ORGANIZATION: Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners
WEBSITE: Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners - Plymouth, MN
MISSION STATEMENT: To strengthen our community by meeting basic needs and equipping individuals and families for ongoing stability.
ORGANIZATION’S CHALLENGE:
At the start of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Interfaith Outreach and Community Partners quickly moved all files from servers to SharePoint and Teams. As a result of this urgency, things weren’t set up correctly and now leaders are facing challenges with user access, a proliferation of sites, and too many security groups. With support from tech experts, they’d like to audit their SharePoint and Teams set-ups, determine a plan for correcting issues, and gain knowledge to improve frameworks going forward.
The Director of Finance and Operations manages tech at the organization and has learned that SharePoint access is determined based on email groups, Teams groups, and individual requests. The office manager assists with onboarding new employees and often needs to go back and add additional SharePoint and Teams access once an employee gets started as it’s difficult to determine everything a new person needs without clear guidelines. Another issue is too many administrator permissions on SharePoint and Teams, and as a result, some employees have created their own sites or bypass the system by saving files on their computer. Staff are also running into file storage issues as the organization has gone too many layers deep in the system, which causes errors in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. This makes sharing and storing files difficult and adds to workloads. Leaders are attempting to clean things up and move applicable items to a staff Intranet site but need guidance on what the best practices are.
With support from tech experts, leaders want to gain a framework for improving tech systems going forward. Spending time determining the ideal SharePoint set up for their organization is desired, as well as correcting as many issues as possible. Leaders would like to define security groups, learn how to fix what’s existing, and how to maintain this system as people join and leave the organization. Overall, they’re seeing fewer issues in Teams but would also like to review its connection to SharePoint and Microsoft 365 and gain a better understanding of how these systems are all connected.
With knowledge of how to improve system set-ups, staff can implement positive changes going forward.
POTENTIAL DELIVERABLE(S):
• SharePoint and Teams set-up audits
• Short- and long-term recommendations
• Best practices framework tailored to organization
REQUESTED VOLUNTEER SKILL SETS: Business Systems Analysis, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 & Teams expertise
These spots are for the 2-3 Pro Bono Consultants - Pro bono consultants give their time and expertise to the challenge, supporting the nonprofit and team in finding a solution to the challenge and working toward the agreed upon deliverable.
