Focus on the Mission, Not the Back Office: How Non-Profit Organizations Can Use KPIs to Multiply Impact

When you think about supporting your organization’s mission, you imagine making a real difference in your communities, increasing access to vital goods and services, and tackling some of the world’s biggest crises.

But let’s be honest. The reality often involves a lot of low-value, time-consuming tasks like manually submitting purchase orders, checking sales tax on invoices (because they always seem to include it), and dealing with mountains of paperwork from the purchasing process.

What if you could set up your day-to-day activities to focus on making a difference and put an end to the tedious stuff — while also getting help to build a roadmap to get there?

Find out more in this post:

• A tough macroenvironment for non-profit organizations
• What does it take for a non-profit organizaion to thrive today?
• Use benchmarks to determine how well your non-profit organization is set up to deliver on its mission
• Non-profit organization spotlight: Project Renewal
• Non-profit organization spotlight: The United Service Organizations
• Take the next right step: Baseline your non-profit organization’s performance

A tough macroenvironment for non-profit organizations

With high interest rates and more competition for funding, non-profit organizations are facing an uncertain financial climate. This means how employees spend organizational funds and manage headcount is under much closer scrutiny.

This is where Coupa comes in. While many external factors are beyond a non-profit organization’s control, how they operate internally and the technology they use are areas they can manage. To better operationalize their mission, leaders need to assess which tasks should be performed by people and which can be automated. In our experience at Coupa and through our work with non-profit organizations over the years, we’ve seen that regardless of size, challenges related to business spending continue to hinder their effectiveness.

What does it take for a non-profit organization to thrive today?

A thriving organization practices financial stewardship and fiscal responsibility, stretching every dollar so that as much funding as possible reaches its programs. This also helps create a stress-free work environment for employees, which positively impacts the quality of programs and services. A great example of this is from the CFO of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), JR Miller:

“In the last three years, LLS has freed up $18.4 million through smarter business spending with Coupa, which we’ve directly invested in lifesaving programs.”

The LLS team achieved this by improving efficiency and productivity across the organization.

At Coupa, we define:

• Efficiency as processes designed to help teams engage in activities such as finding the right suppliers, making smarter sourcing decisions, and optimizing purchases
• Productivity as the ability of teams to get work done quickly thanks to intuitive, user-friendly experiences

Additionally, in our experience working with non-profit organizations, we’ve seen that operations teams are often under-resourced, making it crucial to optimize the productivity of these key employees.

Efficiency and productivity are essential for ensuring that your non-profit organization makes the most of its grants and donations, while also allowing your team to focus on what brought them to the organization in the first place — making an impact. But where do you start? And how do you keep the end goal of productivity and efficiency in mind when you don’t know what a feasible goal should be?

Benchmarking is a great starting point. It lets you compare your organization’s efficiency and productivity metrics against the broader community, helping you see where your performance falls short or stands out. However, not all benchmarks are created equal. Many are survey-based, scraped from the web, too narrow, or only collected over the short term. For benchmarking to be successful, you need a complete picture of what good looks like using data you can trust.

Use benchmarks to determine how well your non-profit organization is set up to deliver on its mission

Coupa’s Total Spend Management Benchmark Report is the gold standard for domain-specific reporting, incorporating transactional spend data from over $6 trillion, sourced ethically from our inception nearly 15 years ago and from more than 10 million buyers and suppliers. The 22 KPIs in the report span the source-to-pay process, and each one features a benchmark from top performers in the Coupa community. This report also provides a holistic view of “best-in-class” efficiency and productivity, along with prescriptive recommendations to help you move closer to those benchmarks.

Non-profit organizations face unique challenges within their business spend processes, and this report allows you to focus on what matters most — whether that’s purchasing, vendor management, invoicing, or payment processing. Additionally, Coupa benchmarks can guide strategic decisions about where to allocate your resources. Fang Chang, Coupa’s EVP and Chief Product Officer, talks about this in greater detail here.

Before we look at how these KPIs and benchmarks help real-life organizations today, we want to give you a sense of how Coupa’s Total Spend Management Benchmark Report measures efficient and productive processes and operations.

Non-profit organization spotlight: Project Renewal

Efficient processes free up time for employees to help end the cycle of homelessness

KPI highlight: Electronic PO Processing

Founded in 1967 as the Manhattan Bowery Corporation, today’s Project Renewal is a 70-strong program organization committed to keeping New Yorkers housed, healthy, and employed. Project Renewal programs are replicated around the United States, meaning even more individuals and families are empowered to renew their lives with health, homes, and jobs.

Recently and in the span of four years, Project Renewal opened three new facilities. But instead of feeling confident about their ability to deliver comprehensive solutions around health, homes, and jobs, employees were bogged down in paper-based procurement processes that looked different at almost every location. In situations like these, it’s easy for non-profit organizations to experience cost overruns because there are few to no centralized control mechanisms in place.

Today, Project Renewal is a much more efficient organization with the Coupa platform. A large part of this is the introduction of electronic PO processing. Featured in Coupa’s Total Spend Management Benchmark Report, electronic PO processing is measured as the percentage of total POs that are approved and received by suppliers electronically. Employees can manage, confirm, and even change electronic POs at a much faster rate. And program directors and the finance team can see, in one place and in real time, what is being bought where, and from whom, thanks to visibility created by electronic POs.

Here’s what Ibrahim Bounafaa, Director of Financial Systems Integration, says about how the Coupa platform has transformed efficiency at Project Renewal:

“Implementing Coupa enabled the agency to move from a highly decentralized, paper-based purchase process to a full-digital, flexible, secure procurement process. The new streamlined and adaptive structure is now consistent throughout the 70+ independent programs, mitigating the risks associated with the previous state.

Despite wide disparities in digital literacy at implementation, front-line end users in our shelters, clinics, and kitchens, quickly adopted the platform thanks to its intuitive design and can now dedicate more time on our mission and our clients and less on the purchasing process.

Program Directors and Finance now have real-time and accurate visibility on the expense pipeline, which greatly helps in optimizing funds and sourcing.”

Non-profit organization spotlight: The United Service Organizations

More productive employees respond faster to the people serving in America’s military and their families

KPI highlight: Requisition-to-Order Cycle Time

Commonly known as the USO, the United Service Organizations has been — since it was founded in 1941 — the nation’s leading organization to serve the men and women in the U.S. military, and their families, throughout their time in uniform. With more than 250 USO centers in countries on almost every continent, programs focus on connection, expeditionary outreach support, entertainment, and transition services.

The USO takes great pride in being by a service member’s side from the moment their military careers begin and through the completion of their service. Depending on what’s needed where and when, and by whom, means that procurement processes span the globe and need to handle an incredibly diverse set of requirements. Care packages shipped overseas, for example, include items tailored to the recipient’s location and living condition. And the faster USO employees can assemble packages, schedule events, and set up training sessions, the faster that service members get the support they need.

It was becoming more and more difficult for the USO to support its mission when employees needed roughly four days of requisition time for a single item. The culprit: paper requests and paper approvals. Instead of spending time on more strategic activities or building relationships, employees were moving pieces of paper from desk to desk to desk.

Today, USO employees quickly buy the goods and services they need — even when conditions change suddenly — on one platform. All the right approvals are in place, right from the start, and buyers place their orders through hosted catalogs with pre-negotiated prices. Leadership was able to identify how much requisition times needed to improve thanks to built-in analytics that allow teams to baseline performance against other non-profit organizations in the Coupa community.

Rick Quaintance, former Director of Procurement and Contract Management reflects on how Coupa helps the USO support its mission:

“The quicker we can turn around requisitions and invoice payment, the more we can support the military — our mission. I saw the opportunities in Coupa where we could, for example, generate a lot more productivity in our requisitioning. When we implemented Coupa, it literally changed our organization in moving toward a more automated system. And we get a huge amount of positive feedback from our military; they really appreciate what we do.”

Take the next right step: Baseline your non-profit organization’s performance

With everyone in your non-profit organization stretched thin, a transformation journey can feel daunting. You might be thinking, What’s working well? What needs to change? What could the future state look like? The 2024 Coupa Clarity Total Spend Management Benchmark Report is an excellent place to find initial answers for a roadmap you feel confident about. See how your organization compares to leaders in the Coupa community and access recommendations and best practices that help the mission create impact.

This article is the joint effort of several Coupa account executives who are committed to helping non-profit organizations focus on what matters most — supporting the communities and causes they serve — with an AI-driven source-to-pay platform designed to drive growth, operate more efficiently and sustainably, help teams work more productively, and build resilience.