As a non-profit leader, how often have you been pitched the next great CRM, donor management system, or technology tool that promises to solve everything? Then comes the actual implementation, which may fail to deliver on all the promises. This costs money and employee time. However, you can gain many of these efficiencies by analyzing your current technology tools and finding ways to use them better.
Routine Tasks and Underutilized Technology
How much time does your staff spend on routine, rule-based tasks instead of building relationships with donors, stakeholders, and those your organization serves? This disengagement prevents them from doing work that furthers the organization’s impact. By better assessing and utilizing your current technology tools, you can automate and streamline processes, saving both time and money. Many of these tools already exist within your organization but are underutilized due to a lack of strategy and training.
If your organization uses Office 365, you have access to a robust automation engine and a wide range of templated business applications for processes like intake, onboarding, project management, and even full donor and volunteer management systems. Implementing tools like Power Automate and Power Apps can transform your operations. For example, automating a process that takes just 10 minutes a day can save significant time over a year. If an employee performs this task 5 days a week, that adds up to over 40 hours a year—essentially freeing up an entire work week for more impactful activities.
Challenges and Opportunities in Technology Implementation
Nonprofits often struggle with technology implementation. A recent survey by Sage found that inefficient manual processes are common in financial operations, and these inefficiencies extend to other areas of organizational functions. By leveraging the tools already available in platforms like Office 365, nonprofits can address these challenges without requiring significant new investments.
Research has shown that nonprofits often struggle with technology implementation. A recent survey by Sage found that when it comes to financial processes, nonprofits maintain a lot of inefficient manual processes. This exists in other organizational functions and is not just unique to financial processes.
Leveraging Power Automate and Power Apps
So, how do we go about solving this using the technologies we currently have? For now, I will focus on tools that are available via Office 365. Microsoft Power Automate can be used to:
- Streamline Rule-Based Processes
- Save employee time with automated workflows to handle repetitive tasks
- Automate data entry to donor management systems
- Automate internal communication
Power Apps is another amazing tool that you may already have access to. Using Power Apps, you can very quickly create business applications that meet your specific needs. For example, you can easily create an intake application for a department that reviews external content (perhaps your marketing department) – with such a Power App, you will be able to streamline your content review process, and the communication between departments, and keep an eye on the volume and types of content you’re reviewing. With this data, you can make decisions to automate further or enhance content guidelines for your organization. You can also keep an eye on the workload for that specific department and plan for resourcing accordingly. Power Apps allows you to easily convert very manual, time-intensive routine processes into a streamlined business application, saving time and reducing frustration.
Power Apps model-driven applications are even more powerful – they allow you to create applications where you can quickly create forms, views, and dashboards based on a data model. Imagine a spreadsheet of all your donors that you can upload and turn into a very robust donor management system/database that has business rules, workflows, and a much better user experience for your colleagues. You can even put security roles in place to ensure users have appropriate permissions to interact with data.
Accessible Tools with No Coding Required
Here’s the best part of all this: you don’t need to be a coder or hire a team of developers to accomplish this. Everything I’ve just described can be done using a drag-and-drop interface.
Now, this all sounds amazing and we’re just scratching the surface of it. To implement this, a strategy needs to be in place and there are many ways you can go about it. Watch for another article coming soon that will describe strategies for implementing and using these technologies. There’s potential in your technology, now it’s time to make the most of it!
