The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about massive workplace changes and has made working from home the “New Normal”. But many people have struggled with the transition from physical offices to remote work, especially when it comes to connectivity and productivity with fellow teammates.
As teams coped with social distancing measures and stayed home during the circuit breaker, the pandemic revealed the rising importance of digital transformation. Organisations had to rely heavily on digital tools like cloud-based services and collaboration platforms to work at a more efficient and productive level.
Digital transformation doesn’t happen that easily, though—shifting an entire company’s workflow to a cloud-based system can be complex and costly. Charities and nonprofit organisations (NPOs) often lack the expertise and resources to do this.
On 19 November 2020, NVPC organised a webinar “Tech Talks: How Dropbox Can Help You Scale Your Operations”, where speakers shared how digital transformation can aid NPOs in increasing productivity and organisational effectiveness. NVPC invited:
- James Ang – Chief Partner Officer at Dropbox (APAC)
- Mary Dee Bautista – Enterprise Business Sales Manager for both Dropbox for Collaboration Solution and HelloSign
- Wilson Tan – Business Director at Web Imp, a Dropbox certified partner
- Asher Low – Executive Director at Limitless, an NPO that aims to enhance mental health awareness for youths
Discovering the importance of digital transformation
Many NPOs find it challenging to streamline manual operations and enhance workflow and productivity.
“[A lot of work has been] impeded because of the restrictions that have been imposed by the pandemic. But there are still people out there that need help [and] social work still needs to be done,” says Ang.
Ang and his team at Dropbox decided to help NPOs use digital technology to improve efficiency and collaborate more productively with their placeholders to impact more lives through their ‘Dropbox for Good’ initiative.
‘Dropbox for Good’, along with ‘Dropbox Foundation’ provides product donation programmes and funding to support NPOs.
“I felt that this was something really meaningful for us to do,” adds Ang.
Although many try to adapt to working from home, there are still difficulties that come with working remotely. Without proper digital tools and connectivity, it’s much harder to sync with everyone in the team. Especially as a charity, prominent aspects of work, such as planning events and campaigns and managing stakeholders, are difficult to do purely online.
Storing donor information, managing payroll, and handling donations are just a few of the challenges charity organisations face. Usually, these documents need to be assessed by various team members—having all of these in sync would save the time and effort needed to send over physical files.
With digital syncing across the team, it’s easier for members to edit and access the latest updated files which will help increase productivity and improve workflow. Without the digitalisation of these processes, charities would spend more time manually handling these documents and have less time to focus on charity work.
May Dee understands the distress of not being able to communicate and connect with teammates when working from home.
“We feel frustrated when teams cannot get in sync. As it [becomes] harder to get important things done [during working hours], you’re working more during off-hours to try to keep up, especially now [that we’re] working remotely.”
Knowing that digitalisation can help NPOs improve their management capabilities and organisational effectiveness, the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) hopes to use VCF to facilitate digital transformation.
The funding supports charities that may not have a basic information and communications technology (ICT) setup. Implementing cost-effective digital transformation solutions can help charities operate effectively so they can devote more time to their mission.
Enhancing operational efficiency with Dropbox
To apply for the VCF grant, charities and NPOs have to first access the list of relevant solutions that the organisation needs, and then get a quotation from a pre-approved vendor that offers your required solutions, listed under the PSG-approved technology providers.
Web Imp is one such PSG-approved vendor that implements technology solutions like Dropbox Business to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and organisations with digital transformation.
Wilson Tan, Business Director of Web Imp, helps organisations navigate digital transformation by assisting them in setting up Dropbox Business.
Dropbox can be a smart workplace that connects teams together—whether it’s for projects, fundraisers, charity initiatives or working with placeholders and sponsors.
It’s not only a file-sharing platform but a powerful tool that helps users organise their files and prioritise relevant or essential content. Charities and NPOs often face challenges with managing extensive data—sorting donor database and information, donations and collaborating with stakeholders. Organisations that often run campaigns and team-based projects, they would need sufficient storage space and efficient file management solution to organise different collaterals.
Using a digital tool that can sort out and compartmentalise important data will improve data management, file sharing, and collaboration among remote teams.
“It connects all the content and [familiar tools that] you love to use for your daily work so everything is easily accessible. No more switching between [applications] because all these [are available in your] smart workspace and [you can] use them in one place or within Dropbox,” explains May Dee.
Dropbox even has the technology to recognise images—you can search a keyword and it matches the content or photo that is related to the word. For example, you can search for “gardening” and Dropbox will give you search results with images related to gardening even if the word isn’t necessarily in the file name.
One of the most important things when running a charity or an NPO is to store donors’ and stakeholders’ information safely and securely while making it accessible to certain members of the organisation.
To address security and privacy issues, Dropbox lets organisations implement granular permissions, which means different users can be given varying levels of access to data. This helps prevent leakage of sensitive and private information and ensure that only a certain group of people access files for each particular project. As an added security measure, Dropbox can require a user to enter a password every time they open a file, and set an expiration date on user access.
Moreover, users can access file history and create team folders with specific configurations without worrying about syncing all these files. Dropbox is able to sync up to 1 Terabyte (TB) of files immediately, giving users spread out across different locations the most recent version of the file.
Increasing productivity and managing collaterals
One organisation that has been using Dropbox business for its daily work operations is Limitless.
Limitless is an NPO that aims to empower young people in Singapore from all walks of life through outreach, social work, mentorship, and career counselling.
Planning and hosting events to reach out to youths involves many collaterals—from posters and flyers for campaigns to photos from events. The Limitless team emphasises visuals when it comes to communicating their goals as an NPO.
The multitude of documents, photos, or videos involved in Limitless’s day-to-day work would require a lot of storage space if they were to save it on a physical drive.
Furthermore, Limitless Executive Director Asher recognises the dangers of storing all their collaterals on individual laptops because they would be more susceptible to data loss.
“We have certain documents—for example, [our] meeting minutes, directors meetings, board meetings, [and] videos of Zoom calls. They are super important in regards to governance, [because] we have a platform whereby all the directors pool from [and even track changes],” Asher says.
He explains that cloud storage of documents is much more secure and less prone to data loss compared to storing files on hard drives. Cloud storage also allows information to be accessible anywhere and all the time.
Dropbox has been particularly useful for Asher.
“I reserve a little folder in my Dropbox just to [put large] items that I want to send via mail, and it saves me space [and it gives me] the power [to remove the items from Dropbox if] I feel that the [receiver] has already downloaded [the files],” Asher emphasises.
Limitless continues to use Dropbox for organisational effectiveness and to tackle storage problems. The team can leave the burdens of manual data storage and connection to Dropbox while focusing on its mission to help youths.
How can the grants help your organisation?
Many charities and NPOs have felt the impact of Covid-19 as they have had to cancel fundraising events and meetups or move them online.
With the shift to remote work, technology is now more critical than ever in helping with productivity, efficiency, and communication to keep events running smoothly online. By selecting Productivity Solution Grant (PSG)-approved technology providers, charities and NPOs can tap on the Voluntary Welfare Organisation-Charities Capability Fund (VCF) to get 80% funding support for things like IT adoption and productivity improvement. Especially for organization that are still behind on technology adoption, these grants will prove to be incredibly useful in helping charities digitalise their operations.
In summary, the journey of Digital Transformation can help charities achieve greater efficiency and productivity while allowing them to continue their passion for helping vulnerable groups.
