Part 3 in our Rethinking Nonprofit Revenue Series is saving time. If you missed Part 1: Making Money or Part 2: Saving Money, find them here!
Many for- and nonprofit business alike believe that money is the most important resource for their organization. It’s simply not true. While cash certainly plays a part in what your organization is capable of at any given time, money can always be regenerated. Time, on the other hand, can’t be bought, borrowed, gotten back, or saved for later, making it especially important for organizations to manage it wisely.
We already know that working in the nonprofit world requires extra commitment, passion, dedication, and sometimes even sacrifice from it’s employees. But effectively managing employees and properly allocating employee resources can help a nonprofit save time- which when looking at your nonprofit in terms of return on investment – equates to saving money. We call this the ROTI: Return on Time Invested. Read on for 8 time-saving questions you can ask within your organization today!
Time=Money: 8 Questions to Save It
1. How do your employees spend their time?
2. Are you employees doing the work you are paying them to do?
3. What areas would support staff increase efficiency for other staff?
4. Can you leverage volunteers or interns to save valuable employee time?
5. Can you leverage technology and/or automation to save time and money on current processes?
6. What are your largest training costs, and can you reduce those costs be leveraging technology to reproduce portions of this training?
7. How much time do employees spend navigating different systems? Can you streamline this?
8. When there is a crisis, what are the things your employees spend the most time on? Can you implement systems to decrease this time spent?
If thinking through these five areas seems like too much work for your organization – remember that you must invest your resources (time, money and talent) in order to increase them. There are no sustainable shortcuts here.
More on Rethinking Nonprofit Revenue:
Sangfroid Strategy works with organizations to help them learn from where they’ve been, define where they want to go, figure out how to get there, and bring their team on the journey with them! If you want to get serious about Rethinking your Revenue – contact our founder, Heather Lenz, at heather@sangfroidstrategy.com.
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