It’s the end of the year and now is a good time to reflect on your organisation’s progress and plan how you want to develop in the new year. Of course you want to achieve your business objectives, get more clients / customers / donors, get more ROI in your marketing, and all the good stuff.
But have you considered refreshing your digital systems and processes? That system that is buggy and bugging you. Work that gets held up at the same point each time. Team not communicating as effectively as they could…
January can be a good time to go next level with your digital technology and make some great changes to head towards digital success for the coming year.
Be open to change
There are always things you can do to improve your systems and processes, but more importantly, you need to be open to explore the possibilities and to actually implement change. There are many reasons why people don’t change. Here are some common ones:
- Too comfortable with what they know.
- Don’t consider there might be another way to do things.
- Scared of technology and scared of change.
- Resistant to try anything new.
- Don’t think they have enough time.
- Expect that it will be too costly.
Go paperless
If you have been creating and receiving invoices by hand, here is an easy upgrade. There are many systems that help capture invoices with the click of a phone camera. Grab a receipt management app for scanning receipts and creating invoices such as Expensify, Shoeboxed, Receipts by Wave and Dropbox’s new app Doc Scanner.
Lose the spreadsheet
Whether it’s a membership, project management or financial data, it’s time to lose the spreadsheet. Having important data in a single file on a single PC is asking for trouble. It is very easy to lose your data if it is not backed up properly, and then you have the problem of version control (multiple versions of a file) being emailed back and forth in many locations and with many filenames – yuck! At the very least, find a good online cloud spreadsheet like Google Sheets, Zoho Sheet, Airtable or SmartSheet. These cloud spreadsheet software are good for generic spreadsheets. But you will probably do even better going to specific cloud software for membership systems, project management or finance. For ideas, just Google “2018 best cloud software” and the type of platform you’re interested in. Specific cloud software will have lots of useful features that generic spreadsheets cannot do.
Direct your team communication
There are so many ways to communicate these days; email, SMS, messenger apps, phone, face to face. You probably use a combination of these methods. You want to be flexible with your customers and clients but you have more control over how you can communicate with team members. The opportunity to bring your internal communications into a single system like Slack and Fleep helps to reduce email significantly, integrate nicely with other file systems we use and trail through threads of conversations and find past conversations and comments much more easily. In our workplace, our team has learned to embrace this communication and saved a lot of time overall.
Design your digital strategy
There are many ways to improve your online systems, each requiring different amounts of energy returning different results. But the most effective and value-adding technological advance you can make is to design a digital strategy to support the objectives for your business and team. Instead of tinkering here and there or tacking on systems in an ad hoc manner, a digital strategy provides clarity for your business’ priorities and a clear roadmap to implement successfully. If you have not considered this before or don’t know where to start, then we would be happy to start a conversation with you.
