What’s the best app for nonprofits, BAND or Remind?
As a nonprofit organization, strong and reliable team communication is an important part of maximizing your fundraising efforts and building lasting relationships with your community.
Keeping up with modern technology helps your organization work together to reach your constituents, wherever they are. Sending messages over emails, text messages, and traditional social media platforms is ineffective because those messages often get buried or lost. Other solutions may show promise, but are restricted by their complexity or cost.
There are two apps that work well for nonprofits looking for versatile, free solutions. Remind is a well known service that, true to its name, provides useful reminders and alerts about deadlines, important documents, and upcoming events. It’s great when all you need to do is get the word out, but sometimes you want more engagement with your audience.
BAND is a two-way communication service that allows you to get everyone engaged with your organization. Like Remind, BAND allows you to send notifications and alerts about important deadlines, documents, and events. However, BAND has tons of additional features that make running your organization a lot easier. Here’s just a few:
(Nearly) Unlimited File, Video, and Photo Sharing
On Remind, photos and files must be attached to messages and notifications. Users are restricted to one file per message, and (like Twitter) it restricts your available character count from 140 down to 117.
With BAND, you can directly upload images and videos to the Photo Album, so you don’t have to worry about uploading dozens or hundreds of photos of your events and activities. You can also share photos and videos in Chatrooms and Posts. Each Post supports up to ten attachments of any type, and there are no restrictions on character length. You can even see and search all of your previous file attachments using the “More” tab.
Read Receipts and Calendars with RSVP
Sending a notification is great, but even if you know the message is getting delivered, you have no way of knowing if it’s really been seen. With BAND you can easily see who’s read your posts and chat messages, so you can hold everyone accountable.
Planning activities, events, and meetings is easy with BAND’s built in Calendar. You can easily plan activities long in advance, so you can set up months ahead of time. With built-in RSVP, you’ll know who’s available to work that day. Members can leave comments on events to ask questions and get more information.
For large events, you can use BAND to keep all of your volunteers organized and informed. You can even download your RSVP lists directly into an Excel sheet to help monitor and keep track of your attendance numbers.
Pinned Notices and Searchable Posts
Sending a notification about important documents and information is great, but sometimes your members work on staggered schedules and can’t open them until later. BAND makes it easy to organize important Posts by pinning them to the top of the group feed. Users can see it as soon as they open the group.
If you don’t want to pin the Post, or need to find something from the past, BAND makes it easy by allowing you to search past Posts. You can even add hashtags for recurring threads (we use #weeklyupdates) so members have an easy way to search all the posts under those categories.
Have a donation drive and need help spreading the word? Let us know in the comments!
