How Should Your Non-profit Organisation be Using Technology to Grow?
Technology seems to change nearly daily. How are we taking advantage of these thousands of new tools to meet the metrics our supporters, donors and board members so want to see? In today’s competitive market for donors its imperative that every organisation take steps to assess these tools and put a plan of action in to how each of them can be used to spur growth, heighten engagement, and build compliance.
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Here are just a few ways we can leverage new technology and forward thinking ideas that perhaps have been overlooked in the past.
Centralized data and content. In today’s world of expanding technology, it’s key to have the appropriate software to manage and control your content. Building consistency across chapters and regions requires having a centralized data chain that can be easily accessed, organised, and updated as required. Once your content is organised in this manner, how is it performing? Recognizing that the data gained through how people and potential donors are interacting with your media and content is another major factor. Which pieces of content are people interacting with? When are they engaging it? How long are they spending on it? Do they understand the takeaways you are targeting?
Using the right platform to monitor all of this data and compile it for you will not only help you re-iterate on content that may not be being used as planned, it will also help you better represent yourself to major contributors by showing off how well your content is performing. It’s no longer good enough to just assume you are doing okay based off of a few top-line numbers or stats. Donors, corporations, and major contributors want to see more detailed stories and data showing how your organisation is fairing.Who is your supporter? A great deal of effort and money is spent on generating new donors. Creating positive ROI on all the endeavors taken to bring new members, and new sources of donors is often overlooked. Generally the urgency to increase those positive increases in total donor’s year over year takes us away from keeping current donors engaged. A focused approach to engaging, re-engaging and keeping people interested often generates more positive results at a much lower cost.
Investing in a client relationship management system to monitor and manage this engagement is key. All of your contacts are potential donors, contributors or partners. From former volunteers, to clients, or even vendors you have used in the past. Keep the information close at hand, organised, and the contacts you make engaged by actively using a CRM to store and keep all that vital information up to date.
Salesforce for instance is a great tool that will automatically update your contact’s information as they move through jobs, schools and other organisations so long as you proactively enter enough information in about each contact.
In-sourcing not out-sourcing. It’s often seen as critical to find lower cost, out-sourced options to managing things like goods and services or print materials needed for organisation volunteers. If quantities in your organisation keep rising, it may be time to look at a different approach. Though you may still need to outsource providers and manufacturers, and in-sourced channel of acquisition may be a great option. By partnering with a third party distributor, like Shopify
for instance, you can create an internal market place for goods. As your bulk purchases grow, this is a valued source of internal revenue as your people and chapters will purchase from your store, providing incremental income to the home office, allowing for more flexibility in expenditures and growth.
Gamification. Gamification is not a new principle in any organisation’s plan to grow both awareness, as well as revenue. Take the Princess Margaret Home Lottery for instance. This organisation created a game around fundraising by throwing in a high odd chance for each donor to at least win their donation back in the form of goods and services, and of course a home that was gifted the organisation. Not only did awareness of the organisation’s goals multiply, but donating to their cause became an exciting event. People look forward to their chance to win big every year.
Not only does this excitement encourage donations, it encourages a major increase in per donor numbers. Finding unique ways to engage donors and build this excitement is key; it also doesn’t necessarily require the scale provided by a free home. Creating small challenges into social media is a great place to start. The Alzheimer Association of Canada’s #CoffeeDay campaign is a great example of a simple form of Gamification that’s fun, interactive, and very social.
Social boasting. Social media has become a mainstay of all modern marketing. Whether for awareness, building donor lists, or finding new funding and collaborations, it’s something that can’t be ignored. Both content and rewards are the keys to encouraging organic growth through these chains. Creating engaging content is simply the first step. One innovative way to encourage social sharing and awareness is to allow donors and contributors to display badges on their social sites like LinkedIn. Creating these badges and share buttons is a onetime thing that takes advantage of a person’s natural instinct to compete and the “collect them all" mentality.
Global Reach. There is more to the world than your local chapters and their collection of volunteers, community centers and events. Creating an online platform that will help you spread further outreach, awareness and education about your goals is necessary more than ever. Opportunities for collaboration worldwide are better than ever. Take advantage of the history, stories, and successes you have had to build an online platform of information, social engagement, and media that showcases these things.Diversified media. Keeping an audience’s attention is harder than ever. Written content just isn’t digested as much as in the past. It’s also lacking in forefront of accessibility, a key factor moving forward as new AODA rules come in to play.
Integrating new media forms into your content can’t be avoided. Videos, info-graphics, images, and other forms of visual communication are not only more engaging, but they have broader reaches than print media. That’s not to say of course to stop printing stories, and whitepapers, and blogs, but it’s highly important to blend different experiences to draw the necessary eyes onto this more in-depth material.Self-directed learning and training. Creating an environment where volunteers across multiple chapters, across the country, or even across the world is a next step for many organisations. Self-directed training through online learning sites, webinars and interactive modules is not only more cost efficient, it opens up the market of potential volunteers beyond your original borders. An organisation like Junior Achievement Canada for instance on-boards new program administrators and volunteers through an online resource portal.
They allow program volunteers to engage with the training at their own pace towards receiving various certifications required to run their various classes and student activities. As an organisation with multiple chapters across the nation this cohesive set of tools they provide makes it easier for their very busy volunteer base to participate.
Measuring compliance of this training is also made more formal in an online setting, where data reporting can show the who, what, where, and when of engagement with the various topics. The data from self-directed learning can also be easily translated into the updates to the learning content itself.
Online board meetings. Though we’re often ready to take advantage of webinar tech to have meetings between key administrative staff, it can be considered a headache to arrange for various busy board members to also meet to discuss an organisation’s direction. Taking advantage of built in tools in some web platform software is a sometimes overlooked way of establishing communication on all levels of leadership. It’s far too often that strategies, and necessary changes don’t happen, because we simply can’t get all the required decision makers in one room to discuss it.
The Junior Achievement Canada Resource Portal
Live events and conferences. It’s easy to overlook the common effectiveness of putting a group of people with connected and diverse backgrounds into a room and letting them organically network. On the other hand, but just following this philosophy, you’re also missing out on the opportunity to engage even more people. Take advantage of modern, unique ways to host conferences online.
You can take a gamified approach like the 2016 CASC conference did, by adding a leaderboard and prizes for the attendees who most engaged with the various conference materials. This allowed them to create a bit of play around the conference, extending the event both before, and after the live events. Because of the extra activity online, they were also able to gather valuable information about the performance of various talks, and the different types of media used to communicate to the audience. A valued source of analytical data to share with future supporters and event sponsors.
How have you taken advantage of technology in your organisation? Have you reviewed a platform like STITCH to help manage and answer some of these questions? Reach us on Twitter and Facebook and let us know where you’ve been successful in the past, and how other organisations can learn and build off this experience.
