Financial Clarity for Nonprofits
Resilia
A pilot initiative where I translated an ambiguous request into a fully scoped, designed, and shipped financial insights system.
Summary
Resilia is a B2B nonprofit platform that supports over 100,000+ users. Nonprofits often struggle to understand their financial position and what steps to take to stay sustainable.
Mission
Our goal was to explore how financial analysis could become more accessible and actionable, especially for small to midsize organizations that lack dedicated financial staff. I led the UX discovery and design of a Financial Health Score dashboard, which became a key milestone in our product shift toward actionable insights and AI-powered reporting.
To understand the root of the problem, I interviewed internal subject matter experts, particularly our fundraising coach who works directly with nonprofit leaders on building sustainable revenue strategies. These conversations surfaced a critical gap between access to financial data and the ability to interpret and act on it.
Key Insights
Lack of Financial Interpretation | No Clear Path to Action |
|---|---|
Many nonprofit leaders have access to financial reports, but lack a clear understanding of what “healthy fundraising” or long-term financial sustainability actually looks like. Unlike small businesses, nonprofits are rarely trained to think in terms of revenue diversification, cash reserves, or financial forecasting. As a result, financial data exists, but meaning does not. | Even when leaders understand their numbers at a surface level, they rarely know what to do next. Smaller organizations, in particular, lack access to financial advisors or strategic planning support. Without contextual guidance, financial insights stall at awareness rather than turning into informed decisions. |
Key insights revealed the core tension: nonprofits did not need more data. They needed interpretation, context, and a clear path forward.
Solution
There was no standardized nonprofit financial health model to build from, so I defined the initial scoring framework from the ground up. I synthesized established nonprofit financial metrics through research and conversations with subject matter experts, then translated them into a weighted scoring model that could function within a product experience.
The framework incorporated key indicators such as liquidity, revenue diversity, operating reserves, and expense ratios. I developed the weighted scoring logic, defined score bands including Excellent, Stable, Monitor, and At Risk, and created a transparent scoring scale that could be clearly communicated in product terms.
My working hypothesis was: If we translate complex financial indicators into a standardized, explainable health score with clear breakdowns and guidance, nonprofit leaders will better understand their financial standing and take proactive steps toward sustainability.
From a strategic standpoint, our goal was to make the financial health score interpretable, trustworthy, and actionable. Rather than presenting a single composite number, we designed the experience to clearly break down how the score was calculated, providing visibility into the underlying metrics and their impact.
In early low-fidelity explorations, I mapped the end-to-end experience to ensure leaders could move seamlessly from data input to insight to action. These flows were tested internally with our fundraising subject matter expert to validate clarity, financial accuracy, and real-world relevance for nonprofit leaders.
The initial MVP included EIN lookup with automated data ingestion, a calculated financial health score, transparent metric breakdowns, a clearly defined scoring scale, personalized improvement recommendations, and an AI powered report generator built through prompt engineering. This marked our first complete end to end system for translating complex financial data into clear, supportive guidance for nonprofits.
Outcome
The resulting feature, combining a standardized health score, automated data retrieval, and AI-generated reports, directly addressed these pain points, increasing confidence scores by 35% with 150 scores calculated in its first month. It not only renewed internal and customer enthusiasm after years of struggling for product-market fit, but also became a cornerstone of the 2026 roadmap. Ultimately, it delivered our first nonprofit financial health score, empowering organizations to understand their financial standing, benchmark effectively, and take confident, actionable next steps.
Click-through rates | Increase Capacity | Confidence Rates |
|---|---|---|
Nonprofits with <15 staff using the tool to assess financial health before making major decisions (e.g., accepting grants, hiring, cutting budgets) | Finance directors at mid-sized nonprofits are reducing monthly reporting time by 30-50% | Higher confidence scores in financial decision-making among executive directors without financial backgrounds |
