Anyone who has worked in a foundation, non-profit or association knows that your mission is your mantra.
There is no greater work than helping clients change their lives, giving grants to institutions to fund worthy causes or helping members of associations to develop.
The work environment today for professionals in non-profits can be extremely challenging. COVID-19 and its aftermath have made it more difficult for staff to do more with less.
They must also be able to predict fundraising trends and ensure that data security and privacy are not compromised.
Many people must now complete their mission in a hybrid format or remotely.
There are many considerations involved in Grantmaking and awarding. These require careful navigation as promised funding can be delayed or suddenly withdrawn.
Staff must be more resourceful in planning and program material.
Great resignation is a very real problem in the non-profit sector. There are many staff changes, and there is often more than one job offer.
Successful non-profits invest in technology to manage hybrid mission-delivery environments, make clients and members happy, reduce costs, and secure fundraising revenue.
They can digitally transform document processes to serve their constituents better, increase business goals, lower risk, and modernize client, donor, and staff experiences.
Reasons Why Non Profit Organisations Can Benefit from Electronic Signatures
Look no further if you are looking for real-life heroes than those who run non-profit agencies. These people work tirelessly daily to provide services that can transform lives, whether for the poor, the needy or the displaced.
Non-profit workers are often very busy. They must have the right tools to help them. Electronic signatures are becoming more popular in the non-profit sector.
We'll look at benefits of electronic signature for nonprofit non-profits use electronic signatures to increase their productivity and streamline workflow.
Faster Document Turnaround Time
This technology is significantly faster than paper-based signature processing methods. eSignly free electronic signature was used by more than a third (33%) of respondents who cited slow turnaround times in completing agreements as their biggest challenge.
A non-profit's mission often depends on its ability to time-box. Critical grant funding is needed to support refugee resettlement services. This must be approved and distributed.
Holding time-sensitive training sessions for members of medical associations to keep them up-to-date about the latest pandemic developments.
Life, health, and well-being often depend on each other. It is not necessary to have preliminary paperwork. However, practicality in negotiating agreements can help. The time it took to prepare and send documents decreased by almost a third when eSignature was adopted by the non-profits surveyed.
On average, document completion took two days.
Faster Client Onboarding
To onboard a client who requires services, many forms and documentation must be completed, signed, and returned.
These forms must be completed using pen-and-ink techniques. This can lead to more time spent on coordination meetings, getting signatures, correcting errors, and finally getting approvals.
The client onboarding process can easily be simplified using the right tools, such as electronic signatures. Clients can sign forms from anywhere, with any device, by emailing them.
You can also reduce errors and missing information by clearly indicating the information required on each form and where signatures are required. eSignly provides detailed auditing that allows nonprofit employees to see where forms are at each stage of the process.
Select and Prioritize Internal Business Processes
Find your nonprofit needs, and then pick a starting point. What areas will an eSignature solution make the most impact on your nonprofit's success? Consider a specific use case that can show the benefits of e-signatures.
You can start by automating repetitive and manual processes in a unit of your nonprofit to create a frictionless workflow that speeds up process cycle times.
Global Fund employs eSignly in its Human Resources department and Grants Management. It started by creating a division in its digital workflow.
This demonstrated the benefits of an eSignature solution for internal functions. It focused on recruiting practices and integrated eSignly into its HR recruitment flow to reduce the time it took for panel evaluations to take from five days down to one day.
Global Fund employees no longer have to search for documents in the building. The automated tracking in eSignly gives them a much clear audit trail.
Managers can now fill their positions quicker and find the talent to tackle critical grant issues more quickly.
Better Visibility into Signing Status
Many nonprofit departments, such as intake, funding, and human resources, need to share documents to obtain approvals, exercise process control and allow different factions to act as checks and balances.
Transparency is more important than ever in a nonprofit. Departments might use a bulk email send-and-sign process to share important forms with clients, employees, or members.
They must also keep track of all changes made to documents in real-time. Sometimes multiple signers are required for forms, such as gift agreements. Nonprofits also need an overall view of the entire process.
Grants require that you monitor each step of the approval process. eSignature gives you visibility to your documents' signing status at any juncture. This allows you to see who has signed and who needs to sign.
Easier Document Collaboration
Documents and forms often need to be shared between multiple departments within a charity organization. Final approvals and checks must be made, and any missing information must be filled in.
Electronic signatures are a great tool for nonprofits to facilitate collaboration.
Nonprofit personnel can collaborate more easily on important documents by using electronic signatures. Is there any information you need to complete a form with a deadline approaching? It's easy to email the information directly to the correct person! Do you need to send important forms to multiple employees? With just a few clicks, bulk-send important forms to your entire organization!
Improved Staff Satisfaction
Staff members are naturally fulfilled by the work they do for clients. It is difficult to keep staff happy in their jobs.
eSignly eSignature is a tool that helps non-profits support their employees by making it easier to sign agreements.
eSignature helps staff stay focused on the collective mission and makes them feel valued. It also gives them a modern technology process that allows them to be more efficient in their work.
Using eSignly, surveyed employees could gain satisfaction by significantly increasing operational efficiency, improving the donor, grantee and client experience, and supporting data security through digital transformation. Grants are much easier to grant and more straightforward to receive. It is easier to manage gifts and donors.
It is easy to report taxes. Signups for volunteers and waivers are easier. As a member benefit, associations can offer software discount agreements.
Human resources can be more productive in HR work than they are with paperwork.
Improved Staff Productivity
35% of the non-profits surveyed struggled to route documents that required multiple signers or reviews before adopting eSignature.
Your employees can now easily route and share documents, such as new-employee offers and donor commitments, with eSignature. Conditional routing allows you to customize signature workflows so that different recipients only sign the document if certain conditions are met.
The overall productivity increase in non-profits surveyed by eSignature was 66%.
Fewer Errors and Omissions
Information is missing from a document with a deadline approaching because of inadvertent negligence by a signer or accidental misuse of an old form by an associate.
Before adopting eSignature, 37% of non-profits listed data quality and signing errors as number three on their list. eSignature allows you to create custom templates for common forms to ensure that the most recent versions are available throughout your organization.
Non-profits must make client and volunteer application processes easy for staff and applicants.
By embedding forms directly on their websites, non-profits can reduce human errors or omissions. This will flag any incomplete or unfilled forms to users.
eSignature will also allow applicants to send email forms directly to the forms. It will also alert them to errors and omissions. Your non-profit must make collecting donations easy and hassle-free for donors.
Non-profit staff must be able to manage incoming donation flows easily. Using eSignature; you can embed donation forms onto your website. Donors can also send email requests directly through eSignature.
This will allow for accurate and quick access. Patrons can quickly and accurately make donations from anywhere in just minutes.
Enhances Data Security and Privacy, Lowers Risk
Non-profits are responsible for protecting and managing sensitive data. eSignature is a useful tool to help you reduce risk and increase data security.
Keeping client and donor identities confidential is essential to run a non-profit that succeeds and keeps your team focused on providing mission-critical services. According to our survey, 27% of non-profits expressed constant concerns about data security. Until they adopted eSignly eSignature, that is.
Using the platform, 47% of respondents reported increased data privacy. E-signatures are not like wet signatures. They come with an electronic record that serves as a strong audit trail and proof that the transaction occurred.
eSignature can be used by signers to confirm informed consent for client healthcare or other sensitive situations. eSignature also offers many options to verify a signer's identity before they sign. These include SMS, email, knowledge-based authentication, and ID verification.
Reduction in Paper Used
Non-profits are always on the lookout for ways to improve their service. Paper-based agreements slow down the process and require extra steps to print and store documentation.
eSignature has the natural advantage of conserving funds and paper. This is also a benefit for the environment. Every dollar saved by reducing paper use can benefit your constituents.
39% of the surveyed non-profits said they saw a decrease in paper usage after adopting eSignature.
This was more than a third of the total reduction in paper use. Are there good reasons to switch to paperless agreements or not? Tracking consent forms from volunteers can quickly exhaust your internal resources.
Digitalization will increase efficiency and reduce costs. It will also help you save trees.
Budget Maximization
Non-profit organizations are known for their core principles and strength. They use every dollar to its fullest.
Fundraising campaigns, events, charitable donations and grants are all ways that non-profits make money. They also sell various products and services. It is important that every dollar spent and earned be accounted for. This makes expense reporting management essential.
Team members of charitable organizations can approve spending, collect signatures from donors and send expense reports to accounting managers.
Best Practices of Electronic Signatures in Non-Profit
These are the top four things to remember when using eSignly for your non-profit.
Evaluate and Map Your Digital Workflow
You may create and deliver hundreds of documents weekly, depending on the non-profit you work for. How are documents created? Who approves them? What can you do to improve the efficiency of how you deliver them? It's a good idea to take a few moments to record all the steps you are currently taking and create a workflow diagram that maps your entire process.
Here's an example of what one might look like. If one of the three proposals is lost, the process could slow down.
You should now think about ways to avoid the redundancies in the process described above.
You may not need a signature from your legal team to confirm that the document was not altered during the digital or paper process.
The audit trail is legally binding with electronic signatures made through eSignly. The audit trail contains a tamper-evident seal and a sequence of chronological events from when the document was created until it was signed and returned to the originator.
An audit trail includes the transaction's date, time stamp and IP address.
Select and Prioritize Internal Business Processes
Find your non-profit needs, and then pick a starting point. What areas will an eSignature solution make the most impact on your non-profit's success? Consider a specific use case that can show the benefits of e-signatures.
You can start by automating repetitive and manual processes in a unit of your non-profit to create a frictionless workflow that speeds up process cycle times.
Test Acceptance by Users
Before you test your use case:
- Share the workflow with those in your non-profit organization who will be the initiators.
- Ask for help from external stakeholders to test your process.
- After the trial is completed, gather feedback from internal and outside testers on all process phases.
- Fix any problems.
- Retest.
Develop an Implementation Strategy
To develop a standard approach for your next units or regions, you can use the lessons learned and feedback from your pilot program.
Create a plan to ensure that the new approach is adopted quickly and effectively. You can tailor the approach to each unit by including individual goals and objectives.
The Key Takeaway
Any non-profit searching for a way to avoid the difficulties of manual signatures will find eSignly's eSignature the best option.
You can send and sign virtually anywhere from eSignly, anytime. More than one billion transactions have been completed using eSignature by more than a million customers from 180+ countries in 18+ languages.
It's easy to use - survey respondents were able to implement eSignly within an average of 16-20 working days.
Business can use eSignly for nonprofit organisation:
- Provide the digital, secure, mobile-friendly experience clients, donors, staff, and volunteers now expect.
- Reduce costs by streamlining client-facing and volunteer processes. This includes automating intake packets, membership forms, and authenticating consent forms. It also streamlines grants management, HR, and procurement back-office processes.
- Automate workflows with eSignature. Connect eSignature with client and donor relationship management, grants, and grants management systems. Secure records of interaction are created that can be used to reduce errors and eliminate virtually all manual steps.
- Secure data through an encrypted platform, client and donor information privacy through closed-loop workflows, and legality of agreements through a digital audit trail for each transaction.
Forrester's Total Economic Impact Study (PDF) on e-signatures showed that there was not only a decrease in paper usage but also a savings of 1.3 hours per transaction due to fewer manual signature steps.
Reduced paper documents saved $11 per transaction. Your organization can reduce shipping costs, paper, ink printers, and scanners. However, e-signature systems can also help you deliver efficiency, cost savings, agility, and customer satisfaction and improve your customers' experience.
Now you can reclaim significant time spent on redundant processes and use it to support your non-profit's mission.
