During the past month, we have been announcing our plans to convert to a new job board software package. We were confident we would launch the new platform on schedule but, unfortunately, our plans have been delayed due to unexpected technical issues.
For now, please continue to place your job ads through the form on our website or by e-mailing Kristen at Ads@NotforprofitNews.com. For your convenience, you can now pay by credit card after we e-mail your invoice.
It’s likely you’ve been on a similar software journey since tech innovations are increasingly offering us more opportunities to better serve our clients, donors, staff and customers. At the same time, some of us aren’t experts on technology or even on job board software. To use an old phrase, we want a system that tells us the time. We don’t want to design and manufacture watches.
In anticipation of improving our job board posting experience, our team put together a long list of characteristics that seemed important to retain from our current job board along with features we wanted to add. We also were excited to learn about the latest options available for a small operation like ours.
We found a job board buying guide that presented several dozen vendors plus options we weren’t as familiar with. After reading the entire guide, I quickly went from being excited to overwhelmed. Plan B was to engage the expert who assembled the buying guide. He was knowledgeable and confident and made some recommendations that helped narrow the list. However, I now realize I didn’t ask enough questions about how he was connecting the dots between our list and those particular job board vendors. And it turned out that the information provided in the vendor’s buying guide wasn’t completely accurate.
Now that we’re able to view things in hindsight, here are 5 questions we will incorporate into our planning process for any software implementation moving forward:
- Was your system initially designed for our type of transaction/use?
- Do you have a streamlined version for small job boards, like us? Or will we adapting this from a big job board system?
- Who takes the lead on this software conversion?
- What will the vendor actually do? Are they training us to do the conversion, or will they do the conversion with our input?
- What level of tech knowledge does our team need? Even if the front-end looks nice, it doesn’t mean the backend has evolved to be user friendly.
So, as our journey continues, we have learned an invaluable lesson: Ask more questions, no matter how basic they may seem, at the beginning of the process. It’s the key to understanding what lies ahead as part of your software implementation.
In the meantime, continue to watch for that future update on the evolution of the job board.
Bryan Orander, President
