How Adobe Acrobat Pro can help you grow your non-profit

How Adobe Acrobat Pro can help you grow your non-profit

How Adobe Acrobat Pro can help you grow your non-profit

Growth is hard. It is a problem that perplexes people of all market segnments. How do I scale my non-profit without sacrificing momentum? What are the risks of accelerating that growth?

The truth is there is no simple answer to this question, but there is a methodology I abide by that has helped: collaboration.

You are only as strong as your team, and your team is only as strong as its ability to collaborate and perform. Adobe Acrobat Pro can help streamline that process to ignite growth in your non-profit. With Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, your team is empowered to quickly create, share, review, and edit documents between team members.

Building and keeping your documents organized

A growing non-profit can only be built on top of a strong foundation. Organization, digitization, and systems that actually work are critical. With Adobe Document Cloud, you can easily manage and store all of your files you have built up through the years. Once files are uploaded, you can easily navigate with the sort, filter and search features.

With all your documents gathered right at your fingertips, collaboration is a snap. With Adobe Acrobat, you can create a PDF from any file format, or even combine files to create an aggregated document. We have used this to create all different types of documents including contracts, job descriptions, internal memos and product roadmaps.

Sharing team documents

With Acrobat Pro DC, we can share documents throughout the entire non-profit. If you’re dealing with confidential documents, the level of access can be personalized by the creator. This level of access can be determined on whether or not that individual needs to sign a document (e.g. a contract) via the Adobe Sign tool, just view the document or be able to review and make edits.

This feature can also come in handy with volunteer turnover. You can just as easily take away access to documents as you can grant access. This provides security for your company when employees move on to new opportunities.

You can also grant access to people outside of your non-profit, such as contractors or clients. We work with contractors and clients that use every storage solution you can think of. Fortunately, Adobe Document Cloud can be connected to programs like Google Drive or DropBox to assist in retrieving shared files.

Establishing an approval system

Sharing documents is important, but the real name of the collaboration game is review. With Acrobat Pro DC, it’s as simple as the “Share for Review” tool. Simply add team members’ email addresses, click “send,” and you’re ready to go. This works great with internal teams, but is also powerful for driving external reviews – even if the reviewer doesn’t have an Acrobat Pro DC subscription.

Two major issues in review cycles are lost data and version control. The review tool prevents both of these, giving final document ownership to the sender. It’s even easy to make sure all the edits have been made, check for accuracy, or spot mistakes. With the “Compare Files” tool, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the two versions. Once something has been reviewed and updated, you can utilize the “stamp” function to show approval.

We all make mistakes; that is why it is important to have a strong system of approval and review within your non-profit. I find that using Acrobat helps hold people within the organization accountable, therefore increasing the quality of work.

There is not one fool-proof solution to growth. It takes a lot of work and problem solving to get there. With Adobe Document Cloud’s streamlined processes, you can take your non-profit one step closer to where you want it to go.