How Our Solution Helped This Nonprofit Streamline Its Planning

The Backstory

Every 75 seconds, a child under age five dies of malaria¹. Over half a million people die of the disease each year, and nearly 80% of them are children under five².

Our client is a nonprofit on a mission to combat the devastating (and entirely preventable) consequences of this disease. For a task as dynamic and challenging as this, it’s critical that they use technology that allows them to be agile, accurate, and smart enough to make an impact in the face of constant change.

The Client

Our client is a renowned global nonprofit organization that helps its partners discover, develop, and deliver effective and affordable antimalarial drugs to disease-endemic countries all over the world. They receive an average of 80-90 million dollars annually from over 20 different public, private, and individual donors, which goes into managing over 100 different projects with their 100+ partners.

If you're interested in learning more about our client, we'd be happy to connect you via a reference call. Contact us for more information.

The Challenge(s)

In a nutshell: too many moving parts to keep track of by hand. It boils down to three key parts:

1. Resource Allocations

Allocating funds is a notoriously complicated part of the NGO-donor relations dynamic. In our client’s case, one person was responsible for handling these allocations manually, without the ability to track changes in real time or forecast potential changes. Lacking the granular systems to properly allocate direct and indirect funds to projects or organizational objectives, funds were allocated only after an expenditure actually occurred, then codified as part of a year-end consolidation. The calculations were riddled with errors, which caused a slew of downstream problems.

2. Donor Reporting

Mistakes in allocations caused inaccurate and late donor reports, which damaged transparency and trust. During the year, our client lacked the level of detail needed to keep their donors informed about how their funds were spent, their impact, and any changes to their program that cropped up in the meantime.

3. Funding Gaps

Our client’s annual budgeting process lacked the support of the kinds of current data they needed to develop future-focused spend estimates. And, since long-term financial planning was done by hand, they were unable to conduct what-if analyses to prepare for sudden changes. And since they lacked the granularity of an automated system, they couldn’t get any visibility or insight into the nature and extent of future funding needs.

The Solution

A custom-developed automated solution to replace manual entry and streamline our client’s planning process.

We created an interface powered by IBM Planning Analytics technology that pulled data from 4 different parts of our client’s organization — project management, grant management, personnel costs, and their existing ERP software (Navision). It all came together into an easy-to-use program that integrated into their existing software, saved them time, and allowed them to focus their energy on what matters most: their mission.

The Results

Our custom-made solution helps our client:

• Centralize the budgeting process, making resource allocations faster and more accurate
• Create more accurate, timely, and transparent donor reports
• Accelerate planning, forecasting, and analysis, preempting funding gaps before they appear
• Make data-informed decisions with detailed internal reporting by project, department, and position
• Mitigate data entry errors
• Save time and resources

What Our Client Has To Say

"The revenue and cost management solution has enabled us to quickly access and analyze financial data for the entire organization, anticipate future trends, and detect and track potential funding gaps, spending peaks, and valleys. Now, we can conduct accurate analyses in a matter of minutes instead of days, and work without the risk of miscalculations due to human error, or of abandoning analyses that can’t be done manually because of the complexity of the information. Today our organization’s financial management is much more agile and better informed."Associate director of an international nonprofit

Does Your Organization Need Custom Nonprofit Software?

Our solution can be tailored to any nonprofit need, in any industry, operating in any country. From project and program management to department organization, time tracking, grant proposal writing and grant management, volunteer management, and more — we will work with you to understand your needs and deliver an integrated solution that both you and your donors can trust.