Non-profit organizations often find themselves stuck between balancing their goodwill efforts, managing assets, managing operational costs, and overcoming communication barriers. Non-profits always need to keep pace with everything around them. It is a balance between where the donors want to go and what the consumers desire from the non-profit.
With so many online interactions, a solid support system is a must-have for non-profit organizations. Well-designed processes allow visitors to connect with and understand your mission. It is also an opportunity to engage potential donors and encourage them to support your organization. Besides, it is also important to generate feedback from both donors and customers in order to plot the trajectory of organizations as they go forward. Non-profit organizations also need to stay on top of multiple inquiries and communications that come in on a daily basis.
Helpdesks can turn out to be the hero of the hour in such a scenario. Helpdesks can help non-profits go an extra mile to get things done, things like answering questions quickly and accurately round the clock. A non-profit ticketing software helps you carry out organized and effective fundraising and provide a fulfilling user experience to your donors as well as volunteers.
Why Do Non-profits Need Helpdesks
You would think that NGOs do not have a lot to gain from deploying digital tools. It is often thought that the only organization that they can leverage is social media to drive engagement. However, this is not the case. Non-profit organizations are constantly looking for instances to use digital transformation as a catalyst to maximize the impact and drive significant social change.
Non-profit organizations today are constantly looking forward to improving their user experience in order to carry out effective fundraising and increase volunteer engagement. These two things are extremely important to the success of a non-profit organization.
Better UX comes from bringing people, processes, and tech together by using strategic and digital transformation. Moving existing manual processes to digital processes can seem daunting, but leveraging a non-profit helpdesk can make this transformation simple.
Obstacles Faced By Non-Profit Organizations
Aligning the helpdesk with your mission can lead to an enriched end-to-end experience for everyone (donors, beneficiaries, and volunteers.) On the contrary, if you fail to do so, it can hinder non-profit organizations’ ability to prioritize and focus on their mission. Let’s look at some obstacles non-profit organizations face due to the lack of technological tools.
1. Gap Between Users and Support Services
This is one of the biggest challenges that non-profit organizations face. The absence of omnichannel support hinders the users’ ability to access key services and knowledge. For example, if a volunteer needs to check the list of donors in any area, or if they need to fetch some other information from the CRM, they should be able to submit a request that can be swiftly attended to and resolved by the right person/technician.
If incidents and service requests get delayed response, it impacts day-to-day operations. It slows down the execution of tasks. If you do not give users easy access to the helpdesk, it creates unwarranted setbacks and hampers new improvements.
2. Unresponsive Services
When a high-priority ticket is raised, it should be assigned to the right support agent, and it should be done as quickly as possible. If you have a manual process in place, none of this would be possible. You need helpdesks with automation features that can help you set priorities and separate important tickets from the rest based on various standards (or criteria). This allows the support team to be agile and deliver services on time.
3. Lack of Strategic Planning
A non-profit organization performs numerous tasks at once, such as managing traffic to the organization’s site during campaigns and charity fundraisers. They’ve to undergo multiple day-to-day IT support services for all stakeholders. When a project arises, the support team plays an important part all the way from the planning stage to the evaluation.
A helpdesk enables you to create multilevel tasks, reduce risks (by monitoring every step), and set deadlines for each and every task. If the project management workflow is coupled with the support management or the IT service management capabilities, the team’s work becomes seamless, and they can deliver it successfully. A hasty project implementation without a proper understanding of the important role the support team plays is a recipe for disaster, i.e., project failure.
4. Lack of Streamlined Processes
During every successful project or campaign, your support team spends a vast amount of time answering questions and attending tickets. Sometimes small and repetitive queries take up too much time for the agents. They should not be answering the smallest queries like troubleshooting the website chatbox when they can spend this time on important activities.
Not having a consolidated repository of answers to commonly raised tickets that is easily available to agents and users cost organizations their valuable time. A helpdesk can eliminate this for your organization. Through a helpdesk, you can implement a workflow or process that is configured to provide solutions for repeated queries to users directly. This saves time and increases the technician’s productivity.
5. Lack of Standardization
Non-profit organizations run on stringent budgets, and the work done by volunteers is crucial to the organization’s survival. If you do not have the right tech tools at your disposal, you won’t be able to track the work, record the agent’s time, and send reminders through various communication channels.
Volunteers work on multiple projects from various locations, and so sometimes, support agents need to provide support remotely. Without a proper IT solution, the IT teams’ ability to provide effective services for the non-profit organization is questionable.
How Can a Non-Profit Helpdesk Help You Manage Better
1. Streamline Your Communication
Non-profit helpdesks can help you streamline your communication and handle them easily. Through a helpdesk, you can manage their conversations with clients and donors all in one place, irrespective of whether it’s via email, phone, chat, or social media.
2. Resource Management
Non-profit ticketing software that uses intelligent automation saves countless hours of work. With an automated system in place, you can automatically organize tickets and focus on more important things. With automation, you can categorize important tickets with tags and priorities. You can route these tickets to the right agents depending on where they’re coming from.
3. Improve Collaboration
Non-profit NGOs require input from multiple people or teams. Helpdesk features like shared inbox, chat within the tickets, comments within the tickets, shared ownership, etc., can help you collaborate within your organization with ease and efficiency.
4. Improve Efficiency and Reduce Redundancy
A non-profit helpdesk would help you put proper processes in place and enable appropriate agents to provide correct resources at the correct time to carry out the task at hand. Non-profit organizations will have a tough time reducing their ticket costs and, most importantly, achieving their goals.
5. Analyze & Make Data-Driven Decisions
Non-profit helpdesks enable organizations to plan, allocate resources and collaborate on projects easily. It helps you get real-time insights into your operations and performance with drill-down analytics and dashboards. You can also analyze ticket volumes and conduct better organizational decision-making and planning.
6. Omnichannel Approach To Centralize Communication
Through a non-profit helpdesk, you can centralize all your conversations on a single interface. You can serve support from various channels like email, social media, SMS, and phone in one task management system. Employees, clients, and donors of your NGO will have a unified ticketing system to raise and resolve support tickets.
7. Encourage Self-service
A non-profit helpdesk can enable you to address legal doubts, regulatory queries, and other FAQs about partnerships. You can make your self-service portal multilingual too. A knowledge base feature will eliminate repetitive tickets and save your end-users time and effort.
8. Canned Actions to Speed Things Up
The value of quick responses increases when your cause is important. You can use predefined or canned replies to enable fast responses to donor queries and let your agents maintain consistency and provide better support.
The Bottomline
Non-profit organizations have so much going on at once. Many people look forward to them for aid and support for various causes. A non-profit organization cannot afford to be firefighting issues due to unstructured processes and bad governance within the organization. All the challenges mentioned above can be overcome with the help of a robust non-profit helpdesk tool. Legacy systems or manual systems may lead to operational mistakes. They also improve the need to fulfill simple demands without adding any complexity to the process. By adopting a helpdesk, non-profits can focus solely on their missions and goals instead of worrying about smaller details.
Support Better With DeskXpand
Serve more people and keep your volunteers, donors, and end-users happy with DeskXpand’s robust ticketing software for non-profits.
