The past few months, when the entire world had to shift, adapt and pivot in response to challenges that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, have also completely changed how charities communicate with their members and donors, manage their volunteers, and conduct fundraising events. One of the most significant transformations was digitisation of the nonprofit sector. Those organisations that rapidly embraced new technologies proved to be more resilient and managed to not only survive, but perform well during the pandemic providing essential services and support to their communities. So, what are the must-have tools to ensure efficiency and effectiveness?

Contact Management

The most important component of running a charitable organisation is being able to build strong relationships with people. This is why it’s wise to invest in a software solution for collecting and storing the contact information of your members, donors and volunteers. A secure cloud-based system helps centralise your information and access it from any location. Look for a reliable database tool that allows you to create segments for managing different groups of stakeholders, run reports to see your members’ involvement with your organisation, add private notes to individual or household profiles, and see the history of communication. This makes it easier to understand your community and find the best ways to serve them. 

File Storage

Apart from collecting contact details of their stakeholders, many charities have a need for uploading, storing and sharing files or documents or managing digital and physical resources that can be rented out to their members or customers. There is a variety of cloud-based file hosting services to choose from, such as Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud, that allow for easy access and management of files and assets.

Project Management

We all have moments when it’s hard to stay on top of our workload! With a project management system, such as Microsoft ToDo or Todoist, you can create task lists and set up reminders. Both of these task managers have a simple and clean interface. Create lists and tasks for personal use or share your projects with a group of people. There are multiple other tools that allow you to build workflows and even coordinate the work of your entire team. Try Asana or monday.com to keep your processes well organised and make sure no important deadlines get forgotten and nothing falls through the cracks.

Finance Tracking

Depending on the type of your organisation, you might need tools to manage the collection of membership fees, donations or pledges, and produce statements and invoices. A reporting tool would come in handy as well, helping you discover lapsed members or donors and get them back into the system. One important aspect to consider here is integration with leading payment processing solutions like Stripe or Ezidebit and accounting software. A fully automated integration with Xero allows you to easily collect payments, issue receipts and run comprehensive financial reports. Having these assists with both processing payments and keeping records of all transactions (which will be needed at the end of the tax year).

‍Communication

In the context of not-for-profit organisations, communication serves multiple purposes, such as growing a community of supporters, advocacy, or fundraising. To save time, utilise an email service provider (such as  Mailchimp or Mailerlite) that gives you an opportunity to email your entire audience with just one click. Alternatively, you can email a segment of your audience keeping your communication more relevant. Many services now provide you with beautiful and customisable templates for emails and campaigns to keep your communication on brand. However, the most important feature is access to analytics that show how many people open and read your emails or what links they click on, which helps create better content. Consistently keeping in touch with your stakeholders is paramount, and email service providers can help you not only design, but also automate your communications, making the whole process more efficient.

In conclusion, to run a successful not-for-profit organisation, it is important to have a set of reliable tools. However, it could be rather challenging, costly and time consuming to maintain several different systems that might also require integrations. The perfect solution lies in finding one software - a complete charity management system that does not require juggling multiple tools. Today is all about streamlined efficiency, so it’s crucial to be able to access all your data and information in one place. Having a robust cloud-based CRM helps charities streamline and simplify their processes, save time spent on admin and take care of their community better.

infoodle is a complete management system, designed to fit the needs of nonprofits of all sectors and sizes. It allows you to store unlimited data and keep it secure and protected with permission-based access, attach private notes or files to people’s profile pages, manage workflows, build stronger connections with stakeholders through consistent communication, share resources, track your financial information, manage events and so much more.