#086 Optimize Processes Before your Processes Outpace You
March 31, 2026 | Read Time: 4 minutes | Written by Jenny Kleintop
Process optimization is one of the eight buckets of philanthropy operations. This bucket ensures you have the workflows and processes in place to succeed. It’s building flowcharts and SOP documentation, such as how you will handle the various data streams coming into your organization and optimize them for efficiency and effectiveness.
A ton of documentation goes into this area, and hundreds of pages come out of this bucket. The important element to include is the why. Why are you doing what you are doing, and why is your setup the way it is? This provides clarity for existing and future team members.
As we think about process optimization in this way, it’s helpful to consider how fundraising strategies change over time and how technology, especially these days, advances rapidly. In November 2022, we saw a huge shift in what’s available in terms of modern tech advances, and we continue to see the pace accelerate every year. If you are running processes the same way you were 5 years ago, it’s time to take a step back and ask yourself, is there a better way we can do this today?
Meaning optimize processes before your processes outpace you.
This is what I’m often brought in to do for leaders and teams. Review what’s working and what is not. Assess what is aligned to current best practices and what’s not. Recommend what to keep, enhance, or add. Implement together with or for the team.
To give you an example, here is one of the things I wrote in an action plan for a leader of a $10M fundraising nonprofit with 17 FTEs.
Need: There is a tremendous opportunity in many areas to optimize processes, as currently, they are labor-intensive with lots of manual steps, which fosters inefficiencies and low bandwidth.
Why this is important: This would free up time and energy to focus on more impactful processes such as multi-step stewardship touches to retain donors or data mining and proactive identification to acquire more prospects and donors.
Steps to take:
Increase efficiency and productivity to redirect resources toward more forward-thinking, momentum-building activities.
Reduce manual error risks to ensure accuracy in workflow and data handling.
Improve resource allocation by optimizing processes, allowing space to move beyond the unnecessary weeds and into the more meaningful initiatives that will move the needle faster in fundraising efforts.
I gave 3 examples.
Processing online gifts: Way too many steps, very cumbersome, and many steps that are manual, which is risky.
Monthly revenue reporting: There are 44 different Excel files, and so much room for error and duplication in numbers; there should be one or two max.
Acknowledgements: There are 6 letters for mail merges, when there could be one letter with an if/then statement in the letter to change the first sentence, as that is the only difference in the 6 letters.
Then I gave them the “why”, as in the benefits of doing this.
Revamping these high-impact processes moves you toward more of a "push of a button" workflow, which saves time.
Moving away from numerous manual steps and using tools to automate where possible protects the integrity of the data and ensures accuracy in reporting.
Starting with 3 opportunities to streamline is not too overwhelming for existing staff and optimizes the most time-intensive processes.
Then I helped them optimize these 3 processes.
The important takeaway here is that it’s okay to update, change, or add new processes to keep up with how fundraising evolves. It’s perfectly normal and necessary. Otherwise, you risk lagging behind, stalling, or getting stuck right when you need to do the opposite.
Take Action
You don’t necessarily need to do it all at once. Rather start small and follow these 3 steps:
1 ➡ Find one high-impact or time-intensive process. If you don’t already have one, build out the existing workflow. Personally, I use a combination of a Visio flow chart for visualization and a Word document for the details.
2 ➡ Put a small task force together to poke holes in it, to talk about how to enhance it, and more importantly, how to align it with today’s best practices. The key is to include one or two people outside data and operations to give you another perspective.
3 ➡ Implement, monitor, and report back on how it’s going. Then repeat with two more processes and soon you’ll be in a rhythm.
Think RARI: Review, assess, recommend, implement.
You’ve got this!
👋 See you next time,
Jenny
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