FIVE REMEDIES FOR NONPROFIT IT CHALLENGES How to drive more resiliency than ever with unified service and operations management Incident & Problem Management: With out-of-the-box workflows following IT Infrastructure Library best practices, ServiceNow’s Incident and Problem Management modules help proactively detect, document, and resolve issues related to volunteer sign-up portals and donor contribution platforms. Rapid resolution reduces downtime and mitigates reputational risk. Service Portal & Self-Service: A user-friendly service portal allows staff and volunteers to submit requests directly. Automated routing and prioritization ensure mission-critical services receive the fastest response. Change Management: Structured change processes ensure that any portal enhancements or updates follow a rigorous approval and testing pathway—minimizing accidental outages and maximizing system reliability. Cloud-Based Platform: ServiceNow is a fully cloud-hosted solution, providing the elasticity to handle spikes in traffic during holiday campaigns or major fundraising events. Event Management (via ITOM Integration): While primarily an ITSM offering, ServiceNow’s integrated platform allows for seamless extension into IT Operations Management (ITOM). This enables real-time monitoring of infrastructure and services, sending alerts before minor issues become major incidents. Automated Workflows & Orchestration: Automated provisioning workflows help ensure additional capacity can be spun up as needed. This reduces the risk of bottlenecks when donation volumes surge and protects revenue streams. Nonprofits often face significant IT challenges balancing mission-driven goals with limited resources, creating unique pressures on technology infrastructure. Budget constraints and reliance on volunteers can make it difficult to implement robust IT service management practices, leaving organizations vulnerable to inefficiencies and service disruptions. These challenges demand creative and resourceful solutions, underscoring the resilience and dedication nonprofits bring to their work. Addressing these challenges requires tailored IT solutions that balance cost-effectiveness, data visibility, strategic alignment, and stakeholder satisfaction within the unique context of nonprofit operations. Common challenges in providing quality IT service delivery and mission services Ensuring that volunteer sign-up portals and donor contribution platforms remain operational and secure is mission-critical. Any downtime can result in lost donations, reduced volunteer engagement, and damage to the nonprofit’s reputation. Nonprofits often experience seasonal spikes in donation traffic or volunteer applications (e.g., during holiday campaigns). Ensuring systems can scale quickly—without crashing or becoming prohibitively expensive—is a key challenge. Maintaining Critical Services (e.g., Volunteer & Donor Portals) Scalability & Service Availability See a Demo ITIL-Aligned Processes: ServiceNow ITSM comes with standardized processes (Incident, Problem, Change, Request) out of the box, making it easier to adopt industry best practices without starting from scratch. Configuration Management Database (CMDB): Having a unified CMDB ensures that all assets, configurations, and dependencies are clearly documented. This transparency is critical for reliable change execution and better incident resolution. Knowledge Management: A centralized knowledge base allows technicians and staff to access best practices, troubleshooting steps, and standard operating procedures, ensuring consistent service delivery across the organization. Performance Analytics: ServiceNow’s built-in Performance Analytics provides real-time dashboards and trend reports to measure KPIs (e.g., incident resolution time, SLA compliance). Nonprofits can tailor these metrics to track mission-critical services. Custom Dashboards for Stakeholders: ServiceNow’s configurable dashboards allow leaders, board members, and donors to see key insights— such as the number of volunteers onboarded, uptime for donor portals, or response rates for service requests—enabling data-driven decisions. Historical & Predictive Insights: By analyzing historical data, Performance Analytics can predict potential service bottlenecks, allowing IT to plan proactively and ensure continuous service improvement. Integration Hub & APIs: ServiceNow’s Integration Hub provides pre-built spokes and connectors to seamlessly integrate with CRM, volunteer management, and legacy fundraising systems, consolidating data into a single system of action. Single System of Record: ServiceNow becomes the central platform for all IT services and processes, eliminating silos and manual re-keying of data between multiple tools. Workflow Automation: With integrated systems, cross-functional workflows (e.g., volunteer onboarding or donor data updates) can be automated, reducing errors and freeing up staff to focus on high-value tasks. Implementing formal IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks (like ITIL) can be daunting. Standardizing incident, problem, and change processes is crucial for consistency, but requires organizational commitment, training, and stakeholder buy-in. Funders, donors, and board members demand clear metrics on the efficiency and effectiveness of programs. IT must provide reliable reporting capabilities to demonstrate impact and guide strategic decision Many nonprofits run on legacy systems or a patchwork of point solutions for fundraising, case management, volunteer tracking, etc. Consolidating and integrating these systems to provide a seamless user experience is complex and time-consuming. Service Management & Process Standardization Reporting & Impact Measurement Integration of Disparate Systems Real results you can expect Real results for service management Fewer submitted issues requiring human intervention • Predictive intelligence incident routing saves IT agents 12% of their time through machine learning-based automatic assignment. • Intuitive, employee self-service means 30% fewer agent ticket assignments. Automated resolution of common issues deflects 16% of incidents. Greater knowledge sharing and diagnosis information • A single view powered by shared monitoring and data offers deeper information needed for a 75% reduction in resolution times. Delivering scalable IT services on a single cloud platform • Leverage the advantages of common data sources, seamless integration between all aspects of IT, and automation to adjust services more effortlessly as needed to increase CMDB accuracy by up to 50%. By studying the challenges and successes of thousands of customers who manage IT services and operations, ServiceNow has identified the major areas to help organizations achieve the following tangible outcomes: 75% Reduction in resolution times 30% Fewer agent ticket assignments due to intuitive, employee self-service 16% Number of incidents deflected due to automated resolution of common issues 12% Improvement in time saved by IT agents using predictive intelligence incident routing Consolidate on a single platform Put an end to silo-based thinking and operations. We’re not proposing that there will be an actual melding of teams and responsibilities, but by placing ITSM and ITOM on top of a shared platform, the service and operations management disciplines will be better informed with a common data model, helping staff better understand the relationships of all IT resources and their dependencies, and addressing issues preventively and proactively in near real-time. You can’t do this when ITSM and ITOM run as separate tools, have independent data models and resulting blind spots. Have modern IT systems evolved beyond the need for a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)? Not in the least. With IT complexities and the number of data sources exploding (think IoT), this centralized place to track your IT components and their relationships is more vital than ever. Modernizing and merging your CMDBs will better support solutions beyond just ITIL functions such as your service desk. Systems must be moved out of the on-premises datacenter and into the cloud to enable faster scaling and greater interoperability across multiple cloud-based systems. This gives rise to tools for understanding relationships and dependencies. A new, consolidated CMDB, should be built to support both service and operations management as well as all IT functions. It will power a wider spectrum of ITSM and ITOM capabilities that contribute to these business outcomes: • Near real-time visibility into true operational state of organization services • Vulnerability remediation based on institutional service priority • Understanding the impact of making a change Centralizing and modernizing your CMDB REMEDY 1 Broadening your visibility across the entire IT landscape Visibility from services and operations must be centralized to highlight cross-dependencies. We’ll use the ServiceNow CMDB solution as an example. With it in place, our customers are creating clean repositories for: 70% Of requests raised through the portal 100+ Ticket categories reduced to 10 75% Increase in tickets compared to previous system Royal National Institute of the Blind Managing compliance and professional standards across over 100 UK residential properties was challenging for RNIB due to reliance on email and manual processes. To address this, they implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management and Employee Center streamlining operations and enhancing employee engagement. This project has demonstrated how great technology like ServiceNow can be transformative for an organization like RNIB. Anila Mistry, Technical Project Manager, RNIB CUSTOMER EXAMPLE READ STORY Infrastructure data (aka, horizontal discovery) The CMDB records the IT-asset makeup of your organization’s environment and identifies all infrastructure. This discovery spans both the physical and virtual assets in your data center as well as the different types of assets available from cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.