Non-Profit 101

The “I” in IMDSA stands for International. When you have an International organization, you often have to get creative when collaborating with your board members.

We are currently planning our 4th biennial Research & Awareness Conference. In the past, we have passed an xl sheet back and forth with notes on our planning –which really never worked.

So, I began searching for online programs that would help all of our planners with their monthly tasks. This was my main goal. I wanted something that gave each planner a calendar where I could upload all their tasks and they could check them off as they went.

And, of course, I did not want to pay for any of it!

Google Aps has a program that will allow you to set up a calendar, but it was far too difficult to figure it all out and after working with it I decided this program was not good for the type of collaboration we were needing.

Comindwork is great program. It offers a place to set tasks in a calendar, a blog to talk about what your are doing, a file upload option, a wiki to include information and links, and a time-sheet to track your planner’s work. The downside to this program for me was, I could only view the calendar up to three months in advance. And, it was just a little too complicated for the average person trying to figure out what their tasks were for the day.

Next, I went to PBWiki hoping that this would be the answer to our needs. This is a good program that has a wiki as well as capabilities to include Google Aps which allowed for the calendar and the tasks, but again, it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

Finally, after a lot of searching and far too many hours on the Internet I found the perfect program for not only our conference planning, but also our board of directors collaboration!

Zoho has so many great applications that you could play all day and never get bored!

Zoho Projects is exactly what I was looking for to help my conference planners collaborate. It offers a variety of collaboration tools on one site:

• Easy to use tasks and milestones calendar

• Document sharing with option to separate in folders and online collaboration within the word and spreadsheet documents

• Links area to set up links to other places (I use this for our other zoho sites)

• Forum to send and receive messages with option of who you want those messages to go to

• Interactive time-sheet to keep track of your completed tasks

• Meeting Planner to announce upcoming meetings to your planners

• Report viewer to see the status on all tasks

This not only allowed our conference planners to collaborate, but immediately we saw the benefits of this site for our board of directors. We found that with the 100 MB of storage that this is a great way for us to upload our monthly reports (such as minutes of last meetings, financial reports, etc) this freed up our email boxes and enabled us to go back to view this information when needed.

So, with this site, our collaboration needs were almost solved. However, I still needed to have a place where our planners could upload all the speaker and exhibitor information as well as sponsors and volunteers.

Zoho Creator was the solution to this dilemma and then some! Zoho Creator allowed for us to enter all of our information with its form builders and then enabled us to read and filter the information through a spreadsheet database. Additionally, this program allowed us to embed forms into our own site for additional data when interested participants fill out that form.

These are the two main programs we use from Zoho for our collaboration. However, they have many more programs as well!

There are many programs out there that will meet your needs no matter if you are planning for an International conference or if you are just wanting to communicate better with your board of directors. But if you are a non-profit organization, you should never have to pay for these services!

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