Times are tough for charities and nonprofits. As funding streams stagnate, retention rates crumble, and community demands grow, many organizations find themselves having to do more with less.
But there’s only so much you can take on manually. Eventually, you’ll reach a breaking point — and it’s your services, employees, and community that will feel the brunt of the impact.
At this stage, automating your nonprofit operations is necessary for survival.
Here’s why.
You wouldn’t waste hours of your Sunday morning hand washing your laundry. So why waste precious time executing your nonprofit operations manually when you don’t have to?
From irritatingly slow to “all-systems-go”, automation takes your pre-defined processes and makes them work faster, better, and more accurately.
With effective automated workflows, your nonprofit can:
These benefits all add up. By making improvements across your operations, you’ll be in a better position to fulfil your mission and serve your community.
Automation sounds great in practice. But how can you implement it throughout your nonprofit operations?
While every organization is different, there are a few universal examples you can use as a starting point:
Does your nonprofit run a large, multi-site volunteering program? If so, we’re sure registration and onboarding takes a great deal of time.
With automation, you can streamline the entire process, from gathering volunteer details, to vetting prospects and delivering onboarding training. So you can get your volunteers up and running quickly and compliantly, without overwhelming your management teams.
Whether you’re distributing aid to refugees or operating a network of food banks, automation can be incredibly helpful for managing inventory and replenishing supplies.
With integrated analytics, you can keep track of stock levels, respond quickly, and predict future demand. This is essential for maintaining a reliable service and managing your nonprofit’s budget. You can also harness these insights to inform donors of your most-needed supplies.
Does your nonprofit scramble to find the right documents when your internal and external audits roll around? Or do you frequently struggle with incomplete or inconsistent paperwork?
Without standardized processes, this will become an ongoing issue.
Creating automated mechanisms for capturing evidence is a smarter way of preparing for audits. Throughout the year, your employees can fill in the appropriate forms as and when needed.
Examples of this may include:
With this audit trail to hand — and a repository of documents to back it up — you’ll be able to prepare for and pass your audits with ease.
In order to meet the needs of your community, you must follow effective and dependable case management processes.
This can be difficult to achieve manually. After all, you can’t always guarantee that your employees will follow procedures accurately or in a timely manner.
Standardized e-forms and automated workflows allow you to progress and track each individual case, from initial assessments to referrals and service planning, with ease. Built in service level agreements (SLAs) and notifications ensure no stage of the process is left forgotten. And, with a clear, centralized trail of every action, you can hand over cases without needing to debrief your employees.
This speeds up case management, mitigates human errors, and improves the overall experience for your clients and community members.
Storytelling can be a powerful and profitable nonprofit communications tool. However, unless you have the resources to ideate and write this content, it may seem like too difficult a task to pursue.
With the help of AI-powered internal communication tools, you can generate news updates, blog posts, and storytelling articles in just a few clicks. All it takes is one clear, concise prompt — the AI handles the rest.
This can augment your communications efforts, allowing you to influence more people, increase brand awareness, and raise more funds for your cause.
Despite the many benefits of automation, adoption rates in the charity sector still remain low. And organizations are beginning to feel the strain.
Indeed, 40% of nonprofits say the biggest internal challenge they face is “a lack of process automation and operational efficiency.”
With so many extraneous challenges to juggle, it’s not surprising that automation is low on the list of priorities. But we’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be a cumbersome task.
With a nonprofit management solution like Claromentis, you can turn any process into a seamless workflow. Our business process automation features require no coding or development expertise. Plus, we provide a knowledge base full of learning resources to help you get started quickly.
But that’s not all. You’ll also receive the added benefit of our feature-rich intranet software, as well as the option to add-on our SCORM-compliant learning management system. Meaning you can make greater improvements to your nonprofit communications, training, and operations — without needing to invest in disparate tools.
If you’d like to learn more about our nonprofit management software, please schedule a 10-minute discussion call with one of our experts. We’ll assess your needs, explain our exclusive charity discounts, and get you one step closer to a more efficient future.