Struggling With Administrative Overhead? Try These 6 Tips

Struggling With Administrative Overhead? Try These 6 Tips

Administrative overhead is the cost of managing any of your organization’s day-to-day operations that are not directly related to a program supporting your mission. The IRS Form 990 sorts expenses into three main categories: program, management and general, and fundraising. In this case, the latter two are considered overhead costs.   

Attitudes toward overhead costs for nonprofits have shifted, and more supporters recognize that these expenses are necessary for nonprofits to deliver their services and make a meaningful impact. However, looking at your current administrative workflows with a critical eye can help you craft a strategic plan to direct more time, energy, and money to your mission. 

This guide explores tips for streamlining administrative tasks to boost efficiency, reduce staff workloads, and invest more in making a difference.

1. Automate repetitive tasks. 

Your staff members likely have a set of tasks they have to complete weekly or even daily. This might be publishing social media content, emailing supporters, transferring data to your CRM, or managing volunteers. While each individual task may seem small on its own, they can strain your team’s bandwidth, leading to stress and burnout. 

Recurring tasks also drain time that could be spent on creative, strategic, or mission-critical activities. For instance, manually copying donor information into your CRM absorbs time and mental energy your fundraising team could be using to build rapport with a potential major donor. To avoid these pitfalls, automate these common repetitive tasks:

• • Sending routine emails, such as welcome emails, tax receipts, thank you emails, volunteer shift reminders, etc.
  • Creating or updating donor profiles based on information from online form submissions (e.g., a donor gives for the first time, and their profile is automatically added to your CRM).
  • Scheduling social media posts to launch at optimal times. 
  • Sending out follow-up surveys after events. 
  • Sharing guided volunteer onboarding materials. 
  • Generating routine weekly or monthly reports (e.g., donations, website traffic, volunteer hours).

Additionally, consider whether your tech stack is well-integrated. Does data move seamlessly from each platform into your CRM, or are staff tasked with manually transferring records? Setting up the necessary integrations, prioritizing data hygiene, and standardizing data entry will completely remove this step and ensure your data is complete and up-to-date.

2. Choose cloud-based technology.

Rather than being stored locally on a single device, cloud-based tools are accessed via the internet and are stored on remote servers. This makes collaboration much easier, increases scalability, and even reduces costs by eliminating hardware expenses and offering more flexible pricing structures. 

Here are a few tips for integrating more cloud-based tech into your operations:

• • Transfer documents to cloud storage. Use a tool like Google Drive or Dropbox to securely store documents, spreadsheets, slides, and more in a database your entire team can access at any time. Confirm any other solutions, like digital waiver software or volunteer scheduling tools, use a cloud-based model to promote seamless collaboration. 
  • Encourage staff adoption. Have staff exclusively use these cloud-based tools to enable real-time collaboration. This will eliminate the need to send files back and forth or to make manual updates, saving time and boosting productivity.
  • Create an organized information hub. Use folders, tagging, filters, search functions, or whatever other features your cloud-based tool offers to organize the information. It should be quick and easy for any team member to independently find a given resource. 

Consider creating guidelines for using these tools to ensure your centralized information hub stays organized. For example, set up rules for naming files (e.g., [Month] Revenue Report_[Year]) so your staff can easily search for and locate the resources they need.

3. Go fully digital.

If your nonprofit still uses paper forms, consider fully switching over to digital versions. As Smartwaiver’s guide explains, digital documents are:

• • Faster and easier to store, eliminating the need to print, share, collect, and file physical documents.
  • Simple to locate, allowing staff to look up specific forms by searching a name or other identifying information.
  • More secure, protecting any sensitive information about your nonprofit and its supporters.
  • Easier to analyze, helping you make the most of data gathered via waivers, volunteer sign-up forms, or event registrations.
  • Able to provide better user experiences by allowing users to access them from anywhere, on any device.
  • More accessible, allowing you to easily update font sizes, languages, etc.

You’ll also save money on printing costs and become a more sustainable organization by reducing paper use. If possible, integrate your digital form solution with your CRM or ensure it uses a cloud-based model for simple sharing and collaboration.

4. Simplify volunteer management. 

Without the right tools and strategies, managing your volunteer program can be a huge time sink. Tasks like running background checks, managing onboarding for new volunteers, collecting volunteer liability waivers, and creating balanced schedules can easily become a full-time job. 

In addition to automating simple rote tasks, your team can make volunteer management more efficient by: 

• • Using a central volunteer management system. Adopt a volunteer management system to serve as a central hub for managing applications, scheduling, communication, and tracking. Ensure the data is shared with your CRM to prevent data silos that could make it hard to track your program’s performance. 
  • Digitize onboarding. Make onboarding as hands-free as possible for your staff by going digital. Create a guided course for new volunteers to complete, including documents with necessary information as well as multimedia elements like training videos or interactive quizzes. As mentioned above, share the onboarding materials automatically with new volunteers when they are accepted into the program.
  • Implement self-service where possible. Give volunteers the opportunity to independently manage their schedules. Allow them to view opportunities, sign up for shifts independently, and receive automated reminders. This prevents time-consuming, back-and-forth scheduling emails with your volunteer coordinator, freeing up their time. 
  • Simplify hours tracking. Ideally, your volunteer management tool should have built-in hours tracking tools. Using digital time-tracking rather than paper sign-in sheets provides more accurate, real-time data. Plus, none of your staff members will need to manually enter hours.

The right tools can also help you offer more consistent recognition and feedback with less work. For example, you might use your volunteer management software to automatically flag key milestones, like serving 50 hours. For those milestones, you may recognize the team member for their efforts with a handwritten note and offer a fun prize, like a VIP invitation to an event or free branded merchandise.

5. Streamline your financial processes. 

Tracking and reporting your finances, managing grant applications and funding, and overseeing fundraising activities can add up. These processes can also be technical and complex for team members who aren’t finance experts. To streamline your financials, consider:

• • Using nonprofit-specific accounting tools. Nonprofits track and report their finances differently from for-profit businesses. Using a tool designed for nonprofits will help you properly track items such as grants and different types of donations without needing to create special workarounds or configurations.
  • Integrate giving and accounting. Connect your online donation platform directly with your accounting system to automatically track income. This will save a significant amount of time, particularly after large campaigns or peaks in giving (e.g., Giving Tuesday).
  • Create simple financial policies. Prevent your financial data or processes from getting messy in the first place by outlining some rules. For example, clarify who has the authority to approve expenses, the steps needed to submit reimbursement requests, and guidelines for using the nonprofit’s debit or credit cards.
  • Ask skilled volunteers for help. Have any volunteers with bookkeeping or accounting experience? Ask them if they would be willing to provide pro bono services, give advice, or assist with financial management tasks. 

Keep in mind that for large organizations or those with more complex financial needs, outsourcing these services can be more cost-effective. Many organizations hire bookkeepers, accountants, and even chief financial officers (CFOs) to help them track, manage, and make decisions about their finances. While this is technically another overhead cost you’ll need to cover, the experts can often deliver much better results on a faster timeline.

6. Consolidate internal communication channels. 

Communicating internally can put a strain on your staff members, just as managing external interactions with your supporters can. The first step in reducing this strain is to choose a single communication channel for your internal communications and stick to it. This should be whatever best suits your nonprofit’s needs, whether that’s email or a dedicated messaging platform like Slack. 

Once you’ve migrated all internal conversations over to a single platform, establish basic rules to help keep things organized and timely. For example, have staff use abbreviations like AR (Action Required) or RR (Response Requested) in email subject lines so the recipient knows what is expected of them. Or, share best practices like using bullet points or bold text to improve clarity. 

These steps can help cut down on back-and-forth between staff and external stakeholders, saving time on communications. Additionally, it will be much easier for them to track down specific threads or conversations when everything is stored in one channel rather than across three or four.

Reducing administrative overhead doesn’t have to involve a massive overhaul of all the processes and tasks you need to keep your nonprofit running. Instead, start with low-lift improvements or simply pick one of these areas to streamline this week. Evaluate how new workflows feel by seeking feedback from staff, and encourage them to redirect the time and resources they save back into your mission.

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