Everyone seems to be talking about automation. It might have something to do with AI, it might not (honestly depends on the kind of automation, but that's a subject for a different article), but, as far as you can tell, automation is this thing that your organization has been missing to bring it into the new age of technology.
The only thing is, you're not sure if your organization is ready for the new age.
If you have poor processes or low-quality or mismatched tools, throwing automation on top is a pretty sure way to end up spending a lot of time and money on new tools that don't fit the way your organization actually works.
If you want to introduce automation into your organization the right way and reap the long-term benefits, here are three things you should do first to make sure that whatever automation you build actually saves your organization time and effort, instead of being one more system of questionable value you have to maintain.
The first step is
1. Write down everything.
Before you can automate a process well, you should have a clear SOP (standard operating procedure) that even a brand new staff member can follow without too much explanation. The more detail you've written down about how your process works, the easier (and therefore cheaper) it will be to automate your process.
Think about:
- what systems someone needs to access,
- what actions they need to do
- where they need to do them
- why they're doing them
- when they're doing them
What do you expect?
Be sure you know exactly what you expect your automation to produce. For example, at a high level, your process might produce:
- A report for a funder
- New journal entries in your accounting software
- A reminder email to the development team
- Photos organized for your comms team to use
As with the process you wrote down above, think carefully about the details of exactly what you expect to get, in as concrete terms as possible, and write that down as well. If your answer is something vague like, "a better sense of where our donor's money is going," that's not specific enough to make an automation. You need to answer, exactly what information will get you a better sense of where your money's going? If it's a spreadsheet of donor data, what does each row in the report represent? What fields does it need in it?
The more details you have, the easier it will be to automate.
Again, the better you know BOTH exactly what you need to do to run the process AND what you expect the process to give you at the end, the easier it will be to automate.
2. Digitize your data.
If you're looking to automate your systems, first make sure that your systems are all digital; that is, that they are accessible on a computer.
In order to for your computer to run an automated process for you, your computer needs be able to access whatever information it needs to run the process on its own. Paper files can't be automated without digitizing them.
Note, you don't need a fancy new software system to do this. Getting data into Google Sheets or Excel is perfectly acceptable, for example. It just has to be on a computer somewhere, not sitting in paper files in a drawer on the right side of your desk. Your computer can't access those paper files yet; once they're digitized and in the computer somewhere, then the automation can start.
If you have paper checks or other paper records to digitize, there are tools and services available that can help you do that. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- If you regularly get paper checks, get a physical check scanning machine with a high MICR (99.9%+) for high accuracy.
- For paper documents, scan them to PDFs using whatever scanner you have on hand (or hire a scanning service for bulky jobs with lots of pages), then, if your existing software doesn't have this built in, run them through an OCR (optical character recognition) program like PaddleOCR or Qwen2.5-VL.
- For smaller batches of documents or non-standard data (including anything jotted on the back on napkins), manual data entry may be the easiest way to start.
If your organization is still relying on physical paper records, feel free to use the tools above to start digitizing them, or research similar tools yourself (I'm sure there are many), or else find a consultant to help get your paper data onto your computer in a well-organized form, ready for automation.
3. Use modern tools with public APIs or automation integrations.
The cheapest, easiest way for automations to interact with your systems is using either a public API, or else a direct integration with an automation tool like Zapier or Make.
Even if you have digitized records and a clear SOP, without an API or direct integration to an automation tool, automating your processes will likely involve simulating actual mouse clicks and keyboard presses, which, while possible, is usually many, many times more expensive than just accessing the data directly.
Public APIs
Most modern subscription software has a public API: a kind of digital door that allows automations to access your data without your direct involvement. "API" is a fancy acronym that stands for application programming interface, and they allow your automations to interact directly with the systems that have them.
If you're not sure if the system you're using has a usable public API, shoot me an email and I will let you know!
What if the API is closed?
Note, some tools (like Gusto or certain ADP products) have APIs that are closed. Closed APIs require organizations to fill out sometimes lengthy applications in order to access them, and those applications need to be manually approved, sometimes with strict requirements that can be prohibitive for a smaller or medium-sized non-profit.
If the API for your software is closed, you can look at the direct integrations that it has available.
Direct automation integrations (Zapier, Make, etc.)
If a tool doesn't have a public API, you want to find out if it has a good integration with Zapier or another low-code automation tool. For more complex integrations, these integrations can sometimes be more limiting than having access to a public API, but they are usually easier to use for people just starting out with automation.
To find out if your software has a Zapier integration, go to Zapier's app directory and search for your software by name on that page.
If you find your software has a Zapier integration, you can click into it, then scroll down until you see "Supported triggers and actions"; those are all the ways that your automation can access the data in that software. If there's a "Load more" button at the bottom of that section, click that to expand it so you can see all the options you have available.
If you can't find your own software in Zapier's app directory, and it doesn't have an open API, it might still be possible to hook it up to an automation, but it's not going to be easy. Automations that connect tools without using APIs or direct integrations can be complex, brittle, and (if you have a consultant do it) pricey. Shoot me an email if you have any questions about your specific tool.
Ready for automation
If...
- you written down your process in excruciating detail so new staff members know exactly how to do it,
- your data is digitized, living on a computer or in the cloud somewhere (remember, Google Sheets or Excel are just fine), AND
- the tools you're using have public APIs or Zapier/low-code integrations that automations can access without your babysitting,
then your organization is ready to start reaping the long-term benefits of automation!
Next steps
If you get to this point and you want to give making the automation on your own a shot, I recommend creating a Zapier account and starting to build out the automation piece by piece using the SOP and instructions you've already written for yourself as a guide.
If you don't have capacity or interest to do it yourself, you can find an automation consultant, or book a process workshop with me and we'll figure out the details of what your automation needs to look like together.
Whether you implement the automation yourself or get someone else to help you, if you followed along with the steps in this article, congratulations! You're now more ready than most to make good use of automation in your organization.