Maybe you’ve heard about Microsoft’s Power Platform suite or one of the tools that comprise it—Power BI, Power Automate, and PowerApps—and wondered whether your nonprofit should look into it. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about it and wanted to provide some clarification about what this powerful suite of tools can do and how your nonprofit might use them. Learn Power BI Course and get your dream job.
Individually, each piece offers beneficial features. Power BI is a strong data visualization tool, Power Automate lets you automate complicated or frequent processes or tasks to free up time and increase efficiency, and Power Apps lets you design and create custom apps without knowing a software programming language. But when you connect them together—and to a wide range of other Microsoft and third-party software—these tools combine to create powerful solutions for your organization.
The big advantage is that you can streamline a lot of workflow processes that take up a lot of time, freeing up staff for other things. You can also eliminate errors and create efficiencies by automating the tasks your organization does every day.
In fact, at Tech Impact, we use these tools in a variety of ways.
For example, my team is responsible for, among other things, creating publications and reports for our nonprofit audience. Using Microsoft Forms, we’ve created a content suggestion form that people can use to submit ideas for new publications. Power Automate checks the form every week to see how many submissions there are and emails the team to let us know. We also set triggers and actions in Power Automate so that anytime someone submits an idea and marks it “high priority,” it also emails the team.
Power Automate includes hundreds of pre-designed templates that you modify and customize for your own needs, making it easy to get started. Just set the triggers and actions based on your user-defined criteria. It’s very user-friendly but gets more complicated as your automations grow in complexity. While it connects with most Microsoft solutions, it will also integrate with more than 400 third-party ones.
At Tech Impact, we also use Power BI to create and share our annual report with our audience, our sponsors, and our board of directors. Rather than a static print or PDF report, ours is a dynamic visualization of our key data metrics—everything from how many people have downloaded our publications to how many students our workforce development programs have served. By automating this data gathering and display, we’ve made it easy to share a real-time picture of our work with the world.
