Nonprofits face many challenges in their work. Their resources are usually scarce, they use donated money for performing their work and they constantly need to ensure transparency in various activities and expense management. That said, they need to stay on their mission and be efficient. How is that possible?
Thankfully, there are special tools that ensure transparency, help build up trustworthy relationships with diverse stakeholders and free up valuable resources by reducing manual work and automating repetitive tasks. We’ve collected the most helpful nonprofit resources that allow nonprofit managers and employees to create an efficient work process, solve essential work tasks and simplify challenging activities.
Time management
The biggest challenges for small nonprofit organizations are about money. In particular, where to find it and how to account for what’s been spent. Preventing a total burnout in the meantime is yet another struggle. In the light of this, it’s highly important for nonprofits to be efficient. If for small projects all the organization and management can be handled on a spreadsheet, diverse campaigns require special software aid.
1. actiTIME
actiTIME offers plenty of features that nonprofits can make use of to increase performance efficiency, eliminate errors in the process of data collection and streamline many repetitive tasks.
The time tracking feature enables users to record hours spent on different activities and, afterward, analyze personal and team-based productivity trends for smarter management decisions. All the data submitted to the timesheet in the online version of actiTIME is kept safely in the cloud and may be retrieved at any moment to generate automatic invoices and multiple reports on project costs and revenues or to calculate payroll (automatically as well). Additionally, it is possible to manage different project tasks and monitor work progress on the Kanban board integrated into the tool, which helps you better prioritize tasks and stay in the know of what is to be done.
All these life-saving solutions are available for free to small teams of up to three users. If you are a larger nonprofit, don’t worry! You can enjoy them at a fair discounted price.
We reduced payroll processing to 45 minutes per week
actiTIME is very robust, integrated well into your business process, and most important, helps you focus on your business instead of monkeying around with technology. actiTIME has reduced our payroll processing from 4-6 hours per week to 45 minutes per week.
2. ProofHub
ProofHub is a project management software tool that maintains a clear picture of complex work processes and provides a visual overview of the current results. Its timekeeping module helps collect basic data on how much time a task requires and gives insights into your current work process. ProofHub’s reports help nonprofit organizations plan work activities in the long term and see where action is needed to achieve better performance.
3. TimeDoctor
TimeDoctor is a timekeeping tool that is based on the detailed monitoring system. It keeps record of work and break time, takes screenshots of employees’ workstations and analyzes how work tools and websites are used. These features make the tool perfect for those nonprofits that would like to obtain accurate data for accounting purposes, enhance team productivity and prevent overwork and burnout.
Fundraising
It’s an obvious fact that efficient fundraising process is key for successful mission-related activities. And often this step turns into one of the hardest tasks for a nonprofit. It’s not only about making the mission clear to potential donors – it’s also about making the donation process easy. Here are the resources that automate and simplify fundraising for nonprofits:
1. Double The Donation
Double The Donation provides a great way to double the raised funds. Here’s how it works.
When an employee donates to a nonprofit organization, their employer can make a matching donation. The biggest challenge here is the lack of communication: employees are not sure whether their employer would like to support their donation initiative; employers, on the other hand, are often simply not aware of those initiatives. Double The Donation addresses this challenge by building up a simple matching procedure. It enables donors to figure out whether their employers can support the organization they are donating money to, and offers special matching gift forms for employers.
2. Snowball
Snowball is a convenient solution for nonprofits that makes donations extremely easy. It goes beyond just replacing old-fashioned ways, such as cash or written checks: the method that this tool offers is text-to-give. This means that supporters can donate money from their mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. What’s more, Snowball helps with selling tickets to your events, so you don’t need a dedicated ticketing system for that. Snowball also includes the fundraising thermometer feature that motivates donors to contribute more to your mission.
3. Donate Kindly
Online presence is essential for any nonprofit – and it can include a simple tool for submitting donations! Combining a description of your mission and a donation form is an efficient way to increase funds: this way, potential donors don’t need to leave the nonprofit’s website to transfer the money. Donate Kindly allows nonprofits to embed donation forms in their websites – no special skills required. In less than 5 minutes, you can start accepting donations directly from your website.
Recommended
Donor management
Attracting funds is one of the major challenges that nonprofits face. However, an even more significant challenge is retaining donors and making repetitive donations the core part of the attracted funds. This part of fundraising is important, as it makes the donation flow more reliable and predictable. Building personal and trustworthy relationships with the donors is essential here, and the following tools help in managing this process.
1. Bloomerang
Bloomerang offers an easy and convenient way to stay updated on key indexes of the donors’ activity and attracted funds. This data helps make informed decisions on enhancing donor communication process, fundraising strategies or engagement methods. It has an interactive dashboard that provides you with an overview of weekly, monthly and yearly results, helps analyze success of your fundraising campaigns and offers suggestions on the improvement strategies. This tool is a true Swiss army knife for communication: it provides email design features, mailing tools, social listening kit and simple website forms for sending a donation, signing up to volunteer etc.
A nice bonus: the tool shows a clear picture of your donors’ engagement level with the so-called “generosity score”.
2. DonorPerfect
Designed for attracting funds, retaining donors and increasing their engagement, DonorPerfect keeps all donor-related data in one place. This allows nonprofit managers to run more targeted campaigns to attract funds, find ways to better engage the existing donors and organize productive events. DonorPerfect is basically a business intelligence tool for nonprofits that provides necessary data for analyzing current results, revealing trends and developing better strategies for interaction with their supporters.
3. Network For Good
Network For Good is an all-in-one platform that combines fundraising and donor management. It helps achieve fundraising goals, retain donors, find more fundraising opportunities and communicate with supporters and prospects more efficiently. It helps create fundraising pages on your website and offers work with a personal coach to learn efficient ways to attract funds and retain supporters. Besides, it includes templates for organizing communication with the donors, which facilitates the interaction process significantly.
Volunteer and event management
Managing volunteers is a hard task without automation. Engaging people, coordinating activities, communicating with the existing volunteers and attracting the new ones – all these processes can be streamlined with special volunteer management tools.
1. VolunteerLocal
VolunteerLocal is a simple platform for scheduling, registration and communication. It keeps volunteer data, allows to create schedules for events and regular activities, recruit people, check in on-site and much more. The reporting module helps analyze event results, get granular data on specific events or campaigns and break them down as you need. The ability to share the signup page via volunteers’ social media accounts increases your exposure and helps engage more people.
2. Signup Genius
This multipurpose tool for organizing groups and running events works for nonprofits as a convenient way to handle volunteer coordination tasks. In it, you can create a sign-up for your event, invite volunteers and send event reminders. This is faster and more reliable than organizing groups via email or spreadsheets: easy signup process and powerful group messaging features ensure streamlined and clear communication. The tool also offers payment and donation accepting tools to run fundraising campaigns.
3. Volunteer Impact
Keeping all your volunteers’ data in one place is essential for successfully organizing them for campaigns or events. Volunteer Impact helps you with that: it keeps essential data in a volunteer database, allows you to schedule work, organize targeted communication with volunteers via email and text, provides access from desktop and mobile devices and is rich in reporting capabilities. Encrypted data storage ensures safety of the volunteers’ information.
Bookkeeping and accounting
Accounting for non-accountants does not only sound like a nightmare – it is one. And, unfortunately, not all nonprofits can afford to hire an accountant. That’s why having a convenient tool for billing and accounting processes is essential for any nonprofit. There are accounting solutions available that are designed specifically for nonprofit organizations and focused on simplicity of accounting works and clarity of financial processes.
1. Accounts
Accounts is a simple tool built specifically for small and medium-sized nonprofits. They often fall into the category of companies that don’t have accountants on their staff due to limited financial resources, and therefore need an easy and affordable solution for accounting and bookkeeping. This tool helps track income and expenses, keep accurate balance records and run reports on financial dynamics for specific periods. Accounts software provides compliance with government forms, perfectly working for those who handle accounting tasks without being a professional accountant.
2. Nonprofit Treasurer
Nonprofit Treasurer is designed for nonprofit organizations to help them handle bookkeeping and accounting tasks. It’s easy to set up and allows anyone without accounting background manage finances. With the help pf Nonprofit Treasurer, you can track transactions, attribute donations to specific categories, import bank transactions and run reports to see the details on your organization’s financial activities for any period.
3. FreshBooks
A popular solution for small and medium businesses and nonprofit organizations that helps solve all essential accounting tasks. It automates such processes as payment reminders, charging fees, invoicing, and generation of reports – the processes that take up most time when done manually. Its clear reports and charts provide a quick overview of the achieved results and backup the communication with donors and sponsors.
