How Do Nonprofits Use Technology Best?

Published by Jay Cordova

How Can Technology Help Nonprofit Organizations?

Nonprofit information technology can be used to improve nearly every aspect of an organization. Here are a few key functions that you can upgrade with the right technology:

Donor Management: Customer relationship management (CRM) software can store donor information like email addresses and track donation frequency. This makes it easier for you to predict how many donations you will receive in a given period and enables you to reach out to donors at the times they are most likely to give.
Volunteer Management: Like with donations, staffing can also be inconsistent. Shared, digital calendars can allow you to see who’s available and when, which is especially helpful when managing a large pool of volunteers.
Staff Management: Hiring, training, and retaining staff can be especially difficult for nonprofits. Having a disorganized system doesn’t help, either. With employee management software, you can create consistency in training, scheduling, and HR processes like handling internal disputes.

Even small upgrades, like setting up an easily accessible schedule, can make a large impact.

How Has Fundraising Changed with Technology?

Technology has revolutionized fundraising in several major ways:

It is easier than ever to make a donation through digital payment methods,
Donors care now more than ever about how effective an organization is at using the funds they raise,
And digital marketing allows nonprofits to reach audiences that are farther away while focusing on those that are most likely to care about their cause.

Implementing the right technology meets your donors where they are, so they are more likely to give.

Examples of Successful Nonprofit Technology in Action

To help illustrate just how effective technology can be at helping nonprofits achieve their missions, let’s take a look at a few recent examples.

New Story

New Story is a nonprofit organization on a journey to house 1 million people by 2030. To reach this goal, New Story typically focuses on new home construction for vulnerable families. However, the pandemic made building difficult. At the same time, the pandemic also jeopardized employment and economic pressure to many families.

Meeting these challenges, New Story transitioned its efforts from new construction to rent relief. To identify families that needed relief the most, they needed to gather and analyze many key data points like changes in income, family size, rent rates, eligibility for government assistance, and emotional health. For data collection and analysis, New Story used Felix, a platform that can quickly correlate and analyze vast amounts of data while automating tasks such as triggering follow up actions and sending notifications.

With the data they were able to gather safely and efficiently, New Story created Neighborhood to enable donors to contribute to rent relief efforts. As safety measures were developed in response to the pandemic, New Story has transitioned back to building, and you can see how they leverage technology to share their message and encourage recurring, monthly donations on their website.

Tiltify

Tiltify has answered the question, “How can technology be used for fundraising?” by leveraging some of the most popular platforms in digital entertainment. They go beyond listing a variety of causes on their website to raise funds and attendance for events. Since 2015, Tiltify has partnered with Twitch, a livestreaming entertainment platform that showcases gaming, music, and more, to make it easy for streamers to raise money for different causes. Specifically, Tiltify created an extension that streamers can use to make it easier for viewers to donate, and it connects with donors’ preferred payment processing systems. Twitch campaigns are capable of raising millions of dollars for charity, partly due to how easy Tiltify makes it to donate.

In 2020, Titltify expanded their built-in telethon capabilities to TikTok, a short video sharing platform with over a billion users and an average of 650,000 new users joining daily. With donation stickers that can be added to both content and creator profiles, viewers can donate with just the tap of a button. 25% of TikTok users are between 10 and 19 years old, and 22.4% are between 20 and 29, so Tiltify is encouraging a whole new generation to be engaged with nonprofits.

Get Shift Done

Get Shift Done is another example of an organization that uses existing technology to meet changing needs. During the pandemic, they noticed two problems that could actually help solve each other. First, lockdowns increased unemployment rates, especially in the hospitality industry. Second, economic instability meant that more people were relying on nonprofits like food banks to meet their essential needs.

By working through Shiftsmart, an app that makes it easier for employers to find new workers, Get Shift Done matches newly unemployed workers with nonprofits that need to meet growing demands. Powered by private donations, they’ve been able to provide an additional 60 million meals while paying workers an income.

Whether working on a global scale or within your own neighborhood, these organizations show the wonders that technology can do for your fundraising, data collection, and team management.

What Technology Does a Nonprofit Need? Find out with CIM

Reading these stories likely has you feeling both excited for what your nonprofit could achieve and nervous about how you’ll actually go about upgrading your technology. Fortunately, you don’t have to navigate that path alone.

At Computers in Ministry, we work with nonprofits to help find the technology that will support their mission without breaking their budget. Here’s how:

We work as an extension of your team to assess how technology can improve your organization,
Create a roadmap for implementing that technology,
Provide ongoing maintenance,
And ensure that your data is safe and secure.