With Washington, DC, in many ways the center of the nonprofit world, it’s good to get a pulse check every once in a while.

And Capital One’s latest check of professionals in DC’s nonprofit sector, based on feedback gathered from members of the Greater Washington Society of Certified Public Accountants (GWSCPA) in December 2015, suggests a high level of confidence.

Overall, 83 percent of respondents anticipated revenue growth in 2016, a jump from 77 percent in the prior year’s survey. However, the survey touched on some risks that nonprofits expected to deal with in the coming year, including fundraising, something that 39 percent of respondents believed would be the biggest challenge this year. Other concerns raised included technology (23 percent), new business efforts (17 percent), risk management (13 percent), and financing operations (8 percent).

In comments on the survey, Capital One Bank’s Kathleen Malloy, senior vice president & market manager of the company’s mid-Atlantic not-for-profit banking group, noted that, overall, things were trending positively.

“We’re encouraged by the upward momentum that we see, with continuing growth and increased revenues for nonprofit organizations,” she said.

Other survey highlights:

• A mixture of risks: The survey found that respondents were fairly mixed about what was the most significant business risk that they faced. Cyberfraud (29 percent) may get most of the headlines, but it received roughly the same percentage of responses as compliance risk (29 percent) and operational risk (28 percent).
• Analytics gets accountants talking: The survey also spent a significant amount of time diving into treasury-management concerns, particularly what would attract nonprofits to a treasury-management platform. The biggest potential draws, according to the survey, were analytics and data aggregation technologies (38 percent), followed by risk management and fraud prevention (27 percent).

The survey, which took place during GWSCPA’s 27th Annual Nonprofit Symposium last year, was based on feedback from a mixture of nonprofit professionals, vendors, and accountants focused on the sector.

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