The modern Internet is rich in various kinds of services. Email, disk storage, email newsletters – cloud integration services and data are used everywhere. The same contacts on smartphones are a pure cloud service. After buying a new phone, you do not need to manually rewrite contacts. It is enough to enter your username / password, and the entire phone book is immediately loaded.
Network drives where information is stored – the same story. Keeping all working documents in one place is at least convenient. After all, all colleagues can access documents from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. We will omit security issues for now, they need to be discussed separately. But the very fact that even from a phone you can open a file on Google Docs, add your comments or make changes, is impressive.
Although today it no longer seems something surprising. Well, yes, documents in the cloud. Yes, you can edit them together and make additions, what is it? Although somewhere I have a pair of 3.5-inch floppy disks with a volume of 1.44 megabytes each. That was cool! If the file is on a floppy disk, great. Didn’t fit – there was a special program that split the file into several parts. Then it was necessary to throw all the parts onto one computer and start the reverse assembly process. And again the original file was obtained in the size of a couple of megabytes.
Today’s data volumes for companies are calculated at least in gigabytes. Processing and storing all this goodness on a local computer is, of course, an interesting activity, but there are other options. More modern, perhaps. Again, considering the subtle points of security.
CRM system
Here at least on the example of CRM. The most understandable thing and many already used in the work. It keeps records of clients / partners / donors – who has what specific work. You can add managers from among employees, share access rights and all that. Conveniently? Certainly! You just need to try it – and you will understand how convenient it is.
How many companies use such systems in their work? Not all of them, of course, but quite a lot already. After all, some organizations (only starting their work, for example) do not really need CRM. For now, at least. But the more non-profit organizations begin to implement such services in their work, the more common they become. It is clear that the matter is not limited to CRM alone. There are other services that can make the work of NGOs more convenient and mobile.
Cloud integration
This is how you can call this task of linking local data in an organization with cloud storage. Along the way, it would be good to find out where it is worth starting the transition to the cloud, what tasks have to be solved, and how the life of an public project will change after the completion of such a digital transformation? And what do IT specialists and non-profit organizations themselves think about such work?
What IT experts say
- I believe that cloud solutions are needed, but at the same time I want to combine several parameters that are not friendly with each other. I don’t like big cloud systems, it’s a dependency on external services. I am for stand-alone solutions on my own site for the needs of a particular organization. It seems like yesterday’s century, but this is autonomization versus globalization.
- About where to look for specialists in this field. First of all, I would single out task segments. For example, cloud storage or CRM + analytics and would be looking for specialists with experience in implementing products that solve these problems. Depending on the task, you can roughly understand the profile of a specialist or a company with which cooperation is possible: a major integrator, server support, CRM implementation, etc. And then you can see which of the companies of the profile you need are already working with non-profit organizations and contact them in the first queue. In addition, around technical tasks and tools, as a rule, there are many useful open communities in FB, Telegram, etc., in which it is not difficult to find a suitable specialist.
- In general, this is certainly not a plowed field, especially in the context of non-profit organization. In principle, the transition to the cloud takes 4 hours to launch the system. The main complexity and time is required for the design and integration of various services, for training users to work in a new working environment.
It’s worth starting with the basic things. I often encounter a misunderstanding of clients, including those from non-profit organization, for which the same Slack is needed. So often that I even started writing an article about it. Now, when everyone uses everything, it is important to convey to people why Slack is better than classic messengers. How the structure of communication in it will help the workflow, how it affects the security of the organization.
