Skilled volunteers delivered nonprofit technology requirements for United Way’s move to new grant management system
United Way of Greater Charlotte is on a mission to find fresh solutions to solve economic mobility and racial inequity by working hand in hand with neighborhoods and grassroots nonprofits. Within their community legacy, they’ve broken down barriers to create uniquely impactful programs that help lift people out of poverty.
United Way reached out to Apparo for assistance evaluating the use of their grant making software system to ensure that the right solution, processes and work flows are in place to support their grant making and tracking efforts.
Through our Community Impact Project program, Apparo matched United Way of Greater Charlotte with two skilled volunteers. They reviewed the nonprofit’s current processes and software systems used for creating applications and tracking grants and created a detailed nonprofit technology requirements document to help United Way’s transition. As United Way works to evaluate their system, they will put the requirements document created in this project to work to ensure that their organizational needs are met.
- Skilled Volunteer Team:
- Jeffrey Orr, Centene Corporation
- Lalit Thakur
- Nonprofit Team: United Way of Greater Charlotte
- Bob Young
- Beth Reichert
- Lawonda Stanfield
After the project was completed, we met with Bob Young (Chief of Staff), Beth Reichert (Project Manager) and Lawonda Stanfield (Business Support Analyst) to discuss the significance of this work and its anticipated impact.
United Way anticipates many operations improvements upon implementation of their new grant making system
United Way anticipates saving significant time in their grant making process by overcoming current technology challenges:
- Using multiple software tools to meet their data and communication needs
- needing to take time to pull data from these sources
- ensuring that data matches correctly
- Purging accounts from their main system if they do not receive a grant and needing to re-enter them if they apply again (due to storage limitations in their current system)
They anticipate that changes made will help save time by:
- Serving as a one-stop-shop for their grant making data and for communications to nonprofits
- Allowing them to grow their data to meet their organizational needs, including capturing nonprofit accounts at all stages in their grant journey
Once the new system in is place, additional benefits to United Wat will include minimized expense and risk:
- $10,000 annual technology savings
- Minimize risk associated with:
- manual data entry requirements
- limited organizational mastery of current breadth of applications being used
Words of appreciation were shared across the nonprofit technology project team
Beth Reichert – “We are very appreciative of the input and experience that it took to create a very comprehensive requirements document, that we will use to set up our new system. Apparo and our volunteers helped us think through details that we would not have known to think or ask about. Our volunteers were very engaged, committed and responsive and also so pleasant to work with. And thank you to the Apparo team. We really appreciate your commitment, helping keep us on track and seeing this work through to the end. I very much appreciate it.”
Bob Young – “One of the benefits of an Apparo Community Impact Project is that it forces the nonprofit to think more deeply about their systems and processes. This was a very valuable exercise for us, so that we can now best translate our needs to a new system. I also want to add my appreciation for Apparo, for Allison (Grant) for keeping us focused, on track, taking the notes, organizing our files. Creating that connectivity and being our convener was critical. All of the Apparo work behind the scenes is so valuable.”
Lawonda Stanfield – “I’ve been with this organization for 33 years and done many software conversions and this process was really great. I enjoyed it and helped me think about things that I would not have thought of even considering. Our volunteers were great; they enthusiastically helped us think outside the box and now we have this fantastic requirements document.”
Jeffrey Orr – “It was a pleasure supporting the United Waycanva team in their effort to find a new software platform. The team was extremely knowledgeable and open to new ideas and suggestions. That always makes for a great experience. Having Apparo and Allison (Grant) to keep us organized and on task really helped me be able to connect the dots for this project. It was so valuable in terms of my ability to get things done.”
