How Nonprofits are Using Audio and Web Conferencing
Posted by Kathleen S on Mon, Sep 21, 2009 @ 09:55 AM
There is a movement underway in America. Young people everywhere are forming their own nonprofit organizations to support the causes about which they care. Technology has made it a simple matter to reach out to supporters using social media and the like. These burgeoning philanthropists and existing nonprofits face more challenges than ever when it comes to raising funds and using those funds efficiently.
In the past, most nonprofits were so deeply entrenched in outreach and delivering services, there was little remaining resource for addressing capacity and scalability. However, as budgets began shrinking and need increasing with the down economy, nonprofits have been forced to think like big business. They are finding ways to cut costs and expand services without sacrificing their main missions.
Today, all nonprofits are networked in some way. Most have websites and all have e-mail ad¬dresses. Nonprofit leaders are beginning to embrace technology and seek out tools that will help them raise funds, awareness and membership. They seek tools that support high volume use, are easy to use and affordable. Many nonprofits have found just such a tool in audio and web conferencing.
Essentially, conferencing software is a communication tool. It allows organizations to build community by disseminating rich and detailed information to a wide audience. It lets everyone connect quickly and easily, anytime from anywhere. The variety of features included in audio and web conferencing lets organizations do more with tools like document sharing, call recording, instant messaging, multiple presenter capability, whiteboards and more.
While this is the same technology large for-profit businesses use to make operations more cost effective and efficient, nonprofits have special needs that conferencing technology meets.
Cost Control: Because audio conferencing per-minute pricing plans are exceptionally affordable. Sincere fees are charged per call instead of monthly, it is easy to assign costs from a specific initiative.
New Volunteer Training: Training new volunteers quickly is essential to maintaining continuous services. Through Web conferencing, document sharing and recording sessions, new volunteers are quickly trained. Nonprofits can avoid duplicative training sessions by playing back recorded training sessions to new volunteers.
Universal Access: Because volunteers and stakeholders are geographically dispersed and may use varying technologies, good conferencing software works across all platforms and is simple to use. Browser-based systems with intuitive interfaces make conferencing easy for anyone, no matter where they are or what systems they use.
When nonprofits embrace audio and web conferencing, they are able to gain more support, raise more funds and help more people.
