When Arika began her role as Marketing & Communications Manager for a local women's nonprofit organization, she needed access to a lot of information to help the organization fulfill its mission. However, due to a lack of structure and clarity, it wasn’t always clear where to find what she needed.
“In our organization, information is very important. Who’s approving what? Who takes the idea? Who meets about it? We want to follow the correct process…[but] anytime there was turnover, when people leave, we would lose knowledge. How do we all work together, get our minds connected, and stop these things from falling through the cracks?
My predecessor didn’t save a lot of things on the network. Everything went with her. So I wound up re-creating a lot of things – our whole department was basically brand new.”
“We’d pushed back, but now we’re seeing the value.”
This nonprofit organization wanted to move away from 3rd-party task management tools and switch to Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and Planner, but Microsoft wasn’t a strong suit for Arika, nor for several of the other managers. So when she went to her first customized M365 training with Mytech Partners, she was hesitant.
“At first, I said ‘how am I gonna learn how to use these new programs?’ We already had something for that, we’d gotten used to it, we liked it. We didn’t want to learn yet another tool.
But Mytech’s training sessions really opened my eyes up. We questioned Nate a lot, we asked him a lot of different things. He was very patient with us, tried to listen and make sure he understood our questions and why we were asking them. Then he showed us how you can copy things over, customize, debrief. I felt very welcomed, and excited.
We’d have these ‘aha!’ moments throughout the training. Accounting would say ‘oh, that makes sense, then we could do XYZ…’ and then HR would have the next epiphany…The trainings started to feel less like an obligation, more like ‘what can we ask at the next one?!’ When we sat down and actually worked through it, we made M365 make sense for our team.”
“We can invest in every program more.”
After several Microsoft 365 training sessions, Arika is much more confident in using these new productivity tools – and as the organization overcomes its technology challenges, it can reinvest that time and effort in more efficient and effective programs for the communities it serves.
“It’s a great way to collaborate. We have our plans, we have our annual report, it’s wonderful to take in all the information, it’s so robust. The health & fitness center can send out member surveys and share the results with all of us. If the COO needs to review & approve something, we can track our edits and not have 5 different document versions messing it up. I can say, ‘just go to Teams!’
As the organization embraces everything Microsoft 365 can do, it’ll continue to help us serve our community. For next year’s events, we’ll be able to go back very easily and look at what we’re doing now. Instead of digging through old folders, we can just check Teams and Planner.
We have more focus, we accomplish more. We can invest in every program more.
We held a blood drive recently; that’s a really important mission for our community, because certain types are really needed. I could never remember all the random info, but this time, it was all right there: contact info, credentials, plans, all in Teams. It was the most successful blood drive we’ve ever held.
Every day, we figure out a little bit more.”