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Training Challenges faced by Not-for-Profit (NFP) Organizations

Around the world, NFP and other charitable institutions are massively growing. In Australia alone, more than 600,000 not-for-profit, trusts, foundations, and other ancillary funds units are actively working. Philanthropic practice is becoming common and is widely known as the third sector or the community sector of society.

As a result, charitable organizations are employing more people than ever before. Employees of such organizations also deserve quality training and development material that helps them to continue doing great work to be able to craft a niche and also to be able to cope with the changing dynamics and realities.

With the implementation of LMS, better training modules can be executed that will significantly reduce the burden on L&D teams by incorporating blended learning and eliminating the setbacks of face-to-face training modules, this will increase efficiency, reduce costs and empower the employees towards a more focused and productive purpose.

Let’s review the top 4 challenges that NFP organizations face and how an LMS can be one of the best and most cost-effective ways to overcome those training challenges.

Challenge 1: Geographically Diverse Learners

With the immense growth the NFP industry is witnessing, they can’t have all their employees in one location. They have to spread themselves across many outlets and offices to achieve significant goals like more coverage for their work, cost savings, efficiency, and increased agility.  

However, not everything is perfect, despite so many benefits it becomes impossible for the organizations to gather their employees for training workshops in a single location, they are a bad fit for dispersed teams as-

  •  Training workshops require the services of a skilled instructor to ensure the training content is engaging and consistent.
  • A minimum number of employees is required to conduct a workshop considering the expenses.
  •  They cannot run on demand, meaning the training can only be conducted if the team can gather every employee’s consent.

How can LMS help?

With the help of a Learning Management System like Thinkific, the team can overcome this challenge easily. With an integrated training creation tool, the company can quickly build training content that is accessible to all, no matter their location, age, equipment, or skills. 

Also, with an LMS learners can set and follow their own pace ensuring the training material is fully understood by them, this increases their working efficiency to a great extent.

The allocation of urgent and critical information can be delivered quickly to ensure everyone stays in the loop. New information can be quickly distributed amongst the team with tracking, reminding, and reporting features.

Challenge 2: Limited Budget

Not-for-profit organizations generally, work with a tighter budget compared to other sectors. Over and above that, creating workshops imposes an additional burden on the organization. Many expenses are not even directly related to training purposes like workbook printing, travel expenses, facilitator costs, traveling time, venue booking, etc.

Despite many strengths workshops have like interactive sessions, team-based activities, breakout sessions, a detailed discussion of case studies, etc, it proves to be a less effective method of delivering training content. Moreover, being on a strict budget rope, it becomes highly crucial to ensure every penny spent on training is worth it.

How can LMS help?

LMS proves to be a game changer in such scenarios. Choosing an effective LMS can drastically cut down training costs by eliminating unnecessary expenses that are not related to imparting fruitful knowledge to the learners. This includes:

  • No set-up fees
  • Discounts for Non-profit organizations
  • Choosing a model that works according to active user subscriptions

This doesn’t just cut down expenses but also increases training output to a large extent.

Challenge 3: Customized Training

Every NFP has its own set of challenges, procedures, and standards to follow. Drafting a content piece that is accurate, updated, and relevant is highly difficult. Employees at such organizations need accurate and relevant information to guide them to become better at what they do. Hence, the data drafting team has to adopt a strategic approach for content delivery:

  • Firstly, they have to localize their content according to their employee’s country of residence. Also, the information should be presented in a way that reflects the company’s rules, cultures and values very clearly.
  • Secondly, the custom training material has to be presented in a way that describes their methods and way of working clearly to its employees and volunteers. From fundraising to case studies discussions to team expansion, everything should be presented in a way that is easily understood by all.

How can LMS help?

Switching over to LMS for training can help solve such complex issues. It can be achieved by providing the most appropriate and localized version of the course (geographically speaking) for their employee’s better learning. It can be based on their country of residence. LMS can make the process easier by capturing internal knowledge and distributing it amongst the learners engagingly and helpfully.

Challenge 4: Lack of Training Staff

NFP organizations work on strict budgets, and most of them don’t even have sufficient funds for large L&D teams. In short, they have lesser in-house IT employees and hence they face several training challenges such as:

  • Difficulty in organizing in-person workshops.
  • Difficulty in devoting separate time for conducting and managing training.
  • Monitoring completion rates of learners like reminders.
  • Difficulty in hosting virtual webinars due to lack of IT support staff, and more.

How can LMS help?

When your NFP doesn’t have adequate IT support, it’s in dire need of an automated integral system to take care of tasks all by itself so no or minimum IT support is required. It can also manage training at scale. A good LMS can help overcome the difficulties of online training and also help save costs.

Conclusion:

An ideal LMS for NFP helps in effectively training your staff to make them well-equipped in facing challenges to become more productive, most importantly at lower costs. It is the perfect solution to overcoming training issues and increasing the efficiency of employees by keeping a track of their performance management all in one place.

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