Volunteers are hard to find, even more so since the COVID pandemic. Formal volunteering in Australia has fallen from around 36% of people in 2019 to about 28% today, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Time is precious everywhere, but not-for-profits in particular can’t afford to have their volunteers and staff lose hours to manual admin tasks that could and should easily be handled by automated processes and a capable system. And since costs are a concern for not-for-profits everywhere, the good news is that grants exist to help fund exactly this kind of long-term investment.
If your team is manually re-entering donor or member details between systems, if volunteers are calling because your event sign-up page can’t handle a simple booking, or if “we’ve always done it this way” is the only reason a process or system still exists, it might be time to explore custom software. Here are some tips on how to judge if your organisation is ready to upgrade.
The first sign: you’re building workarounds
When off-the-shelf software fails, nobody sends a memo saying “this system doesn’t fit anymore.” Instead, staff and volunteers start keeping side spreadsheets, building shared documents to track what the membership, volunteer application or donor systems can’t, or finding workarounds that often only a few people know.
If you add up every workaround your team has built to navigate your current system, how much extra time are they spending on those? And how much extra time and resource would it take to explain all of them to a new starter or volunteer, and for this new person to apply them confidently?
Workarounds are a system telling you it needs evolving or rethinking. In a sector already short on resources, every hour lost is an hour of precious time wasted that they could use to do something more meaningful.
The second sign: growth is capped by admin, not demand
If you doubled your memberships, volunteer applications or events and activities, would your admin overhead double too? For a lot of not-for-profits, the honest answer is yes, or worse. That’s a sign the system is scaling with headcount instead of absorbing the load itself.
Custom software for not-for-profits should do the opposite. Growth should mean more members served or more good done, not more people needed just to keep the lights on, and not more hours asked of volunteers who are already stretched thin.
The third sign: reporting eats a day a week
Funder and grant reporting, board reporting, ACNC compliance, member and donor records. Not-for-profits carry more reporting obligations than many other sectors, and generic software offers generic reporting. If someone on your team has to pretty much disappear for a day every month to wrestle spreadsheets into a report, it’s a sign of a system issue rather than a resourcing problem.
So, is it time? A three-question check
- Are staff or volunteers maintaining a shadow system, a spreadsheet, a notebook, a shared inbox, because the real one can’t do the job?
- Would doubling your memberships, volunteer applications or activities mean adding admin headcount in the same proportion?
- Does reporting take structured software minutes, or does it take a person a day?
Two or three yeses, and it’s worth a proper look. One, and your current system probably just needs an adjustment, not a rebuild. Either way, it’s a better question to answer now than after the third workaround becomes permanent.
Ready when you are
We’ve spent ten years building the membership, volunteer and reporting systems WA not-for-profits run on. See how one of them got on in our Volunteering WA case study. If any of this sounds familiar, get in touch for a straightforward and open conversation to assess where you’re at, and whether custom software might be the right next step, so the people who show up for your cause spend their time on exactly that, not on wrangling manual admin tasks.