As the holiday season approaches, nonprofit organizations are busier than ever, finding creative ways to give back to their communities. With so much going on, running into operational issues stemming from inefficient use of resources or spaces can derail their work. Whether it’s finding room for a growing volunteer team, coordinating events, or maximizing limited office space, nonprofits face unique space management hurdles that can slow down their efforts to give.
Workplace management solutions like Skedda can empower nonprofits to streamline their operations and focus more on what matters: giving back. See how Skedda can help nonprofits make the most of every space and resource so they can focus on the mission-driven work that matters most to them.
How Skedda Streamlines Hybrid Work for Nonprofits To Focus on Their Mission
Limited resources. Aging infrastructure. Complex regulations and compliance requirements. These are just some of the challenges nonprofits must solve while maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for all. Nonprofits must streamline operations and manage their resources more efficiently. Below, we detail the obstacles nonprofits must overcome to ensure a successful hybrid working model.
Maximize Limited Resources and Budgets
Nonprofits often need to operate within strict financial limits, making it essential to minimize overhead. Lack of visibility into when and how spaces are used can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. A workplace management platform like Skedda can help reduce costs by identifying and optimizing underutilized spaces.
Improve your space utilization with Skedda’s Workplace Intelligence.
Skedda’s platform includes an analytics dashboard that offers insights into space utilization, including popular times, downtimes, and resource allocation. Nonprofits can leverage this information to optimize workflows and make informed resource-planning decisions, helping to maximize resources and reduce unnecessary costs.
For example, Trent & Dove—a nonprofit social housing provider in the UK—used Skedda to determine if they should transform one of their meeting rooms into another team hub. Through Skedda’s utilization insights, the nonprofit determined that the room was regularly used, much more than the team believed based on anecdotes. Thus, they scrapped the idea and avoided the meeting room supply and demand disaster.
Robust rules and roles:
Nonprofits generally have limited workspaces to perform specific tasks. Skedda’s robust rules and roles engine allows organizations to decide how and when people can book their dedicated spaces so that the required workspace is available when needed:
- Booking conditions: Establish specific restrictions and limits for each booking, including setting restrictions on who can book specific workstations, the booking time frame, and any additional requirements. For instance, nonprofits can decide that only the “Staff” tag can book certain spaces.
- Quotas: Limit the overall usage of spaces (by individuals or groups) within a given time to ensure various teams or roles can book these spaces. For instance, events aren’t allowed to run over certain hours to ensure that programming runs smoothly.
- Buffer time: Create time gaps between consecutive bookings, which can be helpful for setup and cleanup.
- Advanced booking window: Decide how far in advance users can make bookings, ensuring equitable access and optimal planning. Different workspaces may have varying booking windows based on specific requirements or levels of importance.
Skedda’s check-in functionality helps prevent ghost bookings and maximize space use.
To keep the reservation, people must check in to their reservations within the allotted check-in window. Skedda’s check-in functionality helps deter ghost bookings—where people book a space and fail to show up—or extended bookings of one space. For The University of East London, Skedda’s check-in functionality has helped combat ghost-booking behavior, ensuring that empty rooms are available for others and helping staff manage the cultural shift to hot desking.
“We had a culture where people had their own offices, and now no one has their own office. In the beginning, we found that some people were block-booking a meeting space for long periods and not using it for the entire duration or not showing up altogether.” - Caroline Purcell, the Lead for Deans Projects at Royal Docks School of Business and Law
Streamline Use of Shared Spaces
Many nonprofits manage shared spaces (offices, meeting rooms, event venues) where coordination can be challenging. Balancing the needs of multiple programs under one roof can quickly become an operations nightmare.
Skedda’s user-friendly scheduling helps nonprofits streamline space allocation, ensuring that volunteers and staff can coordinate usage efficiently.
Nonprofits don’t need an IT team or a robust tech stack to get the platform up and running. Trent & Dove had great success implementing Skedda: 71% of Trent & Dove employees reported positive feedback to the Skedda rollout. Higher satisfaction leads to higher adoption, which is important to ensure everyone uses the tool to make space sharing easier.
Learn More: Rolling Out a Desk Booking System? 3 Steps to Guarantee Adoption
Skedda’s custom interactive maps make finding the right space for your needs easy.
Seeing the custom floor plan and amenities beforehand can be a huge time and energy saver for staff and volunteers who may always be showing up to new places for their work. For instance, Trent & Dove found that Skedda’s well-designed floor plans could also work for wayfinding, so they added printers, bathrooms, and stairs to the map. Skedda provided an excellent solution for finding their way around the building. With Skedda’s Space Attributes, staff and volunteers can even filter spaces based on type, capacity, or custom tags, helping to speed up the search for the perfect space.
“Before Skedda, we did not have a digital map of the office layout for room bookings. The team relied on descriptions and that led to inefficient use of resources as people booked rooms that were too large or did not have the amenities they needed.” - Emma Cantrill-Jones, IT Project Manager at Trent & Dove
Nonprofits can use Skedda to organize their spaces into office neighborhoods.
Office neighborhoods can be dedicated to particular departments, job functions, project needs, or equipment requirements. They can have various interconnected spaces that support different types of work. The organizations can help staff and volunteers more easily use the spaces as intended, leading to less conflict and surprises.
For instance, the Educational Partnership & Innovation Trust (EPIT)—a philanthropically-funded organization—has had great success using Skedda for various office neighborhoods. That’s important to them because they manage a workspace shared by various nonprofits and small businesses, making optimal space use even more crucial. Using Skedda, they organized their office into various spaces, including a flexible space area, pod desks, hot desks, and conferencing rooms.
Learn more: How to Create Hybrid Office Neighborhoods With Skedda
Simplify Staff and Volunteer Coordination
With so many moving parts, managing volunteers and their workspace needs can be difficult without a streamlined system. Skedda’s customizable permissions allow different groups (staff, volunteers, donors) to book spaces according to the nonprofits’ policies.
Nonprofits can easily coordinate shifts using Skedda’s tag-based segmentation.
Skedda allows organizations to assign user tags to individuals based on specific criteria, such as staff, volunteers, or donors. Leveraging different user tags can help manage and schedule staff and volunteer rotations. It also allows people with specific tags to reserve desks or workstations for particular shifts or time slots, ensuring adequate coverage and smooth transitions between shifts.
Nonprofits can set up meetings in the apps they already use with Skedda’s two-way calendar sync.
Skedda integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to make booking meetings and inviting attendees easier by using the apps many nonprofits already use. Skedda’s booking platform syncs with your Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar to ensure your meetings are synced, up-to-date, and double-booking free. Easy bookings further make coordinating easier among distributed teams.
Learn more about Skedda’s effortless two-way calendar sync.
Skedda Visitor Management supports easy check-in and check-out.
Gone are the days when you needed to assign a staff member to check volunteers in and out manually. Skedda Visitor Management lets volunteers self-check in when they show up for their shifts. The platform automatically notifies the host when their volunteers have arrived, making the whole experience more welcoming. By checking in and out this way, Skedda also keeps a digital list of volunteer names and statuses, which can be helpful for safety and security purposes.
See all new updates to Skedda Visitor Management.
Reduce Communication Gaps
Nonprofit staff and volunteers are always on the move, which can lead to communication gaps on where people need to go and when they need to be there. Having a way to quickly make updates to bookings can ensure that information is up-to-date and accurate.
Skedda’s mobile booking app lets staff and volunteers reserve workspaces and equipment on the go.
Many nonprofit workers are constantly moving because they may need to meet clients and community members in various places. Skedda’s mobile platform reduces communication gaps by seamlessly displaying available desks, rooms, and shared equipment on your phone. People can easily see what their colleagues have booked and for what time. This is helpful for the organization as a whole to know where people are and also helpful for the person making the booking to be reminded of their reservation.
Easily check who will be in the office with Skedda’s integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Skedda’s integration with Microsoft Teams and Slack brings visibility to who will be in the office and when they will be there, encouraging staff to go into the office and streamlining in-person collaboration. Staff is also more likely to use this functionality because they will be using the apps they’re already familiar with.
See Skedda’s integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams to see who’s in the office.
The Power of Giving Back With Smarter Space Management
By utilizing hybrid spaces effectively to foster collaboration, productivity, and well-being, nonprofits can free up resources for the mission-driven work that matters most to them. Skedda’s workplace management platform helps optimize operations and spaces, improving organizational impact that achieves efficient space usage and cost reductions. Streamlining internal operations enables nonprofits to redirect those resources into programming and service delivery, helping them expand their reach and impact in the communities they serve.
If you’re ready to start managing your workspaces more effectively, create your free Skedda account today.