By Sean Watson, Nonprofit Technology Consultant, TechEffect

Your database doesn't track the date of your organization's last communication with a donor, and many of them aren't donating because they never hear from you. Meanwhile half of your donors are unsubscribing from mailing lists because they hear from you too often. Does this situation sound familiar?

Creating and maintaining a quality relationship with each and every donor is essential to increasing revenue. The selection of quality technology systems is a very important piece of managing those relationships, but equally important is how your team uses the technology. Through continual improvement of your organizational processes, you can harness the technology to be more productive, even in the face of functionality flaws in your systems.

What is Technology Process Improvement?

Technology Process Improvement (TPI) is the practice of analyzing your team's technology-based processes, identifying how those processes can be improved, and implementing changes to make those improvements. That sounds like a lot, but is actually nothing more than identifying, tracking, and making small changes to your daily work. When you're working in Excel, and go looking for a function to do a three-step process in one step, you are doing TPI. All we're going to do now is add a little structure – and do it as a team.

Preparing for Technology Process Improvement

There are a few principles that set the context for your practice of process improvement. While these are absolutely common sense, they are not common practice. Keep a continual focus on these principles and you will substantially increase the likelihood of successful improvements.

PRINCIPLE 1: People First, Tech Second

If you've attempted to implement any new technology system, you already know that Principle 1 is not just a suggestion, but an imperative. If you focus on fitting your world to technology, your staff will become disillusioned, your donors will become disconnected, and your revenue will dwindle.

We all know this, but it sneaks in on us in ways we don't expect. In the heat of hour three of meeting 20 to choose a new database system, we begin to drop important needs so that the system we like becomes the correct system to use. If you allow that to happen, I promise you, you will regret it for years until you finally abandon the system and go searching again. When choosing a system that you will use daily, for years or even decades, several months of deliberation is a small price to pay for long term happiness and productivity.

PRINCIPLE 2: Keep Everyone in the Loop

The undisputed champion of technology project failure is poor user adoption. It's the 500-pound gorilla that will pick up your entire server rack, throw it out the window, and crush your nice new electric car siting below.* Unless you want an entire troop of gorillas fighting you every step of the way, thoroughly involve your team in every part of the process analysis and decision-making. Let them voice their input and objections, and have influence over the process. They need to know that you value their opinions, and are truly concerned about meeting their needs.

*Note: gorillas = yet another reason to move to a cloud-based system

PRINCIPLE 3: Start with a Focus on Specific Needs When Improving Technology

Whether you are working to improve your existing technology systems, or bring in new ones, the first step is always looking at your needs. Even if you think you're covered because "we already did this last year", review those needs and update your listing of them. The world moves fast and we develop new needs on a weekly basis. Your organization's needs from last year will be 25-75% inaccurate for this year, I guarantee it.

Technology Process Improvement in a Nutshell

Two Clear Business Goals

• Continually Improve the Quality of Relationships with Stakeholders
• Create Quality Relationships with New Stakeholders

Part One: 6 Step Cycle for Process Improvement

• Identify A Process (work on one at a time)
• Review the Process in Detail (cover all the angles: who, what, when, where, why, how)
• Identify Areas for Improvement (look for repetitious, annoying, and boring tasks)
• Make One Change at a Time (this ensures you can identify improvement or decline)
• Measure Results of Change (improvement = do more, decline = change approach)
• Return to Step 1 with a new Process

Note: After you get the hang of it, you can begin working on multiple processes simultaneously. But don't overdue it or you will move from science to pseudo-science and results will become chaotic and unpredictable.

Part Two: 5 Steps for Mapping Data

When mapping data, be sure to keep a narrow focus based on type of stakeholder, time period, and/or type of interaction. So for example, you might look at Phone Calls with Donors or Members from 2010. Data is constantly changing, and creating a complete map of your entire data ecosystem can be overwhelming. Work on one system at a time. Once you have all the major data sources mapped, you will start to see the bigger picture. For each focus area:

• Identify Contact Points - Make a list of all places/times/situations/etc when and where your team interacts with stakeholders.
• Identify Data - Make a list of all data that is tracked, or needs to be tracked, related to the contact points you identified in Step 1.
• Identify Lifecycle of Data - Make a drawing representing the lifecycle of your data from creation, through different rounds of editing, to archive, to deletion. (Yes, you should delete data at some point!)
• Identify Outputs and Outcomes - Make a list of the outputs you want and the details you need – remember, don't include things that are nice-to-haves, only the need-to-haves – every piece of data adds to your workload exponentially.
• Review Data Systems Annually - At least once every year at a minimum, review your data and the processes for managing it. This can be quick and easy; don't make it harder than it needs to be.

Conclusion

Through the careful and considered application of the processes described above, you can increase your team's effectiveness with people, while also increasing efficiency and productivity. Now that you have a framework to operate from, get started by remembering these final points:

START SMALL, CELEBRATE OFTEN!

• START – Improvement is about trial and error. Stop planning and start doing!

• SMALL – Start with small processes that are not complex and involve simple technology. After you get some quick victories under your belt, your team will be ready to take on bigger challenges. A group might start with the processes around their Excel sheet for event coordination, and then progress towards the processes for managing members in your enterprise database system.

• CELEBRATE – Clearly measure your improvement work and ensure you know improvement when you see it. When improvement comes, celebrate it as a team.

• OFTEN – Improvement is a never-ending journey of continual victories, if you choose to make it so. Make sure your team takes on at least three processes every month – including occasional improvement of your process improvement process!

Sean Watson is a nonprofit technology consultant and owner of TechEffect, a technology firm that provides technology planning, assistance, and support to nonprofit organizations. He focuses on supporting small and medium sized nonprofits in harnessing the power of technology to maximize their effectiveness, efficiency, and results.