5 Reasons Why NGO’s Should Invest in IT…
By: Rebecca Brosnan
Tags: It, Ngo, Nonprofit, Volunteering, Leadership

…and the Role that the Corporate Sector Can Play to Make it Happen

Image Courtesy of Mother’s Choice Limited

In the past two months since I published an article on building capacity, I have been encouraged by the reaction of many readers. Several leaders within the non-profit industry reached out to say how much they thought this view needed to be championed. Some of our donors have asked how they can help. The most rewarding moment for me personally was when a talented professional who volunteered to do a major review on our building and facility needs told me, “I read your article and decided to step up.” She has now recruited two other professionals to volunteer who have skills sets for which we could never afford to hire.

We believe in investing in our people, systems and infrastructure, despite the pressure to minimize spending on administration. This is true even and especially during the pandemic. We need to think about how to operate efficiently, effectively and in what has been a profound change in many operating models: working remotely. Together with my immensely talented colleague, Helene Rao, we make the case for why NGOs should invest in IT and show concrete examples of what we have accomplished, and the difference it has made to our clients and teams.

Like much of the journey of the Mother’s Choice over the past three decades, it all started with an unconventional idea, irrational hope, and a whole lot of moxie trying to find people who would support our investment in technology. It was not easy. When our visionary CEO met Helene while speaking at major investment bank seven years ago, she immediately plucked her from their IT department to join us and to bring a different approach to our technology.

When Helene arrived excited and ready to get started, she quickly discovered that our three heritage locations had no stable internet connection, which meant our teams could not even reliably email one another. Social workers took notes on paper files that they kept in their desk drawers, which made case supervision and escalation challenging. Anyone who wanted to share a file needed to put it on a USB drive and physically carry it to the other person. Our donor information, adoption alumni and volunteers lists were at best scattered on various excel spreadsheets. Not only was there a lot of data security risk, it was hugely inefficient.

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As Helene got started on the long process of obtaining government permission to put cabling in to our heritage buildings, the team quickly realized that one of the biggest challenge in making our dream of having a solid technology backbone a reality was finding funding. Many donors with the ability to fund large-scale projects are institutions, such as foundations or corporations, and they often still have an unfavorable mindset towards administrative costs. The focus is on having as many dollars reach the direct clients as possible. We applaud this desire and believe in performance management focused on client outcomes. However, we also know that an underinvestment in people, systems and infrastructure can be detrimental to serving those same clients in the long-run.

The building of our technology infrastructure would not have been possible without the support of a corporate sponsor willing not only to invest in our vision, but also the means to get us there. The Macquarie Group Foundation were the first to invest in our project and enabled us to put in place the infrastructure to network our buildings together over a stable new fiber connection. By donating their resources, as well as their time and expertise, they not only made the project a reality, they mentored us through the vendor selection and solution design, upscaled our people, and gave their own staff opportunities to lead a different kind of project. Overall, it was a win-win for both corporate and non-profit.

A key decision in our IT journey was to focus our investments on just a few selective platforms and to build up our resources, knowledge, and capacity on those specific technologies. Using one common platform also allowed us to share data across departments, facilitating collaboration and synergies across the organization. In this respect, Salesforce was an obvious choice.

Even with funding, we will always be financially constrained, not only for the one-off project costs but also on running costs such as license fees. The Salesforce Foundation, their Pledge 1% model, which has inspired many other corporates to give their technology, people, and resources to improve communities around the world, and all the dedicated resources of their “Non Profit Starter Pack” (NPSP) enabled us to hit the ground running managing our donors and volunteers with very little initial investment. We are the fortunate recipients of discounted or free licenses of industry leading technology products that we would never have been able to consider if it were not for their generous programs for NGOs. Today, we use Salesforce to manage our services, clients, partners, donors and volunteers and most of our front line and support staff can oversee their department’s activities whilst “on the road” or “working from home”.

One of the first areas where we implemented Salesforce was in our fundraising and donor relations team. When Helene joined Mother’s Choice, all our donor information was on spreadsheets sitting on different colleagues’ desktops. If we had a change in personnel on the fundraising team and needed to raise funds, we would not have a reliable way to track who had given previously. Without a CRM and our community portal, it was impossible to keep up with, acknowledge and support all of our many valuable stakeholders. Now, we manage campaigns and track donor reporting to help us appreciate donors and appeal to them when our financial needs are greatest.

Another major investment in technology that we were able to make thanks to the Macquarie Group Foundation and PwC was to create a community portal to manage our volunteers. With over 450 of our volunteers coming to our Child Care Home each week, managing rosters and volunteer shifts was extremely challenging. The management of our volunteer program was highly manual. If a volunteer called in sick, our team would have to go down a hand-marked paper list to call each volunteer until they filled the shift. To enable us to administer volunteers more efficiently, we had to invest in technology to match and automate matching the right volunteers to the right volunteering shifts, based on their application status, their skillset and availability. We also needed to enable volunteers to self-report and self-manage any changes to their rosters.

Bringing together these two corporates, one as a sponsor and one as pro-bono implementation partner, we were able to multiply each of their individual corporate donations of resources and time, by developing together a volunteer community portal for a mere fraction of the retail cost. Our community portal today allows our volunteers to remotely update their personal details, sign up for shifts, apply for leave, and even complete online training. Our portal was put to the test over this summer as changing COVID-19 regulations required us to quickly change the number of volunteers we could welcome into our various buildings. We could not have managed through COVID without this technology.

Going from minimal technology to managing our operations in the cloud took many iterations. We had to seek out telecom specialists, IT vendors, sponsors and the invaluable time of subject matter experts volunteering their skill and expertise to piece the jigsaw together. Today, our four locations are networked together, and our remote connectivity solutions ensure that even when working from home, our highly sensitive data stays contained and secure. Even pre-pandemic, we invested in some failover technology recognizing that our services needed 24x7 availability. We tested this just recently when some of our hardware had to be repaired and our staff were able to continue their work undisturbed.

Although each non-profit operational model is different, in the past months and year as we have been tested with political unrest and the COVID-19 epidemic, we are reminded of these five key reasons why investing in IT should be a priority for all non-profits:

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1. We cannot shut down. Many non-profits provide critical services that cannot be shut down during inclement weather, global pandemics, or political unrest. Here in Hong Kong we have been reminded of this many times over the last 12-months (too many if you ask me!). We need to be able to intake teenaged clients who are in danger, homeless or at risk of self-harm, and our babies need to be fed whether the subway system is working or not. Like the rest of the world, we have gone to bare bones operations for brief periods during the pandemic. Our staff has faithfully continued to serve during each of the unexpected challenges of 2019–20. However, even during “lock-downs”, we need to continue to operate with the full force of our critical services from multiple locations. Having technology to roster staff, work remotely and communicate has been essential during this time.

2. By nature, our work is multi-location. Whether it is visiting a foster family, doing an intake at a hospital, accompanying a client to a court date or running a program at a local school, our staff perform their services all over the city. The locations for where our work happens are varied and constantly changing. We have leveraged the power of Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service. We are hugely thankful for our partnership with Microsoft and their support of NGOs through the TechSoup program. Also, using Salesforce as the repository of much of our data, we have developed customized processes, business logic and automation to help us manage our services more efficiently and from a phone or tablet. Customized logic reminds our frontline staff of required client assessments, pushes out reports, warns of overdue tasks and escalates issues even when they are not at their desks. Standardised service forms can be generated “on the fly”.

3. Our staff are highly specialized. In her new book “The Long Fix”, Dr. Vivian Lee says that one of the major challenges in improving outcomes in the US healthcare system is that highly specialized and trained doctors spend too much time on administrative work. Like in the medical profession, non-profits also have highly specialized and training professionals who are burdened by administrative tasks. By freeing their time from administrative burden, they can spend more time doing what they are trained to do, which is to serve our clients who have complex and rapidly evolving needs.

4. We have a LOT of stakeholders. For me, one of the biggest surprises coming from the corporate sector to non-profit is how many stakeholders non-profits have to manage. We are highly regulated by multiple departments of multiple governmental bureaus. We have to communicate and engage with thousands of donors and volunteers. We also have a huge group of service alumni who have spent part of their life as children or young girls at Mother’s Choice and want to stay connected. Non-profits are often so focused on raising desperately needed funds that things like investing in a CRM system is not even a priority. Many NGOs we speak with don’t have a reliable system and it is a huge opportunity lost at a time when every dollar counts.

5. We have to be versatile & nimble. Our services are constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of our clients and their communities. We innovate and seek out best practices to better our programs and grow their impact. To enable this, our technology platforms also need to be dexterous and nimble, allowing us to remain agile and to make changes swiftly whilst keeping our costs down. We are so grateful that many large corporates give back to non-profits like Mother’s Choice by donating not only their products at discounted rates, but many also donate the time of their IT experts to help with our data strategy and implementation of large IT investments.

Of course, none of the above could be possible without donors who share our belief in building capacity in non-profits and corporate partners and volunteers who come forward to lend their time and expertise to making our organization stronger. In particular, we are grateful for Macquarie Group Foundation, HKBN, Salesforce, QLik, PWC, CVC, ASUS, Microsoft, Litmos and many individual volunteers.

As we continue to build capacity in our own organization, we seek to “influence big” by sharing with others. Now that we have gone through this process, Helene is continually asked to speak to other non-profits to understand our journey, what was hard and what was easy. She is even asked by the technology companies or corporates who use these platforms to share our experience.

Helene’s decision to leave her job in investment banking for a job at a volunteer-based, “no IT” non-profit organization and ultimately bring us to a market leader position in leveraging technology, has been a gift to our organization and the thousands of children and young girls in crisis we will serve for years to come. We are reminded that people from a diversity of backgrounds can have tremendous impact in their communities. We continue to be humbled by our incredible volunteers with corporate IT backgrounds who spend their free time to help us implement major IT projects. At our annual dinner, some of the first items to be sponsored are the technology hardware and software items. We are so grateful to be on this journey along with all of our talented staff, volunteers and donors.

We are certainly not done yet. We are continuing to on-board our seven frontline services on to our electronic case management system. Our current process for service data collection needs optimizing and automation. We are in the process building a data visualization model (thanks to another talented IT volunteer) and hope to have greater transparency of data using dashboards for our frontline service workers, managers and board of directors.

In this new post-COVID era, non-profits need to invest in IT more than ever. We foresee that more services will need to be available online, whether it be programs, training, or fundraising. We are excited to leverage our past investment to do even more with the help of new social media and collaboration technologies, and we hope that you will consider helping your local NGOS invest in IT too.

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