The saying in business, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is also true in Ironman triathlon. In order to begin the process of completing this race, you have to get in, schedule or register for the event almost a year in advance, committing yourself and your resources to a course of action. This is the start of the plan. Everything in your plan now works backwards from this event date or goal. Just like in business, goals have to have timelines and objectives.

This commitment helps focus your plans and ultimately your goals. Similarly in business, you have to plan your business operations around a particular strategy or direction. If you want to become a leader in a specific segment of an industry or achieve greater sales, profits or expand your customer base, you need to put a plan together to accomplish this. To achieve the goal, you have to work backwards from the desired result and plan an approach to success.

Just like an athlete, you have to put in the work and practice to get better. Training the body regularly will produce results. Similarly in business, you need to consistently produce the effort and activities in order to reach your target. If you follow this plan and put the work in, you’ll benefit. You may not win the race or even realize the exact goal, but the experience of trying to get there, can sometimes be more valuable and rewarding than the goal itself. Try thinking about how you would prepare for a race the next time you’re asked to step into a business planning or strategy session.

Ironman Triatholon

By David Scott

Like all organizations, non-profits are being asked to do more with less. This is compounded by the reality that non-profits typically lag behind their for-profit counterparts and their funding sources are drying up due to the weak economy. To do more with less, has historically required capital investment in order to purchase productivity-enhancing applications and systems.

Enter SaaS.

With its user-based pricing model, new non-profits can establish operation quickly and easily without the need for capital to buy, install, and integrate the systems. For established non-profits, they can afford to replace their legacy platforms with comparable SaaS platforms. By doing so, they eliminate expenses associated with contracts, support services and more.

That is – more for less!

No matter what their strategy for creating a budget, non-profits are leveraging cloud services for

• Email and Calendaring
• Voice Communications with flexible routing of calls to employees and volunteers
• Constituent Relationship Management
• Non-profit financials & operations
• Communications & Collaboration between employees, volunteers, constituents, and partners
• Online intake of applications and requests for services and donations

The results for non-profits using SaaS products are positive and promising:

• More funds are going to the mission of the non-profit instead of the technology
• More services are being offered
• More accuracy and efficiency means less mistakes
• Operating expense are reduced
• Less manual work so employees and volunteers are more productive

So whether you are big or small, have been around for decades or just starting up, cloud-based technologies can definitely have a positive impact on your organization. We hope that other non-profits will realize the value of using SaaS products and follow in the footsteps of these organizations that are already reaping the benefits. In the future, we look forward to writing more about the great results that non-profits have achieved from using ‘the cloud’!

By Rita Das

As we use these collaboration tools, we have also come to the realization that it is hard to know which one is the best to use for a given situation. They all have their pros and cons and sometimes picking the most appropriate one for, let’s say, putting together a team project or for creating a wiki for your client, is not always obvious. Then there’s the fact that if you don’t have a good sound policy, you might end up having your information spread out over different tools, making it difficult to find what you are looking for. That kind of kills the whole value prop around cloud computing.

Through our own trials and errors, we have found that by establishing basic guidelines, it can make the decision process much easier and save time in the long run. We have been able to take what we have learned and pass it onto our clients. Every situation is different and there is no one set of policies to go by. Therefore, you will need to develop a plan to reflect your unique environment policies. So before you start building that next internal website for a client or creating that excel report that you want to share, why not step back and first come up with some simple rules so that you don’t have to worry about which tool will be most effective each time you want to collaborate. In the end, doing this will only make you and your organization more efficient.

Until next time…

By Kayleigh Murtha
Cloud Marketing Specialist