Four responses to digital disruption from leaders in the nonprofit world

Digital influences are forcing NGOs and nonprofit organizations to change how they operate. But are they ready to evolve?

Digital disruption

Digital innovation is disrupting every industry, but how organizations respond varies from sector to sector.

In the nonprofit sector, digital disruption is sharpening the focus on technology. But this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, technology needs investment, and organizations are often reluctant to spend when funding restrictions are tight.

On the other hand, technology investment is an opportunity to modernize how they work and optimize every dollar spent, benefitting staff, donors and aid recipients.

Pioneers in the sector are finding new ways to make the case for that investment. Letting them embrace new technologies and transform their organizations.

So we’re taking a look at the four biggest benefits of using technology to overcome barriers to success:

1. More impact, agility and efficiency

To enhance operational agility, forward-thinking organizations are investing in enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Helping streamline their processes, improve response capabilities and deliver more impact.

The right ERP aligns your systems and activities, so that your people can work together without duplicated efforts and out-of-date information. Making collaboration and task management easier, reducing admin costs and driving productivity.

By ensuring all your people work on the same platform, you’re able to capture and extract real-time information, for instant feedback on bottom-line impact. Letting you harness new ways of managing costs and expenditures while increasing spending on mission delivery and reducing indirect administrative costs.

The right ERP software gives you the seamless user experience you’d expect in the digital age. Meaning even your non-technical people can analyze and share critical data insights with ease. Encouraging self-sufficiency and enabling company-wide improvements. In this way, you can deliver more impact, efficiency and agility.

2. Free up funding

The current climate is tough for nonprofits; competition for funding is intense, organizational complexity is increasing, donors’ expectations are rising, and people want to see the impact their contributions have. But how can you afford to do all this?

Modern cloud enterprise tools are now more reliable and help you report on program performance and impact at a granular level, giving donors the confidence and inspiration to give more. Plus, better financial visibility and control means less waste, giving you the ability to spend resources where they have the most impact.

Modern ERP platforms should also give you the infrastructure you need to optimize project grant funding and grant management. With leading grant management tools, you can recover more costs against grants to free up precious, unrestricted funding and grow your organization.  

3. Making better decisions

The leading nonprofits know that greater insight into their data, direct from the field, matters. This data drives faster and better decision-making, improving resource allocation efficiency and, ultimately, impact.

So, like nonprofit sector leaders, you need to align systems, unify databases and implement performance management tools to become truly data-driven. This will give you a single version of the truth across all entities and access to real-time data. And with it, you can measure the impact of every investment, predict likely scenarios, inform future strategy and grow sustainably.

4. Improving compliance & accountability

Today’s nonprofits are facing increasingly complex regulations around data privacy and governance, fundraising ethics, employee safety, cybersecurity and tax reporting. Leading truly innovative nonprofits to realize that transparency and accountability are everything.

With greater accountability tracking your transactions, documents and approval audit trails becomes easier. Making monitoring and minimizing your back-office spending and ensuring that projects are on-track with no over-commitments more manageable.

With a robust, transparent, end-to-end financial management, you can, like other industry pioneers, improve your compliance and accountability. Letting you lead the way in aligning on international standards and enhancing donor reporting and adherence to funding restrictions.

Speculate to accumulate

When you’re working hard to create a better world with essential services and programs, justifying budget for operational technologies can be difficult. However, allocating resources to a transparent, agile, modern cloud enterprise infrastructure can make the difference.

In a climate of digital disruption, your ERP should be a platform for engagement, growth and innovation. Helping you do more, react quicker and refine strategy, which ultimately improves the way you deliver impact to the communities you support.