Future themes for the charity sector

What a couple of years it has been for the charity sector. Across the sector, charities have seen huge operational change and survived, even thrived, with a hearty mixture of warrior spirit and digital transformation.

 

Despite the disruption, charity missions remain the same and now it’s becoming much clearer the significant role that technology must play in enabling them. But technology moves and evolves at such pace it can be challenging for charities to know what key areas to focus on to drive tangible change to their organisation.

 

In our experience, every action taken by organisations in the sector needs to positively impact their mission. We are helping many of our customers to unlock the power of technology and while they all have a different roadmap, there are many similarities between them. 

 

We’ve collated together the shared themes to highlight where we think charities and non-profits should be focussing their digital strategy in the next five years.

 

 

Communication and collaboration

 

Charities, perhaps more than the private sector, have such a huge range of different roles working in disparate locations and environments, that it can be tricky to ensure that all team members have access to the right internal communications channels and collaborative tools to ensure that they are working towards the same goals and KPIs and benefitting from shared knowledge.

 

We know that one of the obstacles they face is ensuring that teams on the periphery of each function can communicate easily with others. We predict that Microsoft as a Service solutions will continue in their popularity due to their discounts and charities will start to embrace more than just Teams.

 

They will also make far more use of solutions like SharePoint to give access to shared files and information and share creative and valuable ideas across the board.

 

 

Customer relationship management

 

Some of our customers have started to embrace the traditional CRM system employed by corporates to fire their sales and marketing activities to donors and members. This isn’t what we have historically seen within the sector, but it’s a positive step, allowing them to manage the customer journey and devise clever and creative ways of fundraising and securing donations, while segmenting their donors so that they are able to personalise and automate marketing.

 

The CRM allows charities to analyse and monitor how and when campaigns are working and identify the most valuable donor groups, as well as making the customer journey a greater and more personalised experience, likely positively impacting legacy donations in years to come.

 

As charities move from legacy systems, and begin to consolidate their apps into one CRM, it can provide a full dashboard view of everything happening within the charity as well as reducing cost.

 

 

Wrap-around security

 

For many charities who rely on government contracts, security updates will not just be a choice but a necessity. We predict that all but the very smallest and least digitally mature will be Cyber Essential’s Plus accredited.

 

Most of the security which we believe is necessary and we would like to see as common place in the sector will come as standard with the cloud solutions that we anticipate charities swapping current legacy systems for.

 

That will be a real game changer because solutions like Microsoft Azure have superior levels of security inbuilt which not many organisations realise. We know that security is a worry for charities because the data that they store can be so sensitive, whether that be about beneficiaries or donors, and trust, of course, must be retained at all costs.

 

Our view is that security seems like such a huge topic that it leaves some organisations with analysis paralysis. We’d like to see – and believe we will – charities starting to build a secure foundation and realising that getting those basics in place really does offer a wealth of return on investment.

 

That’s why we talk about challenges and not products. Charities don’t need to understand all the bells and whistles – they just need to feel secure.

 

 

Volunteer management and access permissions

 

Volunteer management is often a challenge whether it’s because of scaling up and down for specific campaigns or access segregation. If the sector embraces solutions to onboard, induct, and offboard volunteers, it will not only make the process more seamless and less time consuming, it will also make sure that everything is more secure because as soon as a volunteer leaves, their permissions are revoked.

 

Solutions such as Microsoft InTune will allow volunteer managers to match volunteers to roles which require their specific skill set, capabilities and availability which will be invaluable when working with huge swathes of people.

 

Even better, when volunteers are no longer able to support the organisation or their situation changes, they are removed from the database, or their details amended. Tracking and scheduling volunteers and gaining insights will help organisations to adapt and evolve to get the best volunteers and keep them for as long as possible.

 

 

Automation and optimisation

 

In an industry like the charitable sector where budgets for recruitment of new employees and equipment can be constrained, automating the right tasks and workloads is crucial to allowing team members to perform the roles where they are really needed and remove admin tasks that it makes more sense for technology to perform. 

 

Not only does this free up the team but we have also been assured by customers that digital transformation helps them to attract and keep the best recruits.

 

Automation can be as simple as introducing an app to allow beneficiaries to self-serve with certain tasks can save hours, costs, and human error. There is an abundance of tools that existing within some Microsoft licenses that offer low-code solutions for automating business processes that organisations can be unaware of.

 

Other ways to optimise involve making sure all employees are working on the same systems, platforms, and data so everyone can work more efficiently in a joined-up way that is centrally managed. Onboarding CRM solutions and file sharing tools such as Microsoft SharePoint is a good starting point. 

 

 

Training and change management

 

With a commitment and drive to make life better for beneficiaries, traditionally, many sector teams are so involved with their day jobs it’s hard to get them all to find the time to train on technology so that they can use it to its best advantage.

 

We are seeing more and more charities eager to reap the rewards and mitigate inefficiencies by putting some time aside for training, but such is the type of work that they do that many have to operate quite reactively to events impacting the people that they help.

 

It’s not just a cultural shift to encourage people to accept the short-term transformation for longer term value, it’s also complex logistically to organise for the different functions and individual user groups. We see a shift happening nevertheless, but we see this as being supported by SaaS solutions becoming more and more intuitive and being a longer-term effort, which could span a number of years.