Forum Discussion
Question for small nonprofits
If you work for a small (5-20 people) nonprofit or charity organisation, what types of information are you capturing using Excel spreadsheets (or paper)?
This might include your volunteers, program participants, donors, assets, clients, etc. What other data are you managing?
Have you tried finding off-the-shelf solutions to help you with managing it?
We capture lots of information in Excel (e.g., applicants, reviewers, scores, recipients, grants, projects, donors, partners, budgets, ...) as we currently do not have a database. And most data is not centralized. Most of the current work revolves around consolidating and cleaning our data assets, and creating proper documentation to support quality reporting.
We are modernizing our SharePoint and looking for other MS tools (e.g., List, PowerQuery) that will help create a single source of truth and improve our efficiency. Off-the-shelf solutions are my recommendation to my organization as we continue to operate with a lean budget. One challenge remains that we do not have a dedicated IT team or MS expert to call upon when we have questions or when a quick implementation would be needed. Networking and meeting people who have those technical skills has been key! :)
Hi Matt,
I am working with a small 20 person org and we have looked at off-the -shelf options and haven't found one that really satisfies our needs here. We are finding that building those missing pieces in power apps is going to be our long term solution. We have also been able to use power apps to help mange QA across a couple disparate systems that previously we struggled to generate a QA process between. We have chased a couple line of business apps and can't find solutions that fill all the check boxes.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing.
Out of interest, are you creating these as small standalone canvas apps? Are you using Dataverse or SharePoint as the db storage?
- Brandon_Antoine
Microsoft
Hey MattBurr
This is an interesting topic. While I don’t run a nonprofit myself, I’ve worked with many small nonprofits. Initially, many lacked infrastructure and some relied on standard applications like Word and Excel. We introduced solutions like OneDrive and SharePoint for file and data management, and Microsoft Teams for communication. A few nonprofits also used Dynamics 365 CRM for data management. It would be exciting to hear how other nonprofits manage their data.
Sincerely,
Brandon Antoine
Microsoft Consultant - Nonprofit Tech Acceleration Program
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