Saving up to USD $1,300 annually for an animal shelter

Background

The Lost Dogs Home is a nonprofit animal shelter, which cares for over 22,000 dogs and cats yearly. We seek to promote the welfare of dogs and cats through pet adoption and community education efforts. Our Human Walking Program is a well-recognized success. The program repositions the community's perspective about shelter pets, where the shelter dogs are rescuing the humans. We encourage other shelters to replicate this adoption initiative locally by providing complimentary guides and creative assets. Our Pet Licence initiative rewards pet owners for their knowledge. Since 2010 the system has helped educating thousands of visitors on how to care for their dogs and cats via petlicence.com.au.

Challenge

The demanding workload drives our quest for a better solution for project and document management. Bitrix24 saves us up to USD $1,300 a year comparatively. The saving is important for a tight budgeted NFP IT department. It takes a bit to setup but the return on investment is quickly demonstrated. Bitrix24 may help save up to 120 hours of my time in reporting and managing major projects each year.

Solution

Here is how we built our work inside Bitrix24:

We are managing our projects on Bitrix24. Each workgroups are created to hold projects. Staff may have their private project with proper security feature applied;
Task lists and tasks are used to manage to-dos. Repeating tasks are setup as template with repeat mode turned on. The sequence order is controlled by task start dates. Tasks are assigned to a responsible person and those who are interested can be copied in. Task creator can manage the responsible person where needed;
Gantt charts are used to get a bird-eye view of the current project status. Dependencies and timelines can be adjusted directly from the chart view;
Group communications are posted as messages and participants can interact using comments, likes, follow modes and other actions;
All relevant files are hold in the shared drives. Personal files are stored in a private drive. With the desktop application, files are synced from the local computer to Bitrix24’s folders;
The native mobile app is used to access information and group communication on the go.

Favorite features are likely to be driven by one’s project role, which directly affects the undertaking activities. As a project coordinator, I find the task management feature with native Gantt chart rather useful.

All tasks, duration and deadlines are automatically reflected with graphic representation on the Gantt chart;
Gantt chart with current date highlighted serves as a dairy every day. With proper deadlines, the progress can be viewed and controlled quite nicely;
Tasks with assigned responsible person send automated reminders. This reduces the awkward emails directly to the upper level managements whilst carrying out the function of reminding people about their responsibilities.

Project and document management functions are working well for us. To those who are in the search, you are encouraged to explore Bitrix24.

Saving up to USD $1,300 annually for an animal shelter