3 Benefits Nonprofits Are Seeing from Today’s Technology

Is it worth the investment to modernizing your nonprofit’s software? If chosen and implemented correctly, the answer is a resounding yes!

In order to fulfill your mission, your nonprofit needs to effectively manage money, stay in touch with members, donors and volunteers, and make administrative tasks as efficient as possible. You want to reduce the time, resources, money, and brain power needed for administrative and accounting tasks so your efforts are focused on meeting your goals. Additionally, many donors choose to give their resources only to nonprofits with excellent financial transparency and a demonstrable history of responsible spending.

Here’s how the right nonprofit software solutions will help your nonprofit succeed:

1. Gain better financial insight

Many growing nonprofits rely on a mix of simple accounting software, manual data entry, and spreadsheets to manage their accounting. This makes it difficult to understand your own finances, much less create reports to communicate with your board and donors. With quality accounting and business management software, you can automate many of these manual processes, reduce errors, and gain better visibility into your organization’s financial and operational details.

Quality technology solutions that improve your accounting, make budgeting easier, and feature dashboards can transform your nonprofit’s finances by making it clear where money is going on a daily basis. This gives you the insight you need to make better decisions to help your nonprofit pursue its mission rather than spending too much time and money on administration.

A good accounting solution for nonprofits will also include flexible, powerful reporting that makes it easy to deliver financial transparency and provide donors and board members with detailed updates.

2. Manage donor and volunteer information more effectively

Rather than keeping donor and volunteer information in spreadsheets, clunky databases or spread across staff computers – use a nonprofit CRM solution to effectively manage donors and volunteers. The right CRM application will allow you to centralize donor and volunteer information so you can easily access, add to, and use it. With modern CRM software, it’s also possible to automatically upload information from external sources or in the field, reducing the time your workers spend on manual data entry.  

Centralizing and automating this collection of information can play a huge role in helping you improve your fundraising strategies by providing a better understanding of your donors. Easily perform complex analysis of giving patterns, donor characteristics, and volunteer trends.

3. Take advantage of the cloud

Cloud-based nonprofit management systems offer a variety of advantages:

• The initial cost of implementation is lower due to subscription-based models.
• The ability to simply add users and modules offers greater scalability for growing nonprofits.
• Automatic, regular updates from your cloud provider means you’ll always have the latest technology without adding IT expenses.
• Storing data in the cloud means reduced investment into IT and infrastructure.
• Cloud data centers offer stronger security for keeping sensitive information.
• Cloud-based apps are mobile-friendly and accessible from anywhere, anytime.

Considering a technology upgrade?

World Relief worked with OTT to build a streamlined case management solution with no paper forms. OTT also helped World Relief double their fundraising in 2 years and improve collaboration with this custom non-profit solution.  Read the case study.

There are countless options on the market for nonprofit management solutions. How do you figure out which one is right for your organization? Here at OTT, Inc., we use a proven 5-step methodology to assess your needs, help you choose the right solution, and help you meet your organizational goals. Contact us today to learn more.