If you’re still doing everything old school, you’re leaving a lot of fundraising dollars on the table, as well as decreasing your NFP’s overall efficiency.  In today’s highly competitive world, you need to make the best use of available technologies to lower your costs and increase the reach of your messaging.

The following five apps can make it easier to keep your team focused on goals while also helping you get the word out about your cause and the work that you are doing each day to create a positive impact in your community.

Email Management

Your nonprofit’s email list is a valuable asset, as it remains one of the most successful ways to connect with supporters and encourage greater giving. Managing your list can be quite a chore, unless you automate the process. MailChimp allows your followers to sign-up for your mailing list, and automatically handles requests to unsubscribe, which decreases the risk that your messages could be mislabeled as spam by email servers. The service also comes with other helpful features, including analytics that can help you test different messages to learn what types of content your supporters like best. The free platform is fairly robust, but, if your list grows overly large, there are reasonably priced subscription-based plans that are 15% off for nonprofits.

Internal Communications

Need a quick, easy way to divide your workforce into teams and manage their instant messaging and other communications? Slack is a browser-based tool that enables you to easily track the development of ideas as well as create and follow conversations with everyone in your organisation. The best part is that it’s completely free for small teams and its compatible with Join.me and several other video conferencing platforms.

Social Media Management

Posting to all your social media accounts on a regular and consistent basis is difficult when you manually create a post or pin for each account. Tools like Buffer help you to create and schedule posts for all your accounts. This allows you to develop a content calendar and plan out your posts, and automate them, weeks or months in advance, saving you a great deal of time, and, making it easier to encourage greater engagement with your followers. The tool also provides users with helpful analytics, such as offering details about which messages remain opened, and, what time of day your followers prefer to engage with your content. Buffer enables you to test your messaging and continually refine your social media approach. Buffer does offer free plans, but, if you need to go with a paid upgrade, NFPs get a 50% discount.

Stay in the Loop and Up-to-Date on Trending Conversations

Keeping your fingertips on the pulse of Twitter can help you to stay up-to-date on trending topics which enables you to create content that’s more relevant to your supporters. TweetDeck is a completely free app that not only assists you to discover the current hottest topics, but it also helps you to locate and follow conversations by hashtags, as well as enabling you to follow the conversations of one or more Twitter accounts.

Create Great Graphics and Other Designs

The imagery that we use within our posts can make or break its popularity. Canva is a free tool that’s packed with pre-made templates and images so that allows you to create great pics, infographics and other images for all your posts. You can then use the captivating image that you’ve created anywhere, whether you are posting on a social media site like Facebook, or just sending an email to your organisation’s supporters.