Not-for-profit organizations come in different sizes and strengths. However, when it comes to IT investment, they all share a common concern: “Will IT help me cut down my administration cost and maximize the percentage of our spending on our ultimate objectives?"
From the technology perspective, one of the important reasons for increasing administrative costs is the increasing cost of manual processes. In many associations the administrative cost has to do with unproductive manual operations. Let us take the case of the membership details. Invariably, a significant portion of an association’s member information such as postal address, phone numbers, subscription details, etc is out of date. Since all updates are done manually, it results in time gaps. The members are required to fax, mail, or call-in changes and the association staff have to then manually key in the changes. The associations and their members incur cost just to update a set of data.
In the traditional setup, communication cost accounts for over half the administrative budget. The associations going the print way incur 80 per cent more cost on account of communication compared to a Web-enabled event management process. Many associations realize that the total communication cost for regular events of office bearers or members continue to go up with shooting up of mailing cost, paper and printing cost, labels, and postage cost. Tech savvy members are "punished" to bear the communication cost and manual efforts to mail back, re-confirm and ensure the receipt of their registration.
The case of the associations-with-computers is little different. With stand-alone desktops, member information is kept in multiple databases for different purposes. These "computerized islands of information" with unlinked databases, make the cost and effort of exchanging data no better than the typical manual process.
The key to reduce the administrative cost lies not in computers but in portals that represent cost-effectiveness, convenience, and transparency.
In an association scenario, portals provide a wide range of options for facilitating interaction between the members, streamlining and reducing staff workloads, while ensuring financial momentum.
Interaction between members
Interaction is the hallmark and a true measure of the success of portals. Portals come with widely-recognized and user friendly interactive features such as:
• Subscriptions to Email updates/newsletters
• Online surveys and polls
• Bulletin boards and chat rooms
• Feedback and comment forms.
Portals enable the members to create and view the association tasks from anywhere in the world. The association members can have role-based access to view the tasks, such as conferences, events, and trade shows etc and other important databases and update their profile or upload the files and renew the subscription.
With Portals the associations can conduct polls, publish announcements, communicate the event details and importantly provide Discussion Forums that acts as a media for the members to share their ideas.
Streamlining and reducing staff workloads
Portals equipped with content management software help the organization to be more responsive to changing situations and cut down the staff cost in administration increase decentralized decision-making and importantly, motivate the staff by being responsive to the members suggestions.
Portals with document management and database software can provide a holistic, closed-loop system through which staff could solicit feedback from members following any interaction with them. Using its comprehensive membership/subscription management system, the staff can easily record all members, prospect contacts and resolution information.