Skilled volunteers conducted nonprofit process assessment for Apparo that drove powerful increase in ability to improve lives in our communities.
Apparo transforms communities and improves lives by connecting nonprofits to technology expertise and resources that amplify their impact. They provide services to the nonprofit community through both internal Apparo resources and external skilled volunteer resources.
Apparo leaders were evaluating many new opportunities and knew they needed to optimize their business processes to be best positioned to grow effectively. Through Apparo’s own Community Impact Project program, they worked with a skilled volunteer team from Jabian Consulting to document processes across their organization, focusing on client programs and services, fundraising and development, data management, marketing, finance, and volunteer engagement.
The Jabian volunteers helped Apparo identify gaps, pain points, risks, and inefficiencies. Based on these findings, the volunteer team provided a prioritized 3-year roadmap of recommendations to help drive operating efficiencies and allow Apparo to amplify their mission.
Skilled Volunteer Team (Jabian Consulting); Noah Cotton, Parshant Dhiman, Thomas Dority, Tyler Durham
Nonprofit Team: Bleema Bershad, Allison Grant, Kim Lanphear, Allison Lavallee, Lavonne McLean, Jennifer Ray
Apparo received 150 hours of support from Jabian with a market value $38,025
Jabian Consulting skilled volunteers begin conducting a nonprofit process assessment with Apparo to create recommendations that will help push their mission forward.
When the project was completed, members of the team shared their appreciation for the anticipated impact of this nonprofit process assessment.
Kim Lanphear, Apparo CEO: “Apparo is at a point of significant change and growth. While that’s exciting, it also can’t happen if we can’t better articulate and execute our processes. Having a team come and do this is game-changing, we couldn’t have done it without having Jabian’s help.”
Lavonne McLean, Apparo COO: “To get to the level that they (Jabian) were, the questions they asked, the amount of documentation they’ve given us, it would have taken us a long time. It really feels like we’re on the beginning of a transformational journey, and they have been a catalyst for us.”
Thomas Dority, Jabian – “Working with Apparo, it has been clearly demonstrated how passionate this team is about achieving their vision and expanding their impact into other markets. I was also very impressed by the team’s ability to navigate difficult conversations – this tells me that the team is very well aligned on Apparo’s mission and vision and also shares a strong sense of culture and community.”
Noah Cotton, Jabian – “I feel that we will have left a lasting impact on the organization and am looking forward to seeing some of projects we’ve narrowed in on in the future! I can’t speak highly enough of Apparo as an organization or the people that work there and would gladly do another CIP.”
The team also shared highlights of anticipated nonprofit and community impact:
- Considerable time savings driven by
- Implementation of a Community Impact Services playbook
- Improved collaboration across the organization
- Streamlined processes
- Decreased risk and faster onboarding of new employees due to streamlined and documented processes/roles
As a result, the team anticipated additional bandwidth to be put to work to increase service to the nonprofit community.
One year after the project was completed, we reconnected as a team to discuss the sustained positive impact of this nonprofit process assessment on our work.
Lavonne McLean, Apparo’s COO, shared, “There’s been a lot of process improvement over the last year and it feels great. We’ve been able to more than double our work to support cohorts of nonprofits without hiring additional staff. We’re being dynamic and evolving as an organization and that is exciting.
“Without the process improvements and behind the scenes work we’ve done, based on the recommendations from this project, I don’t think we would have been able to. It certainly would not have been easy and would have impeded all the revenue growth we’ve experienced.”
Based on the recommendation from this project, the Apparo team has:
- Conducted a Technology Plan project to identify priorities for technology changes and enhancements, which helped identify 50% reduction in technology expenses that was allocated to make important tech improvements
- Created a Community Impact Services Playbook to standardize components of cohort programs, this:
- Increases ease/efficiency of delivering cohort programs
- Saves Development team time in writing funding proposals for new cohort programs, as they have the details ready
- Identified and implemented tactics to improve collaboration across the organization
- Implemented improvements to Salesforce that:
- Save time and improve data accuracy for reporting
- Save time spent on data entry
- Reduce risk of data errors
These improvements drive cohort program revenue growth and save approximately 9 hours per cohort program. Additionally, they have freed time for the Tech Therapy team to focus on earned revenue, which has increased by 79%.
Many additional initiatives have launched and are still in progress. The team is:
- Developing a market expansion strategy
- Refining definition of value delivered to the community
- Establishing KPIs
Importantly, because of these improvements, the Apparo team has been able to expand their critical work on supporting nonprofits. Over the past year, Apparo has experienced:
- 41% increase in our fair market value of support to nonprofits
- 46% increase in the number of nonprofits served, including two cohort programs outside of Charlotte (Atlanta and Greensboro)
- 59% increase in the number of volunteers engaged
A huge thank you to the Jabian skilled volunteer team for helping push our mission forward.
