Have you thought about whether your departmental systems are sharing well enough at your nonprofit?
What would you do if the various departments in your organization failed to communicate with one another? No matter how well a single department handles its own business functions, the organization is guaranteed to run into serious challenges if information isn’t effectively exchanged, especially for leadership who focus on “big picture” matters. Only when an organization is well-connected, can questions like the following be tackled:
- How does the organization demonstrate its values, social return, and success?
- How does the CEO, or the Executive Director, make proper financial, staffing, or other critical decisions without seeing how all the pieces fit together?
- How does the board accomplish its oversight role without utilizing the relationships that run through and across organizational territories?
- No good leader would tolerate such dysfunctional siloes in their organization, yet, many accept this lack of communication and integration in their departmental technology systems. Why?
- We found that no good solutions exist in the market that help companies create the bridges and tunnels that join the departmental systems together.
The 2018 Software Advice issue reviewed 145 NonProfit Applications which placed all of them into the following 8 Categories:
- Accounting
- Fundraising & Donor Management
- Membership Management
- Volunteer Management
- Marketing & Outreach
- CRM
- Event Planning
- Grant Management
None of these categories tie these various systems together in a way that successfully inform decision making to help a non-profit achieve its mission and goals.Yet, increasingly, non-profits are seeing the need to tie these categories to various systems. The Non Profit Times (1/17) identified “Integration and the free flow of information and data between software solutions” as an important and crucial trend going forward. However, this is just a first step. The real utility comes when business intelligence is overlaid on to this, causing leadership to have a much stronger visibility into the things it deems important.So to fill the need, we are developing a solution that fits the following criterion:
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- It’s inexpensive.
- It’s easy to use.
- It adapts and scales to the organization.
- It creates direct ties to the mission.
- It highlights areas deemed most important by the organization regardless of whether there are clear metrics yet created for these areas.
- It provides insight into the key questions, both expansive and contractive, that the organization wants to ask.
Are you getting excited? Even if you are just curious, we hope you will get in touch. We can give you a few good thoughts on how to move forward.
Bruce Golboro
COO, ITDATA, Inc.