Three audiences, one document
The return is filed for a regulator, read by donors, and quoted by journalists. Each wants something different from the same paragraphs.
The IRS is checking that the activities described are consistent with the exempt purpose. A donor is deciding whether the organization does what it says. A reporter is looking for the sentence that can be quoted without qualification. A single description has to survive all three readings, and most of the writing difficulty comes from that rather than from the accounting.
What the instructions actually require
Part III asks for accomplishments for each of the three largest program services, measured by total expenses incurred, not counting donated services or the donated use of materials, equipment, or facilities.1
For each program service reported, the instructions are specific about how to describe it. Describe accomplishments through specific measurements such as clients served, days of care provided, number of sessions or events held, or publications issued. Where the output is intangible, as in a research activity, describe the objective for both the period and the longer-term goal. Give reasonable estimates for statistical information where exact figures are not readily available, and indicate that the information is estimated. Be clear, concise, and complete in the description.1
Read those four instructions together and they describe a writing method rather than an accounting one. Count something. Say what the counting was for. Where you estimated, say so. Then be clear.
The three faults that show up most
The first is a description with no measurement in it. Helping people in need satisfies none of the four instructions, and it gives all three audiences nothing.
The second is an estimate presented as a count. The instructions permit estimates and require them to be identified as such.1 An unlabeled estimate is the kind of statement that is hard to defend later and easy to quote now.
The third is drift between documents. The same program is described in the return, in an annual report, on a grant application, and on a website, and the four descriptions rarely agree on numbers or on scope. That is a consistency problem rather than a writing problem, and it is what copy editing is defined to find: resolving variations in terminology, logic, and mechanics, and checking calculations and conversions.3
An editor can inventory the four versions and report where they differ. Which one is correct is the organization's answer to give.
Clear, concise, and complete is a checkable instruction
Editors Canada's stylistic editing standards cover the same ground the IRS instruction gestures at. They ask for wording made precise, ambiguity resolved, and wordiness eliminated by deleting redundancies and empty phrases. They also ask for plain language principles, with vocabulary and concrete terms suited to the reader.4
Applied to a program description, that produces a short list of edits. Abstractions get replaced by the thing counted. Sentences whose subject is the organization rather than the work get rebuilt. Terms used in the sector but not outside it get defined once or removed.
None of that changes what the organization did. It changes whether a reader who has never heard of the organization can tell what it did.
Where an editor's authority stops
An editor does not decide which programs are the three largest, how expenses were allocated, whether an activity furthers the exempt purpose, or whether a figure is correct. Those determinations belong to the organization, its finance staff, and its accountants, and they arrive with the copy.
Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including draft returns, grant reports, and internal correspondence. EditFast works on nonprofit reporting and grant material and on business reports at the level of wording, consistency, and clarity.
The useful sequence is to write the program descriptions once, for the hardest audience, and then reuse them. A description clear enough for a stranger reading the return is clear enough for a donor and short enough for a grant application, and it will still be there next year.