Working for a nonprofit organization can be equal parts rewarding and challenging.
For project managers, nonprofit work is mainly about juggling various internal processes, tight budgets, and audit requirements while consistently building a case for your organization to keep receiving funds to maintain your project operations.
Therefore, this type of work should be grounded in streamlined and effective practices and tools that help you successfully achieve project goals.
Read on for some best practices in nonprofit project management that will help make project delivery much more efficient.
General Project Stages
Project management terminology can become quite fluid and niched, and knowing how to manage projects effectively varies from industry to industry. Nevertheless, these are the most widely acknowledged stages that every project goes through:
- Inception – this stage defines the necessary processes and authorizations that project leadership team members must give before any planning can start. It also covers the planning phase, which establishes the project’s scope and provides specifics on the steps required for its effective delivery.
- Implementation — this stage refers to the execution of the project and all its activities planned for during the inception phase. Monitoring and control checks should frequently be conducted during the implementation stage.
- Closing — in this stage, all activities are coming to a close, final payments are being made, contracts are nearing their end, and narrative and financial reporting are being finalized. Project evaluation also takes center stage.
The best practices outlined below follow this order.
1. Ensure Proper Team Capacity
Planning for human resources—i.e., the exact number of people you need to deliver a project successfully—should be done in the proposal writing stage. Alternatively, it can also be proposed during the inception phase when budgets are finalized.
Bidding or budgeting for a new project is always a delicate balancing act. While it’s essential to show your organization’s ambition and capability, you must also stay below an astronomical figure required to pay for all expenses incurred during the project’s lifecycle.
Therefore, when you look at the project charter, requirements, deliverables, milestones, and deadlines start planning for key personnel straight away.
At first, this could be the project director, project or product manager, financial manager, and at least one additional supporting role. Once you go through the rest of the necessary budget items and match them to deliverables, you can see whether you have room for more staff.
It’s easy to get optimistic when planning a project and believe that a smaller but experienced team can achieve great results on its own. While this may be true, the workload and pressure can get overwhelming once you reach the peak of your delivery phase.
Therefore, ensure that you have the capacity to execute project activities without causing unnecessary burnout or stress to your team members.
2. Use Project Management Software
Digital tools used for project management are well acknowledged for their value in the corporate sector. However, they can also be highly beneficial to nonprofits.
Project management software makes it simple to conduct most of your work remotely. This is a huge advantage on its own, as it contributes to lowering overhead costs and operating expenses for nonprofit organizations.
Benefits of Using Project Management Software
Project management tools enable managing a range of tasks, including sending emails, organizing and holding meetings with sponsors, obtaining approvals, monitoring budgets, and collecting funds.
If you’re a security professional for a nonprofit, it’s also important to consider how your tools integrate to help you manage the various platforms you’re responsible for. For example, ensuring that your video surveillance system can pass event data to your door access control system through a two-way integration simplifies the otherwise manual process of moving this data over.
No matter your type of work, you can also benefit from the built-in timetable solutions that most project management tools typically provide. They also serve as reminders that help team members remember key deliverables and their deadlines.
3. Maintain a Risk Register
Source: Austin Distel, Unsplash.
A risk register is a tool used by project managers to identify and monitor any risks that could affect successful project delivery. Being proactive in addressing anticipated issues or setbacks makes risk management an essential part of project management.
Any issues that might arise during the project’s life should be identified and recorded during the inception phase and monitored during implementation using this document.
The risk register should contain proposed mitigation strategies for each identified risk, and a solution or plan B in case mitigation efforts do not work. You can even take it up a notch with a texting service for nonprofits that is set up to send alerts to team members once the level of risk for a certain issue gets elevated.
Some risks may appear insignificant or improbable at first, but they nonetheless can affect your project. For instance, project risks might include:
- data security breaches (project documentation or personal information related to project participants being hacked or lost)
- legal dangers (lawsuits or law amendments affecting the project)
- cataclysmic occurrences (pandemics, fires, floods, etc.)
- interruptions in supply chains relevant to your project
As projects grow bigger, longer, and more complicated, staying on top of things gets more challenging. Risks could be overlooked or forgotten if they are not logged in a central area and examined regularly. Even more so, nonprofits ought to focus on personnel and team development capabilities so that they think along the lines of constant vigilance.
A risk register is another valuable tool to add to your project management arsenal.
4. Mainstream Monitoring and Evaluation
Every project needs goals to serve as a roadmap. However, setting project goals and objectives isn’t enough for their successful delivery. You need to make it a point to confirm that you are, in fact, meeting them.
Comparing actual performance to the objectives you have initially established is the core concept of project monitoring. On the other end of that spectrum, project evaluation plays a vital role in outcome harvesting once you reach the project’s final stages.
Demonstrating your project’s success through quantitative and qualitative data is key when bidding for new projects. It is also relevant when asking your sponsors or donors for cost extensions.
Most markedly, however, the information you gain by mainstreaming monitoring and evaluation throughout the project’s lifecycle can be used to improve your processes and methods down the line.
Therefore, although monitoring and evaluation may be the last thing on your mind as a hands-on project manager, make sure to incorporate them in every aspect of project implementation to make your life (and your team members’ lives) easier.
5. Record Lessons Learned
Most project managers are aware of the value of documenting lessons learned and how it benefits their teams, organization, ongoing projects, and other projects in the future.
Lessons learned are any new and valuable observations that have been recorded regarding both the successful and unsuccessful aspects of a project. They represent the organization’s dedication to excellent project management and the project manager’s chance to gain knowledge from the experiences noted down by others.
However, many people do not consistently record lessons learned since there is no established method in place. Alternatively, they record lessons learned at the end of a project and never take another look at them again.
Ongoing efforts should be made to record lessons learned throughout the course of a project, and the project manager needs to promote this approach from day one firmly. Project teams are destined to experience the same problems again if they don’t learn from previous project failures, whether they be their own or those of their colleagues.
Ultimately, project managers lose out on chances to put solid procedures and practices into place to effectively accomplish current and future work by not capitalizing on lessons learned.
Suppose maintaining a document like this is too tedious or time-consuming for you, or your team needs help maximizing its value. In that case, many project management SaaS tools can help manage this and similar tasks. Lessons learned can be matched with specific project activities, milestones, risks, and more, and they can easily be retrieved through your project management software of choice when needed.
Final Thoughts
Nonprofit organizations have big goals to carry out, which generally involve a never-ending list of projects, events to plan, campaigns to carry out, and stakeholder relationships to maintain.
The effectiveness of project delivery depends on your and your team’s ability to manage all of these tasks.
That involves completing tasks on time and meeting key milestones and KPIs without squandering your sponsors’ funds. Indeed, your team may lose its excitement and motivation over unfinished tasks, and external partners may lose faith and interest in your abilities.
Therefore, follow the tips and best practices above to manage and deliver projects for your nonprofit organization effectively.
First published on December 22, 2022.
Nina Petrov
Author
Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist passionate about graphic design and the new generation of green and social businesses. She explores new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her little white bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.
