Enhancing Our Organization's Effectiveness Through Microsoft Products

Our agency began its technology transformation through Microsoft products approximately 10 years through generous donations from Microsoft Canada and licence purchases through Techsoup. We had already been using Microsoft products such as Windows, Word, Excel on our various staff computer work stations, however, our transformation came alive after we decided to install a network using Small Business Server. With this one simple technology change our organizations internal and external communications advanced tremendously and service delivery to our clients increased in its efficiency. The ability to communicate rather immediately using Micrsoft Outlook and conduct research and information gathering using Internet Explorer has made a pronounced difference in the way we provide our services, with the positive effects being higly beneficial to our clients and referral sources.

Our next change was to replace the operating system for our client management database system from a Linux-based system to a Windows platform. Given our familiarity with Windows, we felt that mounting our client database system onto a platform that was very user friendly made a great deal of sense. We were glad we made the change as this has increased our efficiency and decreased the time involved in such tasks as system updates, daily backups, and general database maintanence.

Our transformation has not only occurred with systems changes through Micrsoft products. Three years ago our organization embarked on a fund development and marketing strategy. Central to this strategy was the creation of marketing, promotional and other information materials. Using Microsoft products such as Word and Publisher we have increased our ability to efficiently publish and distribute material in the community, such as Annual Reports, newsletters, press releases, and flyers. The image that is representing our submission is our latest newsletter. It was created with MS Publsiher and easily converted into pdf format for wide electronic distribution, as well as print distribution. As we have been creating our products with Microsft software for a number of years, we have developed templates thereby making the ongoing production of these materials quite efficient.

Unquestionably our organizational effectivness has increased as a result of the introduction of a variety of Microsoft poducts to our agency. This transformation has enabled our agency to maximize its impact on the young people we serve.