OneDesk for Nonprofits

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Non-profit organizations function like any other business even though profit is not the primary goal. With limited resources and funding from government, members, and donors, nonprofits struggle to invest in software and tools that could transform their workflow. This makes it challenging to choose the appropriate software that could reduce their workload. These organizations need solutions for stakeholder management, a knowledge base to answer questions and project management to plan fundraisers or volunteer programs. This is why it makes sense to select multi-faceted software with versatile features that could target one or more functions.

OneDesk is a combination of HelpDesk and Project Management in one application. With OneDesk, you can support your customers and manage projects without the need to purchase, learn, integrate, and switch between multiple applications. OneDesk provides a turnkey solution for non-profit organizations to automatically capture requests from stakeholders, and reply to them on time. If these requests require additional work on your end, tasks can be assigned to your teams and accomplished within project hours.

In this panel, you can create projects and portfolios. These portfolios act as containers for your projects. Portfolios can be titled according to the customer name, client organization, the project type, or the departments in your operation managing the assigned projects.

This will allow you to organize the projects related to their respective portfolios. You can then monitor how the projects are progressing in this specific portfolio.
In each of these projects, you will be able to view the stakeholder inquiries & planned assignments using the Tickets and Tasks applications.

The ticket application allows you to track and manage support tickets that come in as a result of stakeholder requests. These requests can be submitted in multiple ways.

The first way is through receiving the request through the live chat application on your website. OneDesk’s live chat application is a customer-facing application geared towards promoting stakeholder communication. You can customize the app by adding your company colours, logo and including BOT avatar. Once the donor messages you via live chat, your team members can view this in their Messenger application, reply, and create the ticket from the conversation. In doing so, OneDesk links the ticket and conversation together, enabling your team to view all the necessary data from one platform.

The second way is by auto-forwarding your support email to the email address found here. When a stakeholder sends an email to your support email address, OneDesk will capture that email and generate a ticket. All the critical information in the email will be captured on the ticket.

Anytime a stakeholder or a donor sends an email request, OneDesk automatically creates a customer record and categorizes the requester of the ticket according to their organization. Alternatively, your donors, volunteers or contributors can also submit tickets via the customer portal feature that OneDesk provides.

This portal allows your stakeholders to submit tickets to you, communicate with your team members, and review their tickets. You can enable viewing options for potential and existing donors or other end-users to filter tickets according to ticket request type, the project it belongs to, and more.

You can set up customizable webforms for your stakeholders to complete, which generates tickets on your dashboard. These forms can require the stakeholders to provide information that you need to resolve the problem. You can also make custom workflows that start with these forms.

The default web form looks like this. To customize this webform, click here. You will be able to set certain fields as required, rename existing fields, and add additional fields, including custom fields.

For example, you can create a webform for potential donors who may have questions about your donation programs. They can navigate to your customer portal and select the webform titled ‘Donation Programs.’ You can then add the standard or customized fields to capture the appropriate information needed to resolve the ticket. You can also configure these fields to be required to ensure all necessary information is captured.

Once your donor completes the selected webform, you will generate a ticket in your Ticket application in OneDesk.

The ticket allows you to see the details that were filled out on the webform. You can then assign this ticket to a specific individual, team or department. OneDesk allows you to assign multiple team members and departments to a ticket. However, you can eliminate manually assigning teams through automating the process.

Many times, non-profits keep track of their stakeholder requests by formatting those data into excel sheets. You can convert your excel file into a CSV file and import it into your OneDesk account.

OneDesk can automate your workflow and eliminate any manual intervention to route tickets to the appropriate team. With OneDesk’s workflow automations, you can route items to teams and projects, auto-reply to end-users, add custom notifications, and much more.

Many non-profit organizations utilize OneDesk’s workflow automations to set up auto-assignments to maximize efficiency. The way to do this is by navigating to your administration settings and clicking on the ticket tab.

You can create new workflow automations or edit an existing one. Select the user or teams that you want to designate for the specific ticket type. This way, the assignment will rotate between the users each time a new ticket is created. In doing so, your team will be able to manage their workload more efficiently. An evenly distributed ticket rotation will allow you to provide the best service to your stakeholders.

Another way to increase your efficiency is by using an automation to respond to tickets from your stakeholders. You can do this by simply creating an auto-reply generated by your BOT. This will inform the requester that a ticket has been created on your end and it is being worked on by your team.

Communication is an essential part of stakeholder relations. Therefore it is necessary to follow up on any emails sent by members, donors or volunteers.

If a stakeholder wants to follow-up on their ticket, they can either respond via email or create conversations directly from the portal. This message will appear in the messenger and will also be linked to that specific ticket.

Your team members can reply to this existing conversation to communicate with the end-user, or can create internal messages for their team members. Internal conversations are hidden from end-users as it is displayed as an ‘Internal Reply’. This is useful since it allows team members to resolve the ticket through collaborative efforts and provide more accurate information to the stakeholder.

Additionally, stakeholders can also initiate engagement through the Livechat application feature in OneDesk. The live chat enables your stakeholders to send attachments and carry out conversations in real-time. Since chat formats are instantaneous in nature, questions or problems can be resolved immediately by your team members. Apart from that, OneDesk’s live chat feature also timestamps the conversation, which helps your team to check conversation time in case of any dispute.

Tickets require immediate action and can be resolved quickly. However, when a ticket becomes a two-tiered job that involves additional work or planning, it becomes a task. You can convert those tickets into a task or simply create a new task in the Task application. Next let’s take a look at the project management side of OneDesk.

Your team members can log their time on tasks in OneDesk and enter the percentage complete of the assigned tasks. Work is logged by creating a timesheet or running a task timer. When submitting a timesheet, you fill out how much work was done, the current status of this item, percentage complete, etc.

For instance, you can break down a large project by planning a fundraiser into simple tasks by assigning them to your team members based on their expertise. You can also create a planning schedule for a specific task, helping you to manage your project hours.

We understand planning fundraisers and writing the event rollout requires collaboration. In that case, you can carry out conversations from the task form. By engaging with your team members, you can produce a higher quality of work and cover all the details associated with planning events. You can also attach and send important folders to multiple individuals or teams, allowing them to quickly locate the attachments and download them into their computers.

You can organize your tasks inside the project structure or add them to different folders or portfolios within the project. You could create a project template for similar recurring projects, such as your annual reports or newsletters. Simply clone the project each time you work on a similar project.

You can use the standard or customized viewing options to monitor the progress of these tasks. The standard viewing layouts in OneDesk are as follows:

The Tree view arranges tickets or tasks in a hierarchy.

The Flat view shows the tickets and tasks without the hierarchy structure.

The Gantt chart shows your planning versus your actual work and allows you to create task dependencies to lead your team members to finish one task before starting the next.

The Status board arranges all the tasks by their lifecycle statuses. You can drag and drop the task to change its status.

The Calendar view displays all the tasks’ schedules to keep you informed when a task is due.

The dashboard organizes all the tickets in the form of graphs and pie charts. These charts can be downloaded in different formats. You can use the charts for your annual report, newsletters or any report for your stakeholders.

On OneDesk, you can create all the views you need to help you manage your tickets and tasks. My Views allow you to customize views according to your requirements. To create your personalized views, you need to select a layout and add filters, groups and columns.

OneDesk allows you to create timesheet reports, which are CSV files that can be imported in Microsoft Excel. These reports are data records of timesheet properties presented in a tabular data format. Item name, priority, billing type, requester name are some necessary information that can be shown within the timesheet reports. However, other critical information, such as the percentage completed, can be displayed for internal reporting. OneDesk timesheet application allows the administrator to delve deeper when creating reports. Therefore timesheet reports could exhibit internal data such as assignee name, the appointed team and more.

You can also create more in-depth reports in OneDesk.

You may be wondering how all parties can stay up to date. By default, email notifications go out to the tickets followers for any status change or message you send. Similarly, your stakeholders can look for updates in their customer portal, and additional notifications with workflow automations can be established.

Additionally, you can find integrations with other services here.

OneDesk allows you to complete all your work on one platform. You can easily integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks and create your financial reports without signing out of your OneDesk account. Additionally, you can also integrate with other applications. OneDesk has its in-built integrations that allow you seamlessly integrate with other services. You can also integrate with the 2000+ applications supported by Zapier.

OneDesk has all the capabilities to streamline your workflow. With OneDesk, you can capture, automate, manage and track your support tickets, allowing you and your team to take the necessary measures to resolve the problem immediately. With OneDesk’s project management features, you can assign work to the appropriate team and track your projects’ progress in multiple viewing layouts.

Your team members can submit their timesheets for all their work, enabling you to better manage your hours. In addition, OneDesk also helps to keep your stakeholders in the loop. Through customer applications such as web forms and customer portals, your members, donors, volunteers, and contributors can contact you with specific requests, eliminating the problems associated with long email threads.

As a non-profit, you qualify for a 30 % discount on any subscription plan of OneDesk. Signup for Free Trial, and, if you have questions, we are here to help you get started.

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