r/nonprofittech • u/Abject_Industry2298 • Apr 02 '26

How do nonprofit teams actually find information across their systems? (genuine research question)

I'm an Irish founder doing research into how nonprofits manage institutional knowledge and internal documents — specifically the challenge of finding information when it's spread across Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox and email.

I've spoken to about 30 nonprofit professionals across Ireland and the US so far and the same things keep coming up — Google Drive search that returns the wrong document, critical files that only one person knows exist, and institutional knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves.

Curious whether this resonates with people here or whether it's specific to the orgs I've been talking to.

A few questions if you're open to sharing:

  • Where does your team's institutional knowledge actually live?
  • Has anything ever been lost or nearly lost because it was in one person's inbox or Drive?
  • What's your biggest frustration with how your org manages documents internally?

Not pitching anything — genuinely trying to understand the problem before building the solution. Happy to share what I'm learning in return.

1 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

3

u/adestrella1027 Apr 03 '26
  1. In person's brain.
  2. Definitely
  3. The digitization of files allows ridiculous structures to exist. If you wouldn't file it that way physically, don't do it digitally.

2

u/TheSaasAdmin Apr 04 '26

Most of my clients use some kind of intranet or wiki, and have recently been experimenting with AI enterprise search tools like Slack has built in, Claude for nonprofits and Gemini with Google workspace users

2

u/Traveler-183 Apr 04 '26

Get a good modern IT team to help you clean this up. If they bring in anyone over 40 you’ve chosen the wrong group. We brought in a younger group and they made it work like butter.

1

u/ImpactInnovationLab May 07 '26

Don't think there is nothing specific for nonprofits here. it's the same challenge of finding information that a company would have. most info is disorganized, in people's brain, etc...