Question for small nonprofits

As a small nonprofit, we rely primarily on Excel spreadsheets and, occasionally, paper forms to manage key information, including volunteer records, donor details, program participant data, attendance, grant deadlines, reporting requirements, asset inventories, and basic monitoring and evaluation data. Working in low-connectivity and conflict-affected areas, spreadsheets are the most practical way to capture and share information, even though they can lead to duplication, inconsistent data, and extra work when preparing reports.

We have explored off-the-shelf nonprofit data-management systems, but most are either beyond our budget or require technical capacity that our small team cannot yet support. For now, Excel remains our most flexible and practical tool, despite its limitations.

I work with about a dozen non-profit organizations, the bulk of which are faith-based organizations. We have begun to utilize Planner as a way to categorize and gain more value out of the dozens of Excel workbooks that the organization has created over the years. M365 Copilot for Excel along with M365 Copilot helps with the Planner content too, but it's still difficult to manage without having to completely write a custom App to do all of this work. I have not yet tried to layer in Dynamics CRM for data management, but that sounds like it could be useful. 

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.

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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