Shiny New Nonprofit Technology? Don’t Forget the Batteries!

Ah, your organization has just upgraded to a shiny new nonprofit technology system. The staff has been learning how to use it, you’ve made sure everyone has access, and you’re excited to reap all the benefits this new system can offer. Once you’ve unwrapped the package and started playing, it’s easy to become so enamored with your new toy you forget that you need to have batteries on hand for the future.

In this case, the “batteries” are the ongoing upgrades and maintenance of your system. Many nonprofits choose to bring in a company like BackOffice Thinking for this kind of support, to make sure things keep running smoothly and reduce the risk of hacking opportunities. What a smart move! We enjoy changing the batteries, and you get to “set it and forget it,” right? Well, mostly.

Yes, your technology will run pretty smoothly if you do your thing and your support provider does theirs. The organization staff gets to play with the toys every day and make decisions accordingly. Your support provider is taking care of things behind the scenes that only they are going to know. When the two don’t communicate, the toy is bound to have some preventable problems.

Let’s say your organization is running a big capital campaign. Your CRM, website and forms are all set and ready. You have a hugely successful morning kickoff fundraiser and you get slammed with a large number of donations. Yay! And uh-oh, your website can’t handle that much traffic so it crashes.

You scramble to call in support, they get the website back up ASAP, and make sure it can handle the influx from here. Now that they know about this campaign, they’ve made a few other changes to make sure everything runs smoothly throughout.

Meanwhile, the time your support provider took to get it all fixed and do preventative maintenance has racked up extra charges and you lost donations because the website crashed. Does it have to be this way? While there are a few unforeseeable challenges that may come along, there are so many more that can be prevented. That’s why we prefer to build partnerships with our clients.

Partnership is the key to healthy technology.

Yes, regular check-ins to communicate might cost a little more over time, but that’s still cheaper and way less stressful than a breakdown. When you think of your support provider as a partner, they will be able to put processes in place you didn’t know existed.

Here are some things we recommend for partnering with your support provider:

• Put a quarterly check-in on the calendar.
• Share with your provider any upcoming campaigns, changes in staff, things you’d like to improve, and things that have worked well.
• When you are considering structural changes to your technology, check in with your support provider to see if they have any input.
• Ask your support provider for training when there is something you don’t know how to do. Even a 15 minute call with your support provider can prevent a problem because you didn’t have to find a workaround.

Communicating regularly with your support provider and thinking of them as your partner will help avoid needing them to save the day. Just like you have staff meetings to make sure everyone knows the big picture of what’s going on, your outside support also needs that big picture. Around here, we love check-ins with our clients. We always find something we can do to help, which means there’s less chance of things falling apart later. Don’t have a support provider yet? Contact Us for Ongoing Support.