Build a digital toolbox to boost your team’s productivity

Let’s face it: work is hard and time consuming. By implementing new processes, or streamlining your team’s current ones to make your daily tasks flow more easily, you’ll ultimately end up boosting your output and impact. It’ll also have a massive effect on your fundraising capacity – a win-win all around.

Have a read below as we share some of the digital tools we use regularly that we think could be very helpful for charity and non-profit marketing or fundraising teams to maximise their valuable time.

TLDR: We share some of the tools we use in our ‘digital toolbox’ that could be helpful for charity and non-profit teams to streamline their workflow.

Why create a digital toolbox?

Many marketing and fundraising teams, particularly those that are on the smaller side, are still working with apps or services that can’t make the most of their time, for example: creating your social media content on a spreadsheet or working from documents in your computer’s file system, rather than a shared cloud-based storage system.

There’s nothing wrong with that, per se; however, you could be boosting your team’s productivity by automating processes that will save time and money. We’re not about the hustle, but we really value anything that maximises our capacity to get stuck into more complex or creative tasks. No point wasting brain space when you can use a tool to make life a little easier for you.

Building your digital toolbox

So, what should you put in your ‘digital toolbox’? We’re not suggesting you fill it with lots of random apps for the sake of it; it’s worth putting a little time into figuring out where you can save people-hours and effort. You may not get it right the first time, but don’t let an app that’s not working for you put you off. There are so many these days, there’s bound to be one that fits your way of working.

You could also try asking your team or other departments if they’re already using any tools that you could implement – this may save you money, if your organisation already has a subscription to a particular service or app.

Internal communication

These days, a web-based way of communicating with your team is indispensable, especially with remote and asynchronous working. It’s a similar story for communicating with stakeholders that aren’t local to you. As with all the apps and services we discuss, there are always alternatives; these are the ones we prefer and have either used in the past or currently.

• Slack: A ‘freemium’ communication platform that’s designed for teams to talk to one another asynchronously and collaborate in real-time. It lets users create channels for different topics, send messages and files with one another, and integrate other apps to streamline their workflow.
• Loom: A video communication tool that lets users record their screen and camera, share videos instantly, and collaborate asynchronously with their teams. We think it’s great because it allows us to record videos that we can send to clients and/or internally between each other, saving the need for meetings (when possible). It’s also great when working with clients based in different timezones.
• Microsoft Teams: Similar to Slack, Teams does the same sort of thing, but it’s part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Many businesses use this as part of the larger feature/software set already, so if you have access to this, that’s great.
• **Zoom:** Perfect for online chats, meetings and conferences/presentations, Zoom is one platform that we use regularly to communicate with our clients or other service providers.

Email marketing

There are many services to choose from to optimise your email marketing campaigns, the most popular of which is probably Mailchimp. We use Mailchimp ourselves to send our twice monthly Bureau for Good newsletter; however, there’s also Mailer Lite, and more comprehensive marketing platforms like Hubspot or Active Campaign.

Whichever platform you decide to use, it’ll simplify creating good looking email campaigns and is great for keeping your stakeholders informed of your output. It’s also a more secure way to manage your contact lists, as they work to GDPR standards (with your input).

Planning and project management

This is such an important step in your daily life as a team. If you’re not putting good planning in, it’s going to have a very detrimental effect on your ability to not only work together, but to put together and share effective marketing and fundraising campaigns.

Often, we use Figjam (from Figma, the design software we work with) when collaborating and planning – it’s an online interactive whiteboard that allows us to work together remotely, so we can plan our next steps, share ideas and manage our projects smoothly. We mostly use it during our discovery workshops with clients, creating sitemaps or looking at user journeys, and very occasionally, for high-level project planning sessions. We also like another similar app called Miro.

The other aspect of good planning is how you manage your projects. Do you do this digitally, in a way that’s centrally accessible for your whole team? There may be different access levels you allow people to have, but everyone needs to know what’s required of them (e.g. tasks, deadlines etc), so having this as one source of truth for everyone to use as a touchstone is a good way to keep your team on track.

Notion is a great tool to keep your projects and documentation all in one place. It’s a collaboration platform that contains kanban boards, to-do lists, calendars, and even Wikis and databases. Many people use it as a way of project and task tracking. It’s also good for managing your team or collaborating on a project. Because it can do so much it can be a little daunting to begin with, but if you choose a template that works for you, it can also prove an invaluable resource.

Here at TIB, we use a platform called Teamwork: a project management app that helps us plan, track, manage and deliver projects effectively. It has other team-based aspects to it that we find very beneficial, like time tracking, task management and collaboration tools, as well as integrating well with other productivity software. We’d recommend it to help join up your to-do’s with team planning.

There are many other project management tools available, for example: Monday, Asana etc. Choose one that fits your team’s structure, output and working style and you’ll hit the ground running with all you need for your projects to run smoothly.

Cloud-based storage

We’ve spoken a little about the importance of having information and data kept centrally to ensure none of your processes or necessary documentation is lost to the ether. What makes this a much easier task to accomplish is some form of cloud-based storage. It will depend on what that data is (i.e. any kind of client data will need to be kept very securely and adhere to rigorous standards, such as GDPR), but there are many services that can achieve this for you, for example:

• iCloud – Apple’s online storage solution that most Apple product users will be familiar with. You don’t have to have an Apple device to use it, as there is also a web-based only option; however, you won’t be able to access all of its features without one.
• Google Drive – anyone with a Gmail account will probably already have made use of this, and it might arguably be one of the most famous. Using this also provides access to all of Google’s data and word processing etc apps.
• Dropbox – or if you’re in the Microsoft ecosystem, One Drive, – are also good options for online storage services.

Whatever you use, speak to your organisation’s I.T. team to find out what they recommend, as there may be security requirements for data storage that they want you to adhere to.

Marketing and data analytics

Your reach is what defines how well known your brand is (yes, ‘brand’ is as important for charities and non-profits as it is for commercial businesses) – a health signal for how well your marketing campaigns are going. As such, analysing your marketing outputs and the engagement you’re achieving with your intended audiences is an incredibly important part of fundraising work.

There are a number of apps that will assist with this:

• Google Analytics is Google’s web-based analytics service. It tracks and reports the traffic and events from your website or mobile apps as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. As of 2019, it’s the most widely used web analytics service on the web.
• Hotjar analyses your website usage and provides informative feedback via heatmaps, surveys and session recordings. It can be integrated with Google Analytics and other web analytics tools to provide an insight into how people are navigating your website. It’s also a great way to discover ways to improve your users’ web experience.
• Semrush is a platform used by marketers for keyword research and growing brand visibility. It also offers competitor analyses, site audits, backlink tracking and online visibility insights – it’s quite a hardcore tool, so may require some training, but could be worth it to gain useful information on these data points.

Creative

If you’re coming up with the creative side of things, there are a number of excellent apps to help you do this. A good creative app to use is Canva. It’s very user-friendly, requires little creative experience, and has a relatively cheap monthly cost (there’s even a free version, if you don’t need to use some of the more fancy templates, graphics or features). You can also output in a variety of file formats, save for printing, if you’re stuck for ideas.

For the more design savvy, you’ll probably already know about the Adobe suite subscription. A much cheaper – and arguably, just as powerful – option is the Affinity app. Originally three separate apps (Designer, Photo and Publisher), they were acquired by Canva who now offer this mega ‘studio’ app free of charge to all of its users. Whether you’re creating promotional material, graphics for social content, or even presentations and documents, you can’t really go wrong with either.

Social media

Creating engaging content for social media is time (and brain power) consuming enough at the best of times. Still tracking those campaigns via a spreadsheet? Why not take some weight off and employ a digital platform to help with it all?

To make our social media output run more smoothly, we use Buffer – a web and app based platform that allows us to schedule and post our content in batches. It means the posts can go live automatically when we’re working on projects, in meetings or otherwise engaged, so we’ve got things covered. You can also track comments and engagement through it, which is very helpful.

For teams with a large social outreach, you can add multiple channels (the big ones, like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn etc, and others such as Pinterest, BlueSky or Mastodon). Another option is Hootsuite – it’s a very similar premise, but each has a unique way of publishing and pricing structure. Whichever floats your boat, it’ll save you a lot of time and people-hours in social content scheduling!

Team management

Keeping your eye on your team’s annual leave and absences is key for many reasons: project time tracking; planning content publishing and project launches; allowing people to book time off that works for everyone; ensuring they’re all doing okay and to check if anyone needs some assistance.

We use Timetastic to do this: it’s a web-based tool that helps us manage our holidays and plan around our time. It’s helpful to larger organisations, particularly, because it can integrate with many HR systems, and offers a way for all staff to submit leave requests and for you to track absences and plan accordingly, whether they’re based in the office or not.

Conclusion

You may already be aware of a few of these services, or even using some of them. It’s always worth taking stock of what services and apps you have at your disposal and finding out if there are any others you can add or swap to that’ll make your team’s work life easier. If there are any we haven’t suggested that you already love, do shoot us a message on LinkedIn! We’re always open to hearing about new ways to boost our productivity.

If you’d like further help streamlining your output, get in touch to see how we can help you do just that. Our bespoke website audit can assist in improving your digital offering. We also offer our Bureau⁺ service for ongoing support in growing and defining your digital strategy.