vital signs.'"

  —Lucy Bernholz, Arabella Advisors, philanthropy2173.com

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