8 Ways Associations Benefit from Enterprise 2.0 Software

Associations, non-profits and community groups often depend on the activation of their membership and volunteers to make progress on fulfilling their purpose and achieving their goals. But recruiting, deploying, educating, monitoring and tracking the activities of even a small number of members or volunteers is incredibly time-consuming and inefficient. When the association is global, it turns into a real nightmare. The Internet, and specifically enterprise 2.0 collaboration software, has changed all that.  

Here's what a community group, association or non-profit can do with enterprise 2.0 software.

• Enable people to work from home. Gone are the days of showing up at 'headquarters' and getting lists of people to contact or tasks to be completed. With enterprise software - all the information you need is right on each person's computer, updated in real time.

• Keep track of each person's progress. Using the task management feature in enterprise 2.0 collaboration software, everyone can check off what they've done and what goals they've reached. They can also immediately report any difficulties so administrators quickly find out there's a problem, and can do something about it.

• Board members can meet more frequently, keep abreast of changes and make quick decisions - all without leaving their home or office location, and even when they're all in different countries and time zones.

• You no longer have to depend on IT to get people up and running. Anyone capable of opening a browser and creating an email account can be operational within minutes. IT doesn't have to set them up, and no one has to be at their side or spend hours teaching them how to use it. This means the association can create and utilize an ever-expanding membership and volunteer base without the need to take on additional administrative staff.

• Contact lists are constantly updated. You know when and where to get in touch with each person whenever you need them.

• Because members, volunteers, and administrators don't have so much traveling to do, they have far more time to simply get the work done. And if a volunteer only has a short time available on any given day, they can use it to accomplish something. Taking travel out of the equation adds up to a big increase in productivity.

• Administrators can brief the whole group simultaneously, and quickly. The briefing is stored on the enterprise 2.0 software, each person is alerted to the fact that it's there, and they can access it quickly and easily.

• Enterprise software provides a constantly-updated database of documents, procedures, processes and changes that keep people informed in real time.

To top it all off, some of the best enterprise 2.0 solutions don't even cost a lot of money. And it routinely saves money through increased productivity and efficiency.

Technology makes it possible for community groups, associations and non-profits to forward their purpose and reach their goals in an entirely new order of magnitude than we've ever seen before. Taking advantage of everything it has to offer can change the face of your organization.