Why Every Nonprofit Should Be Looking at Slack

“You’ve changed things…forever…there’s no going back,” the Joker calmly informed Batman.

I think of that line in “The Dark Knight” whenever people talk about returning to office post-pandemic. Sure, some companies will oscillate somewhat between fully back and fully remote, but most of the teams we know have found themselves somewhere in the middle with a hybrid setup.

Asynchronous collaboration is going to remain instrumental to organizational and company success. This is also why choosing the right collaboration tool can no longer be a “what’s cheap and generally works” decision. It has to be planned thoughtfully as a pillar of the company’s organizational culture and productivity strategy.

This is often of even greater importance for nonprofits where a large portion of the workload is shared between employees and people outside their organization or not working at a desk from 9 to 5: partners, volunteers, pro-bono services providers, field workers, etc. This is one reason why every nonprofit that does not currently use Slack should be taking a very serious look at it.

Here are five more reasons why:

Slack is Intuitive & Easy to Make Fun 

Have you seen Slack? It’s so fun to use that it is borderline addictive. The ability to customize everything from how you organize threads and channels, to the ease of uploading new emojis and hashtags, makes adoption for many the most fun part of their day. 

With some very basic enablement, Slack can be quickly understood and adopted because it is extremely intuitive. Finding users to message, creating channels, customizing channel and DM (direct message) sections sidebar, using existing emojis, and uploading new emojis are all no-hassle tasks in Slack. This reduces the barrier for team members to start expressing their creativity with it — through fun and interesting social channels and topics, company-specific emojis, and more.

This intuitiveness and flexibility is why Slack has become a uniquely popular tool, especially compared to other tools that often depress morale instead of boosting it (looking at you, Teams).

Slack Lends itself to Crawl, Walk, Run Adoption

Many nonprofits are wildly overextended — and that is on a good day. This makes major adoption projects of new tools difficult and rare. But because Slack is so intuitive and so flexible, it lends itself to a much lower-intensity adoption process with a “crawl, walk, run,” approach. Here are three different ways to do that:

In the first approach, everyone iterates together in a company-wide rollout and iteration process. Stary by allowing everyone to direct message and create channels, then convene a small inter-departmental “task force” to share ongoing feedback, suggest new policies or features, and introduce those policies and features slowly.

The second approach is to utilize the same process, but roll it out team by team, allowing each team’s best ideas to rise to the top and eventually become company-wide.

The third approach is a hybrid model where everyone starts together and early adopter teams then progress faster, allowing the lagging teams to learn from them.

Slack Keeps Getting Better at Delighting Users

One fear you need not have when acquiring Slack is the product ever becoming stale. Since Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021, the pace of innovations in the platform has been remarkably swift. On top of its direct messaging and channels, the foundational bread and butter of Slack, it has subsequently introduced several features for alternate avenues of communication. 

This includes recording video clips that can be posted in channels or direct messages, canvases that act as pared-down documents to organize knowledge for channels and teams, and to-do’s for individuals to manage their own tasks. Additionally, the ability to schedule Slack messages that can be sent, and to “snooze” a message or turn it into a reminder, are ways Slack continues to make even its basic messaging more functional and useful.

All this innovation ensures that as your organization hires employees who are increasingly adept in using digital platforms and have high expectations for their user experience, your collaboration tool will be right there to delight them. One of the reasons some people leave the nonprofit field (as I did in 2015) is the frustration that nonprofits are held back from accessing innovation. Slack proves nonprofits have access to innovative tools and keeps them more competitive in hiring and retaining better talent.

Put Microsoft Back Where It Belongs

Microsoft has been a giant since it created its initial productivity suite and Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook remain industry standards. However, collaboration and productivity are very different core competencies for software. Microsoft Teams is not the gold standard, but an albatross around many Microsoft customers' necks. This is why it is free. People use it not because it is great but because it can be used without additional costs. 

But alas, those days are coming to an end. Microsoft has been ordered to separate Teams, which means Teams will no longer be free for its customers. It will have to transform itself into a far better product or else it will die. Having been at IBM when the good ole’ Lotus system tried to reinvent itself in vain, I know where I’d place my bet.

Even if Teams had a promising future, Microsoft has still made clear it is generally getting out of the Nonprofit game. In July, they notified users that they are retiring their Fundraising & Engagement products, which they had previously championed to rival Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack and Nonprofit Cloud. Now that Microsoft has decided to decrease its investment in nonprofits, perhaps it is time for your nonprofit to consider reciprocating.

Slack + Salesforce Could Be THE Game Changer 

Since Slack joined the Salesforce suite of products, there have been myriad theories for how exactly Salesforce would integrate Slack into its offerings. While everyone assumed its “Chatter” feature would be replaced by Slack, a different picture is now emerging: Users will enter data and do many of the tasks currently done inside Salesforce via their web browser in Slack. In other words, Slack will not only be a user interface for collaboration, but also the primary interface for entering data, running reports, viewing dashboards, logging calls, and emails, etc. 

This picture is a game-changer. It has the potential to supercharge the power of Salesforce by retrofitting one of the world’s best user interfaces. This is the most strategic reason Slack should win out over Teams every time. While Teams will remain a widely used, but hardly loved, tool for virtual meetings and direct messaging, Slack is ready to be the spark your nonprofit needs to turn it into the data-driven organization you’ve been dreaming it could be. 

Interested in chatting about a Slack evaluation for your organization? Let me know on Linkedin.