Michelle McDonald has worked with the Annenberg Foundation since 2012, and currently serves as the Foundation’s Director of Finance & Accounting. She has over 30 years’ experience directing financial and administrative operations. Her focus has been in the nonprofit sector for the past 25 years.

Michelle enjoys partnering with managers, directors, and Board members to use financial information to influence strategic decisions about an organization’s activities. She is a self-described “people person” who doesn’t just want to sit at a desk crunching numbers. She believes financial data can, and should, be used as a tool to effect positive changes for an organization. Her experience includes strategic planning, running various financial scenarios, and projecting financial results to ensure maximization of resources.

In many previous positions, she was specifically hired into situations where effective systems, internal controls, job description review and/or other structural needs were missing in the Finance/Accounting area. An enthusiastic innovator, Michelle has repeatedly developed solutions to address these types of deficiencies. She has consistently worked with her teams and with colleagues outside the Finance/Accounting area to determine how to most effectively provide direction, support, and information. She’s done similar work in the Human Resources, IT, and Facilities/Maintenance areas at many nonprofit organizations.

Michelle also enjoys working with non-financial program managers and Board members to explain financial concepts and to establish ways to work together to accomplish the organization’s goals. Communicating financial ideas to non-financial colleagues and leading disparate groups to a productive consensus are two areas where she has consistently excelled. She has taught nonprofit financial management as a guest lecturer at USC and at Cal State Long Beach.

Michelle graduated with a Masters of Business Administration in Nonprofit/Finance from the Anderson School of Graduate Management at UCLA and earned a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in Personnel Management from the University of Georgia.