Assessment & Planning
Planning for technology is the single most important ingredient to using technology effectively in your organization. The assessment and planning process helps minimize technology-related crises, uses staff time efficiently, and avoids wasting money on equipment. Create a plan to help you think through your priorities in order to use technology in a way that directly furthers your mission.
The challenges your organization faces are ever-changing. There's never a dull moment and hardly any time to catch your breath, never mind envision how things could be different. How can you integrate your offline and online approaches? Can you develop a technology strategy that evolves, grows, and transforms the way you make an impact on your community and the world? Do you have the insight and expertise to map the path? NPower Texas's technology experts do. With our collective intelligence and results-driven tools and techniques, we can help you close gaps and uncover opportunities in your technology infrastructure—and realize greater ROI in the process.
NPower Texas offers two standardized approaches to Assessment & Planning and an online tool:
1. Stable & Secure
The crucial first step for nonprofits to use technology to better serve communities is ensuring they have Stable and Secure technology infrastructures to conduct day-to-day operations. If an organization is operating outside of minimum standards, it will likely face system instability, security breaches, and a general lack of performance and productivity, distracting and detouring the organization from working on its core mission and service delivery.
NPower's methodology elevates nonprofit organizations from "Technology Constrained" to "Stable and Secure" status. Many nonprofits, especially small- to medium-sized organizations, face significant vulnerabilities in their infrastructures, originating from such factors as outdated hardware, older and unsupported operating systems, dangerous security loopholes, inadequate backup procedures, lack of network documentation, and relaxed password policies.
Our "Stable and Secure Assessment" provides an initial step in addressing these challenges that affect so many nonprofit organizations. The assessment, created by NPower specifically for use in the nonprofit field, is designed to measure whether an organization meets each of 12 key technology benchmarks. After the assessment is completed, the NPower Texas team provides a customized set of recommendations and resources to strengthen the organization's technology infrastructure, giving a stronger base to realize its mission.
Learn about the 12 key benchmarks for creating a reliable and productive technology infrastructure.
2. Strategic Technology Planning
A technology plan can help you budget for stability, increase efficiency, and lower your technology costs-and NPower Texas offers the expertise to lead your agency through that process. We help you create a strategic technology plan that ensures your organization's use of technology is in sync with your overall objectives.
NPower Texas has developed a streamlined, effective methodology for helping you identify the best technology solutions for your organization. We help you develop your list of requirements and prioritize them. We then use our research, nationwide network, and tools and processes to find a solution that exactly meets your needs.
TechAtlas
In addition to receiving hands-on assessment and planning assistance from NPower, we also offer an online planning tool to assist you: TechAtlas
TechAtlas is a tool that helps nonprofits assess, plan for and manage the technology they need to make an even greater difference in their communities. TechAtlas walks nonprofits through the technology planning process, from creating a vision of how technology could be most effective in their organizations, to assessing and prioritizing their needs, to generating a final report that can be shared with board and staff.
Additionally, advanced features of TechAtlas (available through an annual subscription of $69) provide tools to manage existing technology more effectively, such as online inventorying, help desk tracking and special assessments. To date, more than 13,000 nonprofits have used TechAtlas to help manage their technology and plan for future needs www.TechAtlas.org
To learn more about how our consultants can assist your organization contact us online.
NPower Texas equipped the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition (NOCC) with hardware and software to ensure its move across town went smoothly and successfully.
