Empowering Non-Profits With Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI is a free set of analytics tools that aids organizations to create gripping dashboards, gain 360-degree insight on organizational goals, organize dynamic reports, and make quicker, intelligent, data-driven decisions.

Power BI helps nonprofit organizations to organize, manage, and analyze data from a variety of sources. It pulls data together and processes it, and then turns it into clear insights, visually compelling chart or graph format.

As a corporation at the vanguard of digital transformation, Microsoft is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technology to every kind of industry, business sector, in fact, every single person.

When we take a step back and observe the challenges faced by nonprofits, the list seems quite long. They struggle with the lack of technical capability, shortage of resources, and absence of partners and few technology solutions tailored for their environment.

Microsoft believes in providing practical guidance in terms of solutions like Power BI helping the nonprofits achieve their missions and drive greater impact through digital transformation.

Their new solutions, offers, and resources are created hand-in-hand with nonprofits to aid some of their most critical needs. The sole motive is to put more advanced technology into the hands of nonprofits so they can increase productivity and efficiency—ultimately strengthening their impact on some of the world’s most pressing issues.

The IT staff in nonprofits is usually stretched thin, making it difficult to maximize the full benefits of technology. Most not-for-profits lack a complete digital strategy, and unfortunately, nearly half of nonprofits believe that their infrastructure is barely keeping up.

In addition to the challenge of combining disparate information, nonprofits need an easy way to visualize huge amounts of data and recognize important trends to increase impact.

Nonprofits are likely to using dissimilar data systems and they are actually, lack the skills to comprehend the information too.  Most of them are working on pretty thin revenue models.  So, most of them might not understand the difference between a transactional structure and an analytics structure.

• To help, Microsoft had announced Power BI templates for nonprofits, a selection of templates that help exemplify how nonprofits can leverage insights and analytics in common use cases.
• The templates show how combining operational data onto a single screen within Power BI allows nonprofits to categorize and analyze trends in areas like grants management, volunteer management, and case management.
• With the skill to discover data in new and meaningful ways, nonprofits can swiftly determine the best course of action to maximize impact.

In one of the cases, Microsoft had developed a Power BI Grants Management Template that unites donor information from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Excel and other sources—visually presenting it as a dashboard in Power BI.

This helps nonprofits to explore this information within the same place helping them identify its recurring donors as well as improvements or losses in support.

• Power BI empowers nonprofits to gather data from different sources and display them on a single platform. Making data management a breeze. One can pull in data from Excel spreadsheets, on-premise data sources, and SQL databases or grab data from your cloud services like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and then get it represented on a visually appealing dashboard for everyone to view.
• Now, one of the most spoken about features of Power BI is the Power BI Q&A that allows the user to ask a question about the data and immediately serves up a correct answer in the form of an interactive chart or graph.

With Power BI, before a user starts creating an amazing visualization, one will need to prepare the data just as one needs to collect the ingredients before cooking. Your nonprofit’s data should be organized before you import it. Spending a few minutes reviewing the data will help and avoid any future hassles.

• Power BI is hosted in the cloud, which helps you access your data and charts from anywhere, at any time, on any device. Sharing and collaborating on documents with team members in real-time directly inside Power BI becomes convenient. Your volunteers do not have to come back to the office to view the dashboards of the schedules or hours contributed, they can view them on the go.
• Collating insights from your data becomes a cakewalk with Power BI’s simple drag-and-drop user experience. When time, resources are scarce, you can quickly find the insights you are looking for and visualize them in beautiful, interactive reports, make wise decisions that affect your mission.

Utilizing opportunities and reducing risks are important to sustain business growth. With Power BI’s predictive forecasting you can visualize the future, donor behavior, and your mission growth.

Microsoft as a conglomerate is devoted to supporting every nonprofit in the cloud and will continue to focus on new offers and innovations helping them with their goals. At AhaApps we too strive to empower nonprofits with the latest technological solutions making their lives a tad easier.

Connect with us to know how you can work better with Power BI and other Microsoft solutions.

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