NPower is power to the nonprofit
BY CHRISTOPHER GERGEN AND STEPHEN MARTIN
Driven by their urgent mission to provide affordable housing but saddled with many manual administrative tasks, executives at Habitat for Humanity of Charlotte paused several years ago to pose a critical question: Would stronger information technology make their organization stronger as a whole?
The nonprofit turned for help to NPower Charlotte Region, which conducted a comprehensive assessment of Habitat's current set-up and offered a clear answer to its question: Absolutely yes.
"That was a turning point for Habitat as an organization," recalls Meg Robertson, an associate director there. "We'd never really strategically looked at our technology needs. We'd never been intentional about it."
When it comes to technology, that scattershot approach placed Habitat among the vast majority of nonprofits. Often unable to fund IT staffs large enough to handle their needs, nonprofits string together whatever support they can find.
Sometimes it's a contractor who stops by once a month. Other times, it's one or two full-time IT specialists. That works well - until they try to take a vacation. The cost of scrimping on IT adds up, in the form of outdated processes, lost productivity and missed opportunities for organizations that, in these tight economic times, have little margin for error.
As a nonprofit IT consulting firm that serves fellow nonprofits exclusively, NPower Charlotte Region offers a welcome alternative. Part of a national network of eight firms that started in Seattle in 1999 and has been funded significantly by Microsoft, NPower launched in Charlotte in 2003. With a staff of about two-dozen full- and part-time employees, it has served more than 100 nonprofits of all sizes in the region.
Its work runs the gamut, from strategic consulting to managed services in which it acts as a full-service IT department for clients, as well as providing free technology seminars and private IT coaching sessions. Last year, NPower Charlotte's revenue reached $2 million - providing its services for about half the price of for-profit IT firms.
With a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support shared technology solutions for nonprofits, NPower recently built a new volunteer management system for Habitat, Carolina Raptor Center in Huntersville and Classroom Central, which equips students with free school supplies.
The technology makes paperless approaches that previously were highly manual and fragmented. It provides a central database of all Habitat volunteers, the professional and civic organizations with which they're affiliated, and whether they are donors. Just as significantly, it allows volunteers to sign up for construction shifts virtually.
The impact is far-reaching. Previously, Robertson says, it was difficult to know which volunteers were also donors, complicating targeted fundraising outreach. Because Habitat didn't have complete information on the various affiliations of its donors, matching grant funds that reside in various corporations and civic groups were often overlooked.
Without a uniform sign-up process, it was also difficult to project how many volunteers would show up at a site. So Habitat struggled to assign the appropriate number of staffers to specific projects, creating considerable inefficiencies.
"This system is transformational in terms of improving our business processes," Robertson says.
And it's being shared with Habitat for Humanity International as a potential model for affiliates everywhere.
In the months ahead, Habitat will start measuring its impact more precisely. In the meantime, through the Foundation for the Carolinas' Catalyst Fund, NPower is also exploring options for shared technology services that would benefit eight other Habitat affiliates in the Charlotte region.
Jane McIntyre got to know Chris Meade, NPower's executive director, in the early 2000s as CEO of YWCA Central Carolinas, where she brought in NPower Charlotte to run its IT services. Now executive director of United Way of Central Carolinas, McIntyre hired NPower to handle all of its IT work as well. Together, they have mapped out a strategic IT plan and secured more than $200,000 worth of free software through a Microsoft grant, diverting the resulting savings toward much-needed hardware upgrades.
Earlier this year, the groups grew even closer when NPower moved its offices onto the third floor of United Way's building in uptown Charlotte. The three-year, $150,000 lease gives NPower the larger working area and events space it needed and moves it closer to many clients. The lease payments, meanwhile, help United Way plow more of its funds back into the community.
It's a fitting partnership, McIntyre says, between two organizations whose missions are to build the region's nonprofit capacity, while modeling the collaboration it takes to realize them.
About the Authors:Christopher Gergen is the founding executive director of Bull City Forward, a member of the faculty of the Hart Leadership Program at Duke University, and co-author of Life Entrepreneurs. Stephen Martin, a former business and education journalist, is a speechwriter at the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership.
Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/08/07/1394089/npower-is-power-to-the-nonprofit.html#ixzz1URDcvzEl