It’s Summertime! Baseball and Automation?
Yay! It’s nearly summer and that means we’re well into baseball season!
Artic Consulting has developed the Nonprofit Solutions Framework, a comprehensive blueprint for a modern nonprofit organization’s operations and use of technology. Given the current landscape in 2021, nonprofits need to digitize their operations and apply modern technology to maximize efficiency. These digital transformations affect how nonprofits interact with Volunteers, Donors, and Grant awarding organizations. Artic has developed specific Verticals with fully integrated solutions to manage each of these interactions.
Digital transformations also affect the nonprofit’s operations, communication and infrastructure. By making use of free offers from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other technology companies, nonprofits can quickly build best-of-class solutions and make use of the latest modern tools and technologies.
Take a look how nonprofits can focus on their mission, and let technology solutions help drive efficiencies and productivity across their organization.
Volunteer Management
Volunteers are extremely valuable to many nonprofit organizations. According to IndependentSector.org, in 2020 the average value of a volunteer per hour is $27.20. Attracting, retaining, and motivating good volunteers is a critical activity for many nonprofits.
Volunteers often need to report hours they gave to the organization’s initiatives, and the capture and verification of these volunteer hours is often challenging.
An organization can apply modern technology to streamline these activities using a solution that tracks their hours, skills used, and which programs/initiatives they volunteer for (or wish to volunteer for). This information can also be used to generate reports for the organization across its entire volunteer base.
Donor Management
Donors are the lifeblood of many organizations as they provide both operating capital and other forms of support. Donors are more likely to become repeat donors when they are aware of how their donactions are used and given transparency about the work of the organization.
Technology can be used to track relevant information about donors such as their past donations and which initiatives they support within the organization. An organization can also map this information to which programs received the funds and how they were spent.
Grant Management
Grants are another key way that organizations are funded, and often staff will work on one or more grant opportunities at any given time. The process of writing a grant proposal document can be quite complex, with multiple staff members involved, and specific requirements that need to be met within the proposal. Often, research and organizational data is needed prior to a proposal being written and submitted. Frequently, senior members of the organization would like to review and approve proposals before submission.
By mapping out a workflow, these sets of tasks can be streamlined into repeatable processes with several action steps and decision points, all of which can be made more efficient with technology and automation. Also, by utilizing a repeatable workflow, a work-back schedule can be easily generated so that key milestone dates are planned for.
A tracking tool for this workflow would also allow transparency across the organization and remind staff members when their contributions are needed to complete the process.
Operations Management
Every organization needs to collaborate and share information, and modern tools can make this easy but also can create their own sets of complexity. For example, when documents are emailed back and forth between staff members, sometimes the latest version of the document is hard to find, or changes made by one person are not seen by another.
Making use of modern cloud-based services like SharePoint and Google Drive, staff members can seamlessly collaborate and share information without the risk of losing track or overwriting changes.
These services are also available on multiple devices and work well across other products within their respective suites of services.
Communication Management
Every nonprofit needs basic communication and productivity tools to work virtually, harness their internal knowledge, and drive efficiency.
Microsoft’s 365 services and Google’s G Suite services provide modern email, document and presentation creation, and virtual meeting systems. By leveraging these tools, staff members and volunteers can coordinate and share information quickly and across a variety of devices.
Infrastructure Management
All aspects of an organization including its website, files, data, and internal applications can now be hosted seamlessly with modern cloud-based infrastructure such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS platforms. Qualified nonprofits can get annual grants of credits to use these services for free. By making use of them, an organization can instantly have global reach and scale services up or down based on needs.
Contact Artic to start a conversation on how we can implement these technology solutions for your nonprofit.