August 05, 2024
The Role of Nonprofit Technology Consulting
The goal of nonprofit technology consulting is to provide strategic guidance to ensure that technology decisions, systems, and processes continue to evolve alongside advancements in the technical marketplace.
While a nonprofit tech consultant can be engaged to solve particular problems, they can also be a continuous part of the organization - helping to develop technical expertise across the board. Their assistance is critical, as failing to adopt overall technical trends and tools can leave an organization behind its competitors and expose its systems to significant security breaches.
Technology cannot be separated from the business processes built around it or the people who use it daily. Much of the preparatory work around technical change involves fully understanding current business processes, identifying their shortcomings, and determining how they must evolve with the introduction of better technology. At the same time, considerations must be human-centric. Organizations composed of many individuals can only change so quickly. Employees need to understand why they are asked to do things differently and what they will gain from the change. The personnel buy-in can prove as challenging as the technical aspects, as there is no point in implementing new systems that people cannot or will not use effectively.
Using Technology to Achieve a Nonprofit Mission
In our experience, there are a few key needs that come up repeatedly as organizations use technology to further their nonprofit mission. We'll address each one briefly.
Selection and Integration of Systems
The selection and integration of systems should aim to automate business processes, significantly reducing or eliminating manual employee labor.
Systems must be chosen with a keen eye towards how they can both service business processes across the entire organization, and integrate effectively with best-in-class tools required by different groups. Ultimately, the correct technology allows employees to focus on the nonprofit mission instead of being eternally mired in day-to-day tasks.
Secure Systems
Secure systems ensure that the organization cannot be compromised and can pass security audits required by grantors or customers
Organizations with a strong understanding of security needs and processes are ready to collaborate effectively with other organizations. Security audits should be viewed as opportunities to ensure that an organization's systems are well-primed. However many organizations dread them because they point to where security processes haven't been created or maintained.
Reporting Tools
Reporting tools should provide organization-wide impact reporting.
Without a focus or commitment to these reporting tools, departments and individuals work in silos. Generating impact reporting becomes a truly challenging task that requires many individuals to manually provide data points, easily losing sight of the overall nonprofit mission in the process.
Holistic Understanding of Customers, Clients, Donors, Granters, and Stakeholders
In today's world it is critical organizations quickly understand who individuals are to them. This understanding allows organizations to engage appropriately without making embarrassing, and possibly costly, mistakes. It also eliminates productivity losses of employees who need to manually communicate across departments every time they need information about particular individuals or groups.
Boosting Fundraising Drives and Interaction Through Tech
Different teams often have preferences for the systems and tools they use to manage their many individual and organizational relationships.
Fundraising teams have different needs than marketing or membership teams as they manage their fundraising drives. However, allowing technology decisions to be made by fundraising teams without consultation can lead to issues for a number of reasons. In today's world, automating integrations between systems that serve different purposes is challenging but essential. Generally the first question a nonprofit tech consultant will ask is, does the organization use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool and how do the fundraising drive processes integrate with this tool? Surprisingly, the answer is often, "they don't integrate at all", or "each department uses different tools to perform the same tasks''.
A fundraising drive involves more than just interfacing with donors. Granters often require reporting to show the impact of their investments. This reporting typically requires organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources and systems, not just within the specific donor management system.
Additionally, it's critical to understand which donors are also members and possibly clients of the organization. Connections with these individuals look much different than connections with individuals who only interact with one part of an organization. In today's age of social media and targeted marketing, people expect you to know exactly who they are when you communicate with them.
How We Can Help as Nonprofit Tech Consultants
We can easily understand how someone can read this article and say, these challenges should be handled by our (CTO, COO, or Technology Director), why would we also need a nonprofit tech consultant? The answer lies in the scope of technology. We're not just talking about the IT side of technology, though there are overlaps, but the business process and systems selection side of technology. Our focus on these areas allows us to work hand in hand with organizations' Technology Directors, CTO's and COO's, providing guidance through the continuous changes brought by advances in Cloud offerings and today's tools.
Whether these resources are hired employees or consultants on some level isn't important. Our specialization in working with nonprofits and in providing nonprofit technology consulting brings a level of expertise and perspective that is difficult to hire internally.
Our team approach brings diverse strengths and experiences to the table offering more than one individual's opinion.
We provide guidance and best practices -- informed by both the marketplace and our extensive experience -- on what resources are best to hire in-house versus what should be sourced as consultants. This depends on what expertise is already in place within an organization. We excel at evaluating this and offering expert feedback.
Also, we can customize our engagement to meet your specific needs.
It's critical to approach nonprofit technology consulting in a strategic way to be successful. Nonprofit tech consultants who can gain a deep understanding of the organization's unique needs and goals, collaborate effectively, and simplify the process of evaluating the pros and cons of technical decisions are needed resources.
At Coat Rack, we specialize in providing tailored Application Development, Nonprofit Technical Consulting, and Strategic Product Management services to empower non-profits in delivering impactful projects.
We maintain a strong focus on where non-profit organizations should be in 2-5 years regarding technology. Things change, and it is important to keep up.
If you're ready to transform your technology solutions, schedule a free consultation with us today and discover how we can help you achieve your nonprofit mission effectively.
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