Reduce Your Nonprofit’s Workload and Get More Done With These Tips

As a nonprofit professional, you’re probably always looking for ways to get more accomplished, faster. Working as efficiently as possible helps your organization be a good steward of funds. It also helps you (and/or your staff) to be more productive and ultimately have greater job satisfaction. 

When brainstorming how you and your team can work more efficiently, you might not always think about your software. Or, if you do think about it, you might think wistfully about the latest technology that you wish your organization had. 

But there are things you can do to put your current software to work to reduce your workload and even get more done. Let’s look at some specific ways to use the tech you already have to work more efficiently.

Use Templates

Starting with a template makes it much faster and easier to build emails, campaigns, web pages and more without needing to create and extensively test new designs from scratch every time. Many software packages include the ability to set up templates.

For instance, you can use template capabilities to:

• Build templates in your email marketing tool for common types of email messages and fundraising asks that include standard headings and content sections.
• Create and re-use a baseline website template in your peer-to-peer fundraising software for campaigns and events that occur multiple times throughout any given year.
• Set up and use page templates in your content management system (CMS) for types of web pages that often need to be created or updated in your organization’s main website.

When you create templates, be sure to label them as “templates” to help ensure that they are only copied and not accidentally modified, published or sent.

Streamline Your Online Forms

Optimize your donation and event registration forms by asking for only the minimum information you need to process the event registration, donation or other task. The form will be much easier and faster for you to build and maintain. As a bonus, your site visitors will appreciate not needing to complete a tedious form.

When it’s time to build another new form, copy your more streamlined form and make any adjustments needed instead of starting from square one with a new form.

Put Marketing and Process Automation to Work

Many email marketing, constituent relationship management (CRM) and donor management software packages include some kind of process automation capabilities. Take some time now to review the process automation capabilities of your current software. Then, put them to work to automate repetitive tasks and speed up process steps – saving you valuable time in the long run.

For example:

• Set up an automated notification that alerts specific staff members when donations come in at a certain level so that donors can be personally thanked.
• Schedule an automated email series that welcomes new contacts to your organization when they make a first-time donation or sign up for an event for the first time.
• Set up monthly reports to automatically send to the appropriate managers for review.
• Automate other manual processes, such as data entry, data reconciliation, and sending multichannel communications.

Invest in Software Training

You’ll be able to work faster and more confidently if you know your organization’s technology capabilities and how to use them. To do that, find ways to invest more in software training in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Determine what on-demand training your technology vendors offer. Many of these trainings are free to customers and provide a quick and convenient way to better understand how to use your software to complete daily tasks, take refresher courses or uplevel your skills. Once you learn more about your on-demand training options, be sure to take advantage of what’s available and encourage other staff members to do the same.

It’s also beneficial to locate the help functionality, in which you can search for answers to common questions directly in the software. If this option is available, ensure you and your staff know about it and use it frequently.

Finally, attend conferences hosted by your software vendors. Some have affordable and convenient online attendance options, and these events can be great places to get added training and learn tips for optimizing your software.

Keep Your Data Clean

Wading through duplicate, inaccurate and outdated data every time you need to find information or run a report is a big time-waster. Plus, your software won’t work as fast or as accurately as it should when your data is in poor shape. So, if your organization doesn’t have strong policies and processes in place for keeping data clean, it’s time to turn this around.

For example, if a new user record is created in your system every time a supporter interacts with you, then take steps to allow them to easily log in to your website with their existing record to avoid creating duplicate records. Or use a picklist or dropdown for entering information like state and country to ensure spelling is consistent and in the format you prefer.

Maintaining clean data is a long-term efficiency play and typically involves multiple people across the organization. But if you invest the time now to clean up your nonprofit’s data and put initiatives in place to keep it clean, you’ll see greater efficiencies for years to come.

Making sure your software is set up optimally for the way your organization works can be a big time-saver. The way your software is configured to manage data and processes, handle forms and integrate data among systems can make a huge difference in how easy it is to use and how fast it works.

Work with your software power users, IT team or nonprofit technology partner to audit your key software and find ways to fine-tune the configurations to make sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.