Does the way you manage your participants look anything like this?

If it does, you’re not alone and the good news is that you can make things better. But first, let’s get into the reasons why juggling several systems should be on your nonprofit’s risk register.

Reason 1: Information stored in spreadsheets goes missing very easily

Nonprofits usually start out with a spreadsheet for two reasons; spreadsheets are easy to create and most people know how to update them, even if only in a basic way. This means that they’re a great choice when you're launching your nonprofit and you need a way to start organising your participants. However the ease with which spreadsheets can be updated is also their biggest downfall.

Have you ever had any of these things happen to your spreadsheet?

• Someone enters information in the wrong format, e.g. they spell a number instead of entering the digit

• A formula breaks because information is in the wrong format

• Information gets lost because someone has accidentally deleted a cell or cut some information that they were meant to copy

Data validation (i.e. checking that information is in the correct format) is difficult within a spreadsheet because spreadsheets were designed to make data analysis easy, rather than to organise information. Data analysts are typically advanced spreadsheet users. They’re able to take advantage of the freedom to manipulate data and flexibility to create calculations that spreadsheets offer.

But when you’re using a spreadsheet to record attendance or track beneficiaries, you’re not using this powerful tool for the purpose it was designed. As a result, your data will often need to be ‘cleaned’, i.e. checked for inaccuracies and inconsistencies, and this ultimately costs your nonprofit in time, and potentially reputation or worse in the event that something goes wrong as a result of staff not having the correct information to hand.

Reason 2: You don’t have a Single Source of Truth

A source of truth is anything that holds information about the people you work with, for example a spreadsheet, a database or an online form. When you have several systems that store overlapping information about the same person you get into difficulty whenever information about that person is updated. If it’s updated in one place and not updated in all the others, you introduce inconsistencies. For example,

• Different staff spelling someone’s name differently or using a person’s nickname rather than their first name

• A change in address or phone number

When one system says one thing about a person’s name and the other system says the other, you need to know which one is telling the truth. That’s where a Single Source of Truth comes in. One of your systems needs to be responsible for maintaining the latest up-to-date record for each person so that there’s one place to go to confirm their name spelling or latest address.

When you use several systems within your nonprofit, this becomes almost impossible, especially when using older software that doesn’t speak to other systems. The downside is that the inconsistencies in information cause staff to lose confidence in the accuracy of the data they’re working with. That means that they need to spend longer double-checking information to avoid making mistakes. This reduces their efficiency and slows down your service delivery. Ultimately it’s your beneficiaries who lose out because time that would have been invested in working with them directly is instead spent manually checking that the information in your systems is correct.

Reason 3: You miss out on the funding your work deserves

Do you know the average amount of time it takes your beneficiaries to achieve an outcome?

Would you like to know whether that amount of time differs depending on the outcome being achieved, or whether it’s affected by factors such as a person’s gender, postcode or caseworker?

When your information is stored in separate places, getting answers to these questions (or indeed any monitoring or evaluation question that asks about your impact) becomes stressful, difficult and time-consuming. You have to download information from one place, copy it across to another and hope that everything is accurate and up-to-date. You end up being unable to provide robust impact data; and when your funders are savvy, they notice.

Trusts, foundations and commissioners want to see the impact of the grants and contracts they award. They want to be confident that you’re making a difference, which means that they need you to provide information that goes beyond positive anecdotes, success stories and case studies. If you’re unable to convince them that your work makes a quantifiable impact, your chances of receiving follow-on funding or securing new funding in the first place will be reduced.

What can you do about it?

Rather than spending time and money on several systems, you can consolidate your service delivery and project operations into just one platform. This is what organisations like Vintage Vibes, Plus Forth Valley, SHiFT and The Reach Foundation have achieved using Makerble® Impact Platform.

Inspire yourself with what’s possible by reading their case studies and see just how easy it is to switch your organisation over from several separate systems to one holistic platform. You’ll reduce your charity’s risk, improve your organisation’s data security and increase your nonprofit’s likelihood of securing funding.