Why Do Nonprofit Organizations Need an LMS?

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Nonprofit organizations help people around the world through their charity work. They provide medical aid, educational assistance, disaster relief, food, and shelter to communities in distress.

Additionally, they run various campaigns and programs all around the globe to spread awareness and empower people. This requires a huge team of people who can streamline the entire process.

Earlier, nonprofit organizations did this team-building through intensive training in classrooms. The instructor would guide members about how to start and spread the campaign. The organization also distributed campaign-related material, including posters and banners. The team would then start working as their managers instructed.

In 2020, the pandemic exposed new caveats in traditional training. Many nonprofit organizations began to realize how important it is to shift the mode of training from offline to online. This minimizes their costs while also helping create a more productive and efficient team.

Even on a shoestring budget, nonprofit organizations can successfully train and upskill their teams using cost-effective, contemporary, alterable learning management systems to leverage and support a wide range of learning and development programs.

What Is a Learning Management System?

A learning management system (LMS) is a web-based technology that helps in planning, delivering, and evaluating training and learning. It is the best tool to provide skillful training to employees. For instance, many corporations use sales enablement software, an LMS for marketing and sales.

What Are the Benefits of an LMS for a Nonprofit Organization?

1. Facilitating Training

The main objective of a nonprofit organization is to support a cause or fulfill the needs of communities. It can achieve this by providing training, collaborative activities, and other resources for its members, volunteers, and staff on a global scale. With the help of an LMS, a nonprofit organization can provide a range of online training courses to their staff and volunteer groups through an easy-to-use, easily accessible online platform.

2. Reduced Costs

In traditional training, the nonprofit organization incurs a huge cost. However, an LMS reduces training costs. For example, an LMS brings down:

Maintenance costs, including money spent on infrastructure maintenance (chairs, benches, building maintenance, and so on).
Instructors’ fees. An organization can spend a great deal of money on instructors’ fees. What’s more, if an instructor is an outsider they may charge exorbitant fees. On the other hand, if they are an in-house subject matter expert, then that person is diverted from core activities. Again, this wastes time and money.
Costs for training materials. An organization might spend a good amount of money on posters, banners, and paper pamphlets. This can get expensive.
Traveling costs. For running campaigns, members sometimes travel from one place to another. Their travel-related expenses are another major cost.

An LMS completely eradicates the need for a nonprofit organization to spend money on the above-mentioned categories.

3. Centralized Storage

An LMS comes equipped with a centralized online training library. This is where all the eLearning content and confidential material can be stored.

The LMS even comes with more advanced safeguards. These can include IP blockers, anti-spam, anti-virus, and restricted registration based on the domain. Moreover, password protection can ensure that no one except the eLearning project managers and online instructors can access sensitive information.

4. Just-in-Time Support

With an LMS, online learners can access the eLearning material with just one click. So even if you’re traveling or eating or it’s the middle of the night, you can learn from anywhere, anytime. There is no fixed time for getting training. Of course, this differs from traditional classroom-based training where one had to be physically present.

5. Mobile Responsiveness

Today, almost everyone holds a mobile phone in their hands. So even if you don’t have a laptop or desktop, you can still get good training.

This is because, with a mobile phone, online training is becoming a more feasible option for online learning. Online learners can attend webinars, connect with fellow learners, and reap the benefits of online training materials on their mobile devices conveniently.

6. Automated Tracking

Nonprofit organizations need to track and evaluate their teams or members regularly. Gone is the time when one had to use Excel Spreadsheets or similar ways to track data.

Today, we can do all of this automatically through an LMS, including full reporting and data export. The system tracks online learners’ overall activities. For example, it keeps track of a student’s engagement level as well as how many times they have accessed the eLearning course material. It also notes the number of watch hours or videos the online instructors have uploaded.

7. Increased Donations for Nonprofit Organizations

Not only can an LMS help educate your development team, but it can also be used to train and educate volunteers to attract donations. This can be helpful in the following ways:

Training the members to write compelling grant proposals.
Providing eLearning courses that can help in building strong relationships with donors. The online training course can help staff and volunteers develop good communication skills and persuasion abilities.
Additionally, some nonprofits choose to sell their courses online to those outside their organization. Thus, an LMS equipped with an excellent payment gateway can enable seamless transactions. This is a source of revenue for them.

8. Compliance Training for Nonprofit Organizations

Most nonprofit organizations are strictly regulated by the government. To ensure that the members of the organization adhere to internal and external rules and regulations, compliance training is a must. Hence, necessary training must be provided to comply with the law. This includes financial oversight, business practices, safety, and so on.

The eLearning project managers and online instructors can create eLearning course modules that strengthen compliance training.

After training, certifications can be given to a member or online learners that will boost their morale.

9. Unifying a Global Work Force

Many of the volunteers of a nonprofit organization are spread across different geographical boundaries. All of them require online training material which is in sync with their native language. With an LMS, the online training material can be translated into a language based on the online learner’s location.

The online instructors can also assign eLearning group projects to increase collaboration among volunteers.

Creating a mentorship online program is another way of unifying teams around the globe.

An LMS Benefits Nonprofit Organizations

An LMS is of great benefit to nonprofit organizations. It offers the best customizable, scalable, and affordable learning. With this, it is possible to attend live conferences via a video link if the conference is happening far away. Thus, an LMS can help in expanding the volunteer base as well.