It is important to understand the benefits associated with digital transformations cannot be underestimated by charities and not-for-profits. You will find that you are able to save money, use better planning, improve security, provide flexible working for staff through the use of the cloud-based technology such as Dynamics 365 which can help to provide charities with a whole host of benefits for choosing to become more digitally focused.
In our latest blog article, we will provide you with 6 ways that charities can become more digitally focused through the use of Microsoft technology.
Become more sustainable & save money
Making the decision to move online, paperless processes will almost certainly help you to become more environmentally friendly. This will help charities to reduce the need to buy and store paper by deciding to go digital.
Making the most of cloud-based technologies will help to reduce energy costs and carbon footprint as they will be much more efficient than on-site data centres.
Drive better collaboration
You will find that online collaboration tools provide you with better flexibility and remote working capabilities enabling your teams to complete their work without the need to be face-to-face. Also, it is worth noting that these tools can be used externally to arrange events and webinars at no extra cost to your organisation. In addition to this, cloud-based technology helps to guarantee that your teams remain connected to both their colleagues as well as vital business data and services whilst on the move.
Determine and showcase mission impact
When it comes to the third sector, being able to illustrate performance convincingly is vital to being able to instill confidence and to continue to maintain support from both donors and volunteers. Being able to articulate what success looks like and being able to effectively and efficiently track performance is of the utmost importance.
The use of an online platform to collate and process data will help to speed up reporting as well as giving you access to other useful tools such as charts and graphs, thus enabling you to present a more visually pleasing look for key business data.
As well as enabling you to provide better and more accurate reporting, it will also enable charities to learn more about their audiences as well as how to give more accurate reports in addition to giving charities deeper insights into how they can develop and improve their mission impact.
Improved efficiency and gain better insights
Being able to have all your data centralised will enable charities/not-for-profits to gain the right levels of information in addition to having a real-time view of donors, volunteers and benefit recipients. Furthermore, they will not need to waste any more time diving through multiple systems to find data, instead they can focus their time on helping the charity to deliver better value for its stakeholders.
Improve security, compliance and accessibility
In a business world driven by regulations and legislation, it is of the utmost importance to ensure that all data received by organisations is kept secure at all times. A heavy reliance on both paper-based or Excel based processes increases the chances of data being lost or stolen. Using a highly secure cloud hosting platform enables you to both improve security as well as reduce the chances of falling victim to a cyber-attack.
As well as the above, you will notice that a large proportion of platforms give comprehensive security models accompanied by role-based access, keeping data secure on a need-to-know basis in addition to providing regular information updates to help preserve data integrity.
It is widely said that a reliable platform should include accessible features and content that can help improve the overall productivity of users.
Bring automation into the business for tedious processes
It goes without saying but business process automation can help deliver a whole host of advantages for a charity or not-for-profit organisation. You will find that the use of automation software will help to reduce manual data entry as well as tedious admin tasks, freeing up time for team members to focus on tasks that will provide better value for the organisation. By using automation, you can speed up responses to even if it is out of office working hours. Better still, automation can help you to plan out your work and tasks and even being able to allocate tasks to the most appropriate person which will almost certainly help you to become much more efficient.
As well as the benefits offered by automation, you will have also heard of the growing use of AI (artificial intelligence) that can provide a whole host of benefits to both charities and not-for-profits. For example, chatbots that can automatically provide answers to common questions saving your employees valuable time.
So, why Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform?
You will find that Dynamics 365 is a world-famous software platform that has been designed to be able to deliver all of the above and much, much more. Dynamics 365 equips organisations with the capabilities to provide tailored customer and user experiences which at the same time can help to develop better and more long-term relationships with customers. By also taking advantage of its game changing automation as well as workflow and reporting capabilities, charities and not-for-profits are able to follow every single part of the user journey whilst at the same time maintaining compliance by using the security capabilities contained within the system.
On the other hand, the Microsoft Power Platform empowers you with a whole host of business solution and productivity tools to enable your organisation to become more digitally focused which comes to include secure data storage with Dataverse, better user experiences with Power Apps and Power Pages in addition to game changing automation and workflow capabilities via Power Automate.
Next Steps?
If you are a charity or not-for-profit looking to undergo a complete business transformation with Advantage or even if you aren’t a charity, then please talk to our team of Business Transformation experts today to discuss how we can help you bring your organisation into the modern world.
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