During the course of your project, you may need to do a ‘counting the cost’ study – either ahead of an important donor report, or at the end of the year as you balance your books and plan for next year’s programming. Here are some ideas for how to do one efficiently and inclusively, accurately representing the perspectives of your different teams and their financial needs.

Define the scope

• Clearly define the whys and what
• articulate goals
• what specific costs will you be analysing – direct, indirect, fixed, or variable?
• timeframe and other logistics

Engage Teams

• Internal teams: everyone in your project team, management, grants management, accounting, legal, HR – everyone. You may need to do this in rounds depending on the size of your organisation
• External teams: partner organisations, community members, funds/donor representatives

Review the purpose with each team and get their support. Add their requests and needs for the study so your efforts – including money spent! – can meet a range of perspectives. Pay everyone for their time to contribute to the study. If you cannot compensate them financially, find some other ways to reward them. Sometimes even bringing cake to a meeting helps – I’ve seen this, and trust me it’s appreciated!

Collect your Data

• use a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches
• look at project, programme, and org-level costs
• prioritise them and assign them a timescale too – are these costs useful for the short, medium, or long term?
• what could these costs tell you about building organisational resilience? For example if you’re buying an asset, what does this up-front investment now mean for your financial stability over the next 5 years? Write this down and add it to the qualitative review
• direct costs: salaries, materials, project-specific expenses
• indirect costs: overheads and administrative expenses
• opportunity costs: the loss of one option over another (eg. not choosing to bid on a specific project)
• intangible costs: the impacts of your work (socially and environmentally)

Cost-Benefit Analysis

• compare costs with expected benefits. Who will they benefit the most and how?
• consider a wide range of benefits – as above, something may not ‘reap rewards’ immediately, but could help you over the medium term, like membership to an expensive association which could open doors for new partnerships for your teams

Reporting and Transparency

Prepare a comprehensive report that presents findings clearly and accessibly. Make sure it includes:

• An executive summary
• Detailed cost analysis – with its benefits
• Contributions and feedback
• Recommendations for decision-making

Distribute the report to everyone for review, invite feedback, and share the final versions in accessible formats and multiple languages.

Feedback and Learning

• create open feedback channels
• make sure everyone knows they exist and how to share their thoughts with you
• use what you’ve learned from the process of collecting financial and cost-based data and think about how it can support the next time you need to do this
• this includes any missing datasets, systems, processes, etc that should either be in place or should be improved for next time