Nonprofit Challenges

Growing your Organization

NPower’s IT Services Can Help You Grow Your Organization Faster and with Less Risk

Information Technology systems play a critical role in all growth strategies, from helping to achieve results to coping with the expanded scale of the organization. Technology improves productivity by enabling communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing that allows employees to innovate. NPower can help you select, deploy, and manage the IT needed to be successful in growing your organization.

Many organizations have ambitions to grow beyond their current size in terms of reach and operational scale. That starts with increasing your number of funders and your effectiveness in attracting and retaining and tracking new donors.

Your target constituents need to be aware of your services, and you can increase this awareness through a variety of marketing methods and campaigns.

Underlying all your efforts, however, needs to be a robust and accessible store of information about your constituents and the services they access from your organization. This information needs to be securely stored and yet accessible to those who need it. This may include not only people in your office, but also field workers who are traveling or executives accessing information from home outside regular business hours.

As your development efforts are successful and funding grows and your reach expands, so does the need for more employees to cope with the demand, perhaps additional locations and certainly more systems to help those people manage the organizational processes. These systems need to be planned, implemented and supported by specialized technicians.

NPower’s services can help you grow your organization faster and with less risk.

Strategy Planning

NPower Can Help You Build an IT strategy for Your Organization without Hiring a CIO

Information Technology (IT) systems can help to create an advantage for your organization, by improving client relations, increasing the number of constituents you can reach and reducing operational costs by automation of tasks. Stable systems that are securely available to local and remote workers, are the foundation of an effective organization.

These IT systems can represent a significant cost however, and there are many choices in terms of the hardware, software, networks and services that you can use. You also have to balance the needs of your organization today with those that you foresee in the future. Budget constraints will always affect the path chosen and the speed with which you can advance.

Making the right technology decisions takes a combination of experience and understanding. The experience that comes from having done it successfully before, and the understanding of the nonprofit space in which you work.

Making the wrong IT decisions can mean having system breakdowns that impact organization for hours or even days. It can mean ending up with poor communications, lack of visibility to critical business information or being vulnerable to security risks. Nonprofits need to have the best advice in terms of their IT strategy and yet most cannot afford to hire a full time Chief Information Officer (CIO) or even a technical expert.

NPower’s consultants can help to devise a plan for your organization, to not only stabilize and secure your current environment, but also to work with you as you plan the future phases of your organization and recommend the most appropriate IT strategy for your organization. All without having to burden your organization with the cost of full-time IT people.

Servicing Your Constituents

Every nonprofit has to focus on the cost elements of their operation and for ways to do more with less. The cost of employee wages and benefits is typically the largest expense line item in any nonprofit’s budget. The use of Information Technology (IT) to automate processes and provide secure anywhere access to information increases productivity. IT improves employee and resource efficiency. That impact is increasingly seen in the nonprofit sector, where technology has allowed small organizations to expand their service offerings, reach more constituents and to reduce their costs. Unfortunately, there are also many examples of where nonprofits have invested in particular technology systems or solutions but have failed to see the expected returns. They have often suffered from having been poorly advised or from lack of understanding of the full requirements of a particular system or its operation.

NPower is a trusted advisor to nonprofits helping them make the right decisions in terms of using IT to increase the impact of their mission.

Coping with Changes

Technology plays a major role within a nonprofit when major change occurs. This can be when there is a need to move to new office space to cope with expansion, the opening of a new office or a merge with another organization.

These phases in the life a nonprofit are often an excellent time to look at the company’s Information technology (IT) infrastructure and support model. Moving to a new office creates an opportunity to get the servers located and set up correctly and to put in wired or wireless networks to connect computers. It also is a good time to look at your overall support model.

NPower can help you get through these changes, and even turn them into opportunities to have a more efficient and effective IT environment.

Data Security

Large companies generally have extensive plans to protect their business from the impact of major interruptions to the operation of their businesses. Whether it’s through duplicate locations for their data processing, the availability of alternative work locations for their people or through extensive archiving of their corporate data, they have a strategy and processes in place to best prepare them to keep their business operating as effectively as possible.

Nonprofits however, often feel that they cannot afford to invest in the kind of insurance this represents. Their view is generally that they will save the money and take the risk, and that they couldn’t afford any of these kinds of things anyway.

The reality is however that there are many steps a nonprofit can and should take to protect their organization, without it being a major financial burden to them. Something as simple as having a disciplined procedure for taking back-up and data storage, can provide a first layer of protection against a major loss of constituent and donor information.

NPower’s consultants can help review the requirements your organization has in terms of being able to keep operating under adverse conditions, to help you understand the costs and find affordable steps and then deploy the selected solutions or define the required procedures.