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Last week, we shared a closer look at the foundation of the Nonprofit IT Pyramid, Access to Stable & Secure IT. To continue the biopic on our favorite framework, let’s take a look at an organization using IT at the second level of the pyramid, Optimize Service Delivery.

Optimize Service Delivery

Access to stable and secure technology is essential, but it is just the foundation upon which you can begin to use technology to expand your organization’s service delivery and community impact. In other words, it enables you to start doing really cool, mission-centric things with IT.

At the “Optimize” level, nonprofits use databases and relationship management software, collaboration and engagement tools, social media and fundraising solutions to help them become “bigger, stronger, faster.” (Or, in nonprofit terms, able to serve more clients with better services in a more efficient and effective way.) At this level, not only does your organization have access to the IT tools it needs, but it is savvy in how it deploys those tools to serve clients, integrate services, share institutional knowledge, and strengthen relationships with key stakeholders.

As abz* Austria illustrates, IT at this level is a business enabler and is increasingly an investment in mission, not just an infrastructure cost.

abz* Austria uses CRM software to match more women with jobs

abz* Austria is Austria’s leading women’s organization, and serves more than 3,000 women each year with career coaching, job orientation courses, and IT training to help them develop valuable skills sought by employers. Their long-term vision is to achieve gender equality in the labor market in Austria, but – as their client base grew – abz* faced near-term challenges. A majority of its employer contact information and trainee data were recorded on paper, which made coordinating service delivery ineffective and cumbersome. abz* realized its paper-based process of matching trainees with job opportunities had to go. It was not only limiting their growth, but it was also hampering the quality and professionalism of service they could offer to trainees and employers.

With their sights set on improved data management and service delivery processes, abz* implemented Client Relationship Management (CRM) software, allowing the organization to create one central database of current and past trainees, employers and jobs, and volunteer trainers. No more rifling through paper files, duplicate records, and walls of filing cabinets. The CRM system allowed them to quickly and easily index and sort the skills and certifications of thousands of trainees to help them find suitable employment opportunities. Now, abz* can get important information and job opportunities out to its trainees more efficiently, and can better identify quality matches between candidates and jobs. They are even able to better schedule and deploy their bench of volunteer trainers. The use of CRM allowed the organization to optimize its existing method of service delivery and to expand the reach of its services to more women in Austria.

“Having a database enables far more professional work,” said Daniela Schallert, the Executive Director of abz* Austria. Not only that, but now Daniela can demonstrate to her board the connection between technology and mission. The investment in CRM was an investment in effective program delivery with a direct impact on the organization’s ability to meet its mission.

Now that’s what we call optimizing service delivery.

More, more, more!

Watch the *abz video to hear directly from staff the impact CRM had on their service delivery. And come again next week - we'll look at how technology at the top of the pyramid can transform the way nonprofits take on social challenges.

As you make your way through this 4-part series, we hope the pyramid becomes an increasingly helpful framework to guide your own organization’s IT planning and discussions. It’s simple, but we think that’s what makes it so darn useful. Leave a comment and let me know what you think: Does your organization speak “pyramid?” Have you taken on IT projects that improved your service delivery?

You haven’t read the Nonprofit IT Pyramid paper yet? No wonder you're confused! Get the full story at http://bit.ly/npitpyramid

Part One in this series available here.
Part Three in this series available here.

Lindsay Bealko helps Microsoft Community Affairs put technology know-how in the hands of nonprofits through resources like webinars, NGO Connection Days, and software donations. With several years’ experience in the nonprofit sector, Lindsay understands the unique challenges and opportunities nonprofits face when trying to adopt technology to help them meet their missions. She sometimes tweets at @linzbilks.

In the near future when I drive up to a village in Africa, although the roads may be bumpy and dusty, I will see a woman using a tablet PC powered by the latest renewable energy source and connected to the internet giving her information on sustainable and locally proven farming techniques and providing immediate access to market prices for her products. The same tablet will be used by her children to download the latest curricula and other educational content to help them with their homework. This is a vision of Technology and Development that Dr. Raj Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) painted last week during an inspiring talk in Seattle.

Organized by Global Washington, the theme of the panel discussion was Technology’s Impact on Global Development. Attended by over 400 people at St. Mark’s Cathedral – a wonderful venue in the Capital Hill neighborhood - panelists included Congressmen Jim McDermott, Congressmen Adam Smith, Professor Prema Arasu from Washington State University, Dr. Chris Elias with PATH, and myself. Moderated by Sylvia Matthews Burwell from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a recurring theme was how do we continue to support global development activities in the current economic climate?

The panelists shared thoughts on the importance of global aid and development and posited that technology does have a role to play to drive effective adoption and spur new innovations. There was broad agreement that we must find new ways of working on the development of innovative models to reach the poor as we continue to figure out the best way to achieve the vision that Dr. Shah so vividly painted. Clearly we all also understood that technology is not a panacea, noting that while a woman in the most remote village may have a cell phone to make a call, if there is no one at the other end to take the call and provide the needed services, the phone becomes useless. This was the point Dr. Elias made to highlight the importance of effective delivery systems combined with content, services and other infrastructure that are local in nature and support local development.

We at Microsoft believe in the power of technology to drive social innovation and change and we have seen this demonstrated in many ways around the world. However we also recognize that unless we have local solutions to local problems no amount of technology will truly benefit the poor. Therefore we work in partnership with effective local organizations, global NGOs and development agencies such as USAID to ensure we have the right partnership model to drive local innovation with the power to scale outside of the immediate local context.

As much as we should be cautious of technology playing too dominant a role in solutions we also should not be afraid of technology and must put processes in place that help drive local innovation. To bring about meaningful and long lasting change that lifts people out of poverty and addresses the fundamental factors that lead new generations into poverty, we have to rethink our approach to go beyond investing in transactional efforts to those that can become transformational. This will mean taking risks and learning from failures and I personally applaud the new approaches proposed by USAID to truly assess the impact of their programs and share successes as well as failures. As Congressmen Jim McDermott reminded us in his concluding remarks; it is easy to see a glass half empty – but when you see the glass half full, you focus on the potential to fill up that glass. Right now we must collectively invest in realizing this potential and appropriate recognize the positive impact of technology in that effort.

Working at Microsoft, I’m fully aware of the amazing things that people can do with technology and the impact that it can have, but every now and then, my knowledge is taken to new depths – literally!

The Octopus Deep-Sea Archeology Research Association has a long history of successful discoveries of treasures hidden deep in the ocean. They have identified and explored several shipwrecks in different regions. During these projects there is a huge amount of data and images created, but until recently, they had not figured out how to effectively manage all this information. 

When members of the Octopus Association first contacted Microsoft, they asked for a donation of Windows Server 2003. However, after assessing their needs and seeing the sheer volume of photos, videos and data that they had to handle, we quickly realized that there were other ways that Microsoft technology could help. Following a number of additional meetings to better understand their specific requirements, Microsoft Hungary donated software valued at over $30,000, featuring products such as SharePoint, Silverlight and Photosynth.

Along with the software, we worked with the Association to use technology that could bring the work of the archeologists into the living room of people everywhere. One of the most spectacular solutions that the Octopus Association are using is Photosynth, which enables them to combine different photos of an object to produce a 3D image. Below you can see two interesting examples. One showcases a wine bottle, the other one a sculpture, both on the exact location where they were found. Click on the images to view the Photosynth.

Besides photos, the Octopus Association discovered that videos could be shared as well, using Microsoft Silverlight technology. These interactive multimedia elements will be introduced in a virtual online museum that is planned to be launched within a year. The museum will use embedded accessibility tools to ensure that the visually impaired can experience their work also.

Helping to share the results of the Association’s discoveries with a wider audience is only a small fraction of our support of the Octopus Association. One of the most important changes was helping them to transfer their organization's portal to SharePoint, since this technology is ideal for collecting and sharing data created at geographically disparate locations, which is of course regular practice in the Association’s work.  

Moreover, through some help from Microsoft's system engineers, the IT manager of Octopus created a solution to enhance the transfer of information on new finds to historians, archaeologists and researchers involved in the projects, all over the world.

Using SharePoint has made research administration very efficient, as opposed to the former, paper based solution, making tasks such as bulk inquiries and filters much more efficient.   Not only are archaeological records entered into the database, but divers' logs are linked to these data.  In the case of any potential deviations, the system initiates an alarm.  The software can calculate this by comparing current and historic data, and is able to alarm the team leader in time, before any issue might arise.

Members of Octopus also exploit the advantages of Windows 7's security functions.  The Association’s IT manager is a big fan of Windows 7 networking, search, data management and display functionality.  He believes that the management of data communications is significantly faster in Windows 7, while less user interaction is required for frequently used functions.

Because our Microsoft team closely follows the Association, to provide technical and professional assistance, I have managed to learn a great deal about their work.  I’m proud and pleased to have experienced the excitement of working on this project and amazed once again to learn that there are a vast number of creative ways to use Microsoft's technologies.  This gives new meaning to my understanding of Unlimited Potential and where we might go from here.

Bernadette Szilagyi

Microsoft Hungary Unlimited Potential Program manager

Last week in our post, Demystifying Nonprofit IT Adoption and Innovation, we introduced you to the Nonprofit IT Pyramid. We love pyramids; particularly this one (I’m not kidding). Not only does it help us understand how nonprofits approach technology, but it also helps us focus our resources and programming to best meet the needs of nonprofits. The Nonprofit IT Pyramid just makes sense to us; we can only hope that you will come to find this pyramid as useful a framework as we do.

To this end, we want to give you a closer look at the pyramid by sharing an example of a nonprofit using IT at each level. In this post, we’ll focus on Access to Stable & Secure IT, but in future posts, we’ll take on Optimize Service Delivery, Transform, and – finally – a case study of one nonprofit’s journey up the pyramid. By the time we’re done, we hope you’ll be bona fide pyramid lovers like us!

Access to Stable & Secure Technologies

As we shared last week, the foundation of the Nonprofit IT Pyramid is all about access to stable and secure technologies. Organizations need stable and secure IT to accomplish day-to-day tasks: functional hardware, tech support, e-mail, Internet access, and productivity software, for starters. This level also includes the need for policies and procedures to promote proper IT use and ensure that your data – some of your nonprofit’s most valuable assets – are safe and secure. ‘Round here, we collectively refer to technologies in the foundation as “infrastructure.” (Then again, we’re kind of geeky.)

Next time you are considering a new IT project, ask yourself: “Do we have a stable and secure IT foundation?” If not, it may be worth focusing on this level first, which is exactly what the Freestore Foodbank did.

The Freestore Foodbank stabilizes its IT platform to boost productivity

The Freestore Foodbank is the third largest food bank in Ohio and the largest emergency social services outlet for the greater Cincinnati area. We were first introduced to them when they participated in (and were a winner of!) our Show Your Impact contest with our partner, TechSoup Global. The food bank provides food resources for 450 agencies in 20 counties, serving 160,000 individuals a year. In 2008, they delivered 85,090 meals at 12 different sites through their Kids Café program. Freestore’s vision is to be the leader of a community mobilized to end hunger and address its root causes.

With scale and ambition like this, it’s plain to see why stable and secure technology is critical to Freestore’s operation. But the agency’s technology was in such disarray that the staff was having a hard time accomplishing simple day-to-day tasks, much less expanding their services or realizing the vision. In their words, “The servers were old, the software was ancient, and no one had the same version of software. It was difficult to share files between sites let alone between computers, as well as send things out to donors, board members, or anyone asking for information.”

Freestore’s leadership knew they had to get the foundation of the organization’s IT pyramid in better shape so they could give staff the tools they needed. When IT is not working well, not only does staff productivity suffer, but so too will staff morale. The food bank invested in infrastructure: they standardized software across the agency, upgraded servers and hardware to reduce downtime, started central file back-up, and created a disaster recovery plan. As they said, “[It was] a monumental task given our small budget [and] limited resources, but definitely one that had to happen for the vitality and growth of the organization.”

As a result of the upgrades, the staff is more productive, client files are shared more efficiently, and Freestore can more confidently start planning IT projects at the next level of the pyramid. The stable and secure technology foundation has Freestore Foodbank well-positioned for ongoing IT success.

Can’t Get Enough?

Neither can we! Read more about Freestore’s IT makeover at www.showyourimpact.org/raising-bar. Ready to start your own IT makeover? Bring the Nonprofit IT Pyramid and discussion questions to your next staff meeting to start a discussion about the state of IT at your organization. Or tune in next time to read the next installment of our nonprofit pyramid love affair. Either way, we can’t wait.

Just want more pyramid, like, NOW? We understand. Read the full paper: http://bit.ly/npitpyramid

Part Two of this series is available here.

Lindsay Bealko has, for the past three years, been helping Microsoft Community Affairs put technology know-how in the hands of NGOs through resources like webinars, NGO Connection Days, and software donations. Having spent several years in the nonprofit sector prior to her work for Microsoft, Lindsay understands the unique challenges and opportunities nonprofits face when trying to adopt technology to help them meet their missions. She tweets (occasionally) at @linzbilks.