Use Technology to Make Your Nonprofit Stronger
Efficiency is a must for volunteer-driven nonprofits. You want to ensure every penny and every volunteer hour is well spent in service of your mission. Yet when I begin a new assignment as a Nonprofit Virtual Assistant (NPVA), I often find my clients aren’t using the many technologies designed to enhance efficiency. It’s understandable: unfortunately, the very people who could benefit the most from these tools are so busy and bogged down that they feel they can’t research technologies, roll them out effectively, or learn to use all their capabilities. Others don’t explore their options because they assume they will be too expensive, but these systems may be more affordable than you think.
My More Than Giving Co. NPVA training included gaining proficiency in Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Dropbox and the Google Suite. As an experienced NPVA, I’ve helped my clients with these tools and many more. I am always willing to assist clients in exploring new technology or organizing training. In this blog post I’m going to share some of the technology tools I see small to medium-sized nonprofits using with success, along with examples of the tasks they can help streamline.
Project management: You may have heard someone mention a “Trello board” without really knowing what that means. Trello, Asana and Monday enable you to break projects or event planning down into steps, organize them, and assign people and deadlines. Trello is Kanban-based, visually pleasing and intuitive (think: cloud-based whiteboard). Asana is all about the lists (and sub-lists), allowing you to invite teams, set up workflows and know who is doing what by when. It lends itself well to complex projects and events. Monday is visually colorful, accommodates larger teams and offers many different options to view projects. Trello and Asana offer free basic plans, but with all three platforms different tiers of pricing unlock different features (and/or different numbers of users).
Donor management: Maintaining donor information in Excel spreadsheets will ultimately hinder fundraising. Platforms like Little Green Light, Bloomerang and DonorPerfect offer many options to analyze and report on donors/donation history and interact with donors across multiple channels. Capabilities vary by platform and plan, but all will enable you to pull up a report for your board meeting or grant application with just a few clicks or easily send out donor acknowledgments and tax receipts.
Cloud-based storage: Gone are the days of the giant dusty hard drive sitting on your floor. Solutions like Google Workspace, One Drive, and Dropbox let you store documents in the cloud and easily share and work on them with colleagues, from anywhere. You can chat right in a document, leave comments and assign tasks, all while never having to send a single email!
For nonprofit leaders, implementing new technologies does require some initial time for set-up and training. However once technologies are implemented, you can save hundreds of hours across your organization. Best of all, once processes become more efficient, you can focus this newly found time on high-level tasks and goals.
No technology is the perfect fit for every organization, but when you do connect with the right technology, you will look back and wonder how you managed before!
Last tip: if you're not already subscribing to TechSoup, sign up today. This is the “go to” place for nonprofit organizations to get discounts on technology. Many of the subscriptions are free or greatly reduced the first year to allow you to sample new platforms.
Could your organization use the remote administrative support of a Nonprofit Virtual Assistant?