Importance Of Being Data-Driven For Non-Profits With Power BI

Being data-driven in today’s world is a given. After all, everything relies on data, any industry, type of business, organization goals, targets. For nonprofits, digital transformation, a renovation of the way they use the information to better serve stakeholders, donors, members and strengthen value – is more and more pivotal to survival.

A survey had shown that nonprofit donors want to view the impact of their dollars as it’s important to know how a charity uses its contributions. The most successful nonprofits have been able to tap into that arena with the help of data and the right kind of technology.

The success strategy is all about pre-emptively planning for and investing in modern tech platforms, leveraging crucial data to make informed decisions, streamlining the organization, and promote transparency.

Business intelligence solutions continue to take data-driven decision making to a different tangent for most organizations. Loads of data are being churned out every day by various nonprofits and there is a serious requirement to process this data for tracking the mission goals.

Moreover, reports and dashboards are an essential part of running the operations for the members, the staff at these nonprofits. However, data can sometimes be overwhelming if not processed and delivered in the right manner. Here is where Power BI comes to play.

Being Data-Driven

A data-driven nonprofit can be summarized as one that utilizes data to inform and guide important decisions. Collating and evaluating quantifiable and relevant information is significant to the process.

Rather than following the traditional way of doing things – relying on intuition, gut feelings, or previous experiences, data analysis leads to the actions and selections of the most effective nonprofit decision-makers. Power BI becomes an aid in such kind of real-time, analytical decision-making process.

Gathering Data

For many nonprofits, the initial step in a technology revolution begins by gathering and unifying data that might be dispersed across multiple systems.

There are associations struggle with an expensive, unwieldy system constructed on multiple vendors and services and there are others that struggle with dissimilar budgeting or payment systems or distributed donor lists.

There are even nonprofits that deal with incongruent external data challenges like census data, education assessments, or even weather statistics.

Once a data-driven organization has a tactical technique for assembling its data and assuring the quality with Power BI, it can begin to surface and analyze the information, garnering and sharing insight through reports and dashboards.

It can quantitatively display a comprehensive range of information from operations transparency to programming effect.

Advantages of data-driven technology

In the nonprofit domain, every dollar saved is a dollar earned and it enhances the impact it creates. Decision-makers, donors, and volunteers believe planned technology investment is also eventually important to a charity’s impact.

• A well-organized technology conversion in terms of Power BI, with leadership approving good IT governance, planned support meant to meet a nonprofit’s requirements in association with its goals, and staff and volunteers who are prepared to accept the new solution, are critical to overall success.
• Once in motion, Power BI and its data visualization feature can assure a successful modern data platform that can drive transparency, efficiency, and save expenditure.
• The augmented transparency of a data-driven nonprofit can increase satisfaction, provide lucidity, and build trust across its network – from board members and corporate and major donors to staff and volunteers.
• Stakeholders can easily guarantee governance policies comply. Staff can precisely and quickly track budgets. Volunteers and donors can visualize the extent of their contributions. The ability to visualize and share the effect of a nonprofit’s hard work can build momentum tenfold with Power BI.
• Implementing a Power BI solution provides a great opening for increasing efficiency.  It can highlight budding areas for development that are often otherwise unnoticed.  With Power BI, identifying and removing delays from operations to amplify impact or enhancing targeted audience to avoid wasting dollars can be expected.

Transitioning with Power BI

• Telling stories of impact with your data becomes convenient with Power BI.  If you want to showcase data that changes over time in a way that’s easy to understand, Power BI is the tool to be used.
• Power BI lets you do display the changes by dragging a slider bar and you can even add a calculated measure for a figure such as revenue.
• Instead of designing charts and reports, use the natural language features of Power BI to query and get visualizations in response. You can specify the way the data is presented like- “how many donors attended the last awareness program?”
• With data silos scattered across the organization, it’s difficult to manage a single form of the truth and ensure alignment between the nonprofit and technology. Avoid poorly designed
  models with inefficient calculations which lead to poor performance and distrust in data quality.
• A well-executed Power BI implementation helps a nonprofit to spend less time wrangling data and more time analyzing information and generating insights.

With its innumerable features, Power BI can become a lot more useful and enhance your decision-making abilities. Also, it allows for increased productivity and a focused approach towards your mission.

Power BI offers a lot of advanced visualization techniques that bring your data to life and make your evaluation process, easier.

At AhaApps, we will help you get the most out of your Power BI investment, accelerating time-to-value with our proven method and our team of skilled consultants. Connect with us today.

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