Operating one nonprofit location is hard enough as it is. But when your network expands, things can become much more convoluted.
Management turns into a juggling act. You try to keep a handle on all of your teams and locations, but your grip slips and things scatter around you. You lose track of financial performance; you forget about upcoming events and obligations; you worry about audit preparedness and compliance…
There’s no clarity — only chaos.
Eventually, this lack of oversight can result in:
To avoid these issues, you need to find a way to harmonize your multiple sites.
This is where a multi-site nonprofit software can provide much needed support.
Think of multi-site nonprofit software as a centralized control center. Instead of juggling an arm full of disparate tools (which may vary from site to site), you can consolidate all of your processes, communications, policies, learning, people and more into one platform.
This allows you to manage your teams, coordinate your projects, and standardize your operations with ease — no matter how many locations you oversee or where in the world they are.
With the right platform in your toolkit, you can:
But what functionality can you expect from a software for nonprofits?
In the rest of this blog article, we’ll list 17 essential features every nonprofit software should contain (and explain why you need them).
You’ll fail to achieve anything with your nonprofit software unless your employees actually use it. That’s why you shouldn’t overlook design and UI capabilities.
Features such as page building capabilities, drag-and-drop widgets, and menus will help you improve navigation and boost user adoption rates.
In addition to this, custom themes will instill brand consistency and bring cohesion to your digital workplace. Certain software vendors, such as Claromentis, allow you to set unique themes for your different branches and affiliate organizations. Meaning everyone gets a completely personalized experience.
The chances are, you’ll want to use your nonprofit software internally and externally. That’s why it’s important to choose a platform with intranet and extranet capabilities.
This empowers you to share communications, events, projects and more with a wider community. Whether that’s your employees, donors, partner organizations, or local citizens. With this kind of reach, you can level-up your fundraising efforts and increase awareness.
57% of nonprofit communicators plan to use storytelling more often. And there’s no greater way of sharing impactful stories than with engaging news articles and blogs.
With the right unified multi-site nonprofit software, you can:
If you’re strapped for time – as 45% of nonprofit communicators are – we’d recommend choosing a platform with generative AI functionality, too. That way, you can create relevant, high-quality content within just a few seconds.
Over 40% of nonprofits say the biggest internal challenge they face currently is ‘a lack of process automation and operational efficiency’.
Considering the ongoing funding uncertainties and labor challenges across the sector, this may come as no surprise.
To augment your teams and enhance efficiency across your sites, choose a nonprofit management software that contains a native automation platform.
Take Claromentis as an example. Our business process automation platform, InfoCapture, enables you to automate any manual process. There’s no development support required. Simply translate your existing processes into no-code e-forms or automated workflows, and you’re good to go.
Use cases can include:
Operational efficiency hinges on well-defined training — especially when you’re operating a multi-site nonprofit or charity. More than this, compelling learning opportunities can streamline onboarding, enhance board governance, and positively impact employee retention rates.
An integrated, scalable learning management system (LMS) will allow you to build, distribute, and manage these training initiatives.
Just make sure your nonprofit software contains all the LMS capabilities you require, such as:
Project and task management spaces are crucial for coordinating events, fundraising projects, and marketing campaigns across your locations.
With the ability to assign tasks and monitor progress, you can bring an end to bottlenecks and missed deadlines.
We often associate roles and permissions with data security. (And quite rightly.)
But did you know that these features can also enable you to deliver personalized content experiences? This may be helpful if you’d like to show specific communications, training, and processes to different locations and affiliate organizations across your network.
Maintaining compliance is already a tough job for many nonprofits. But when you factor in changing regulations, global discrepancies, and employee disengagement, the task becomes all the more difficult.
Yes, you may have a solid process for distributing your policies. But how can you guarantee your network actually reads and understands them?
This is where an integrated AI-powered policy management application can be of use:
With these capabilities, you can bolster compliance across your dispersed teams and reduce the likelihood of regulatory penalties.
As an integral part of nonprofit operations, you can expect to find event management capabilities in almost all nonprofit software solutions.
These features should allow you to create and manage any in-person and virtual events, from providing location details to displaying attendance lists.
Version-controlled document and asset management features empower teams to collaborate on project work and access brand materials remotely.
This not only strengthens multi-site relationships, but can reduce bottlenecks and ensure brand consistency.
For compliance and efficiency reasons, your employees must follow procedures to the letter. Take case management as an example. Following the right steps, from assessment to service coordination and follow-up, is essential for providing the best service to your community.
A searchable knowledge base is a great way to capture this step-by-step information. With the ability to ask questions and build a helpful repository of FAQs, you can ensure your multi-site teams know how to handle every case, every time.
Multi-site may also mean multi-lingual. If you have offices spread across the globe, you’ll need to prioritize a nonprofit software that features integrated localization features.
This will allow every employee, trustee, volunteer, or community member to read and understand your important communications.
In order to manage your multi-site nonprofit effectively, you need clear insights.
Yet many organizations struggle with lack of real-time visibility across their locations.
With organization dashboards, you can gain a quick overview of policy acceptance rates, training completions, news updates, events, discussions, and more. It’s all the information you need to track performance in one simple page.
Nonprofit teams don’t have it easy. With dwindling resources and mounting workloads, employees often struggle with disengagement and burnout.
While rewards and recognition schemes — such as skills-based badges and network-wide thank you messages — can’t ease all of their troubles, they can boost morale and ensure your employees feel more appreciated.
Forums and discussion rooms are a great way to facilitate collaboration and strengthen cross-site relationships. You can set up forums for dedicated projects or topics, keep on top of the latest conversations via subscriptions and notifications, and control access with user permissions.
Short polls and surveys will give you a better understanding of network-wide challenges, sentiments, and engagement levels.
Your nonprofit management software should allow you to anonymize these surveys to ensure you receive authentic responses. That way, you have concrete information to help you improve the way you run your nonprofit organization or charity.
A mobile application is a must-have for on-the-go team members, whether they’re working in a soup kitchen or distributing leaflets across their local neighborhood.
To reduce any inconsistencies, this app should provide the same information, branding, and experience as your software’s browser or desktop application.
Your nonprofit already has plenty of economic and sociopolitical challenges to contend with. So why add multi-site nonprofit management to the list?
With a comprehensive nonprofit management software like Claromentis, you can augment your teams, standardize your processes, and make positive changes to your outreach, fundraising, and donor management efforts. All of which will help you boost awareness and make a tangible difference to the communities you serve.
Our 3-in-1 solution combines intranet, e-learning, and automation capabilities. Meaning you get all of the intuitive features listed above (and more) in just one solution.
Interested in learning more? Schedule a quick 10-minute discussion call to see whether Claromentis is a good fit for your nonprofit or charity.