By Sean Hale
In the world of nonprofit management, a quiet, pervasive habit kills innovation and paralyzes boards: DILLY (Do It Like Last Year).
We see it everywhere. You can find it in the budget that is just last year’s numbers with a little cost-of-living adjustment tacked on. You can find it in the board reports that use the same dense, gray spreadsheets created a decade ago. And most dangerously, you can find it in the mindset that financial reports are “magical tea leaves”—mysterious documents that only a few “accounting types” are qualified to interpret.
When you allow DILLY to rule your financial reporting, you aren’t just being old-fashioned. You are actively disempowering your leadership team and creating a ceiling for your mission.
A Case Study in Organizational Suffocation: When DILLY Becomes The Mission
I once worked with a nonprofit where DILLY wasn’t just a habit; it was the law of the land. In this environment, any suggestion of doing things differently was treated as a taboo. Why? Because to suggest a new way of reporting or a new way of working was seen as an implicit rebuke to the current and former leadership. To change the “how” was considered an insult to the “who.”
The result? A total blackout of financial transparency. The board, by their own admission, had almost no sense of the organization’s actual financial health. The senior executive had zero interest in the topic, treating the numbers as a secondary concern to the “real work.”
The reports themselves were a convoluted mess. They were so poorly structured that even when I showed them to an auditor friend, we both walked away unable to make heads or tails of the data. To make matters worse, the Treasurer—a CPA herself—believed her primary duty was to read the financial reports line-by-line during the board meeting. It was a mind-numbing exercise in compliance that provided zero insight. When the board and leadership discussed finances at all, they just talked in circles because nobody knew the true state of the organization’s financial health.
The Rise of the “Abrasive Gatekeeper”
The absence of transparency created a power vacuum. In this organization, that vacuum was filled by the Finance Committee Chair. He had an accomplished career in a field completely unrelated to finance and accounting, yet everyone deferred to him as the sole interpreter of the “magical tea leaves.” Anyone who didn’t defer to him completely could count on a severe tongue lashing, at minimum.
His primary motivation? A deep-seated belief that the staff and the rest of the board were wildly irresponsible with money. He saw his role not as a strategic partner, but as a barrier. His top priority was to prevent the board and staff from ever spending money, regardless of the potential consequences, risks, or missed opportunities.
The Terminal Cost of Saving Nickels
By the time I became involved, the nonprofit was facing multiple crises. The infrastructure was failing after decades of “deferred maintenance,” staff turnover in critical leadership positions was high, membership was divided into factions, and the mission was stagnant. Nonetheless, spending any money to fix the root causes was like pulling teeth.
Imagine a family member who refuses to get basic medical treatment for a serious condition because it would involve spending a few nickels and dimes today. They focus on the immediate cost of the doctor’s visit while ignoring the much larger, lethal cost of letting the condition go untreated.
This nonprofit was on a path to dying because it was “saving” itself into the grave.
The Turning Point: Choosing Impact Over Inertia
The organization eventually turned around, but not because of a sudden influx of cash. It turned around because a critical mass of leadership bravely said “no” to DILLY.
They realized that while the mission and values should be held sacred, the methods must be held accountable. They stopped judging how they did their work based on how closely it adhered to decades-old inertia and started judging it based on impact.
A significant part of that shift was demanding financial reports that people could actually understand. They traded the “line-by-line” readings for financial reports that exposed the “terminal condition” for what it was. Once the rest of the board could see the cost of their inaction, the “Abrasive Gatekeeper” lost his power. Financial transparency formed one of the key ingredients that led to engagement and other structural changes that reinvigorated the organization, its mission, and impact.
Three Signs Your Organization is Stuck in a DILLY Trap
How do you know if your nonprofit is being held back by “Do It Like Last Year” syndrome? Look for these three red flags:
- The “Accounting Speak” Barrier
If your board meetings feature a treasurer reading line items while the rest of the room checks their phones, you have a transparency problem. When financial data gets presented in a way that requires someone with magical powers to translate, you are effectively locking the doors to the engine room. In today’s world, off-putting, mind-numbing complexity is a choice. We have the tools to make data visual and intuitive. Choosing not to use them is choosing to keep your leadership in the dark.
- The Fear of Rebuking the Past
Is your board afraid to change the reporting format because “that’s how so-and-so always wanted it”? When tradition becomes a shield against accountability, the mission suffers. Leadership means being willing to admit that what worked thirty or even three years ago might be the very thing killing the organization today.
- The “Savings” Mirage
If your finance committee’s only metric of success is “how much money didn’t we spend this month,” you are likely trapped in DILLY. Successful nonprofits don’t just save money; they invest it for impact. If you can’t connect the dots on your nonprofit’s financial health or how each dollar translates into impact, your reports need serious work.
The Gatekeeper Trap: Why “One Version of the Truth” is Dangerous
When the truth gets funneled through a single person, you lose the Collective Wisdom of the group.
- Unintentional Confirmation Bias: The person holding the data often, even subconsciously, only looks for facts that support their existing narrative.
- Passive Governance: If a board member is just nodding along to numbers they don’t understand, they aren’t providing oversight. They’re just spectating.
- The Disengagement Domino Effect: If a board member doesn’t feel engaged and responsible for the organization’s health, they won’t feel responsible for it. They won’t help with fundraising or recruitment because they don’t truly “own” the numbers.
As I’ve noted before, your CPA will not take care of this for you. Executive Directors must take a serious role in financial stewardship.
Transparency is the Means; Mission Delivery is the End
It’s important to get the hierarchy right. We don’t strive for transparency just to be “open.”
- Financial Transparency leads to…
- Leader Engagement, which leads to…
- Better Decisions, which leads to…
- Stronger Mission Impact.
The goal isn’t “inclusive leadership” for its own sake. The goal is a resilient organization that can pivot and still deliver on the mission when the world changes. Nonprofits make the best decisions—and get the most buy-in for them—when all leaders are engaged.
When you move from “tea leaf reading” to shared, visual data:
- Buy-in Increases: People support what they help build.
- Blind Spots Vanish: A program lead might see a trend in a chart that an accountant views as just another line item.
- Speed Increases: You stop wasting time “getting on the same page” because the dashboard did that work for you before the meeting started.
How do you get to Financial Transparency?
While no one action, report, or cultural change will get you there, my favorite tool is a graphic financial dashboard. It supplements the traditional financial reports by transforming the key measures of financial health into easy-to-read graphics.
Instead of having to squint, focus, and puzzle, trends easily pop out. Leaders can quickly arrive at questions and insights, bringing their experience and knowledge to bear on big financial decisions. For example:
- Why has the money that people owe us grown over the past six months?
- Why have youth program expenses grown while the number of youth served has gone down?
- We were planning on holding our annual gala at a beautiful outdoor venue, but now that revenue forms a big slice of our revenue pie, I’m going to look at how we mitigate the risk of the weather ruining the event.
Aren’t those the kinds of questions and insights you want to hear in your board and leadership team meetings?
Stop DILLY-ing. Start Leading.
Failing to maintain basic financial oversight can even call into question the effectiveness of your Directors & Officers (D&O) insurance, as courts do not look kindly on “willful ignorance” by a board.
If you want a board that feels true ownership for your nonprofit’s health, you have to give them the map. You have to move past the “way we’ve always done it” and embrace tools that invite participation.
Transitioning to a dashboard mindset is a cultural shift, but it’s one of the best, and most cost-effective, ways to ensure mission sustainability. A fractional CFO can help build these narratives, but the commitment to transparency must come from the top.
Stop letting DILLY rule your board room. Take the tea leaves off the table, turn on the lights, and let your whole team lead.