In my last post, I wrote about about technology fragmentation in nonprofits.
It’s a cancer that eats away at your organization until most of your efforts are
OPERATIONS
instead of
YOUR MISSION
Mistakes and waste caused by tech fragmentation eat away at your nonprofit’s reputation.
Your donors and partners begin to think that you might not be trustworthy.
Or, that you might not be a faithful steward of your resources.
That’s a serious problem.
The answer is to build a unified tech stack.
Unified is the opposite of fragmented.
Fragmented is ad-hoc, short-term, undisciplined, uncoordinated, painful.
Unified is thought out, planned, strategized, streamlined, pleasing.
As a steward, you are charged with managing your resources faithfully.
Technology (software tools, platforms, and digital processes) is a resource that is worth getting right.
Technology enables your mission in ways that nothing else can.
We are blessed with the ability to leverage these digital capabilities for good!
Technology benefits that are too valuable to pass up:
- Donor engagement – Donors want to feel connected to causes that they support. Technology helps deepen these relationships:
- Personalized communication: Allowing you to send personalized communications increasing trust and familiarity.
- Impact reporting: Showing the tangible impact of donations gives donors confidence that they are actively contributing to your mission.
- Online giving: Making it easy for donors to give and set up donations through user-friendly platforms.
- Data-driven decisions – Collect and analyze useful data which enables you to strategize and plan effectively.
- Program evaluation: Identify which programs are generating the most value and and the ones that need to improve.
- Finance reporting: Visualize financial data and provide evidence-based reports for funders.
- Constituent insights: Understand who your donors are, why they donate, and how to target others in the same segments.
- Streamlined operations – Automate the day-to-day, saving you time and enabling you to work on your mission instead of on operations.
- Partnership Management – Collaborate with corporate partners, vendors, or churches with shared digital resources and communication.
- Volunteer and staff training – Build e-learning modules or virtual training sessions to help them onboard quickly.
- Event planning – Integrate online registrations with constituent databases and stop missing out on donations at live events.
If this sounds appealing, here’s something important to consider:
These benefits are only possible AFTER your nonprofit has been digitally enabled.
If these describe your nonprofit, you are not digitally enabled:
- manual reporting on paper
- filing cabinets
- physical receipts
- physical constituent documents
- manual donation management
- tracking tasks on sticky notes
Digital enablement is the baseline for achieving more with fewer resources.
You cannot have the other benefits without it.