IT Tech Tips

If you work for or care about a non-profit organization, make sure they know about Centrend – and these strategies for obtaining the best software for free or nearly free. Corporations understand that investments in technology can make a huge difference in the success of their non-profit organization. After calculating Return on Investment (ROI) they can afford to wait a year or more for their technology investment to pay off. Non-profit organizations don’t have that luxury of waiting for a return on investment.   They have to maintain a positive cash flow to be successful. While the ROI can be terrific for businesses adopting new software technology, it’s harder to justify such expenses in the non-profit sector. As a turn-around specialist and business consultant friend of mine tells our clients, “No margin, no mission.” Fortunately, there are many opportunities to obtain top-notch information systems either free or at a minimum cost. The following list is what I consider the best of the best for Non-Profits. Start here to make sure you are obtaining the most cost-effective technology for your non-profit: Tech Soup – Tech Soup is the premier platform that lets businesses like Microsoft donate software licensing and subscriptions to non-profits. There is a minimal fee for TechSoup to administer the licensing, but the cost ends up being pennies on the dollar. You can also get recycled/off lease hardware from them very inexpensively though in our experience, the quality of the hardware has been inconsistent. Gsuite for Non-Profits – Google has a very generous program for Non-Profits that allows you to use the entire Gsuite for up to 49 users, completely free!  You can have 30 gig of storage for each user, plus use team drives for document collaboration. Google can host your entire domain name for free and having their reliability for email gives your non-profit a great advantage at no cost. SalesForce.com – Salesforce.com’s “Nonprofit Success Pack” provides a set of advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools for managing constituents and donors. It’s not free, but the price is significantly reduced and it’s a very robust set of tools. Donorbox.org – Donorbox.org is an automated, recurring donation management system. You can use the system absolutely free to raise up to $1,000 a month. After that, they charge a nominal fee of 1.5% to pay for the cost of the platform.  MailChimp and ConstantContact – They offer complete email marketing solutions for keeping in touch with donors and creating brand awareness. Both services are good and offer discounts for non-profits, but MailChimp will ultimately cost less than ConstantContact for nearly the same feature set.  The list above will be a great place to get started when looking at software options for your non-profit organization. They will require you to show a copy of your 501c3, Federal Tax ID/EIN, and unless you are brand new, a copy of your tax return for the previous year.   If you have favorite resources for non-profits, please feel free to add them to the comments below. If you need help getting some of this in place, Centrend may be able to donate consulting services. Please reach out to us and let us know how we can help your mission succeed! 

There is NOTHING worse than having worked on an Excel Spreadsheet or written something in MS Word and then had to redo it because of a power loss or application crash. You can avoid this frustration by following a few quick and easy precautionary steps. So How Do I Protect from Microsoft Word and Excel Crashes? The most critical piece of advice I can start with is to save early and often, especially before your print. I don’t know if it’s due to Murphy’s Law, or if there is some science behind the fact that programs tend to crash when the document is sent to print. To protect yourself between saves, launch the Office application and follow this process: Click File. Click Options. Click Save on the menu bar. Make sure that “Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes” is checked. Make sure that “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving” is checked. Click OK. Now you are protected! If the Microsoft application crashes or if you exit and say “Don’t Save” when it asks if you want to save, you will be prompted with a screen such as the following to recover the file at the last checkpoint! I’ve shown you how to establish Autosave using Microsoft Word. You don’t need to set up autosave for each document, but you do need to set autosave up for each application. Configure autosave for each of your Microsoft programs, and you significantly reduce the amount of data loss that can occur. Note: This article assumes you are using a Microsoft Application such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel and are saving data to a local hard drive or USB memory stick. If you are saving to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, backup versions of the file (revisions) are automatically saved for you and can be recovered through that program’s interface.