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By John DaSilva, Project Development Manager, Kenan Institute Asia
It’s not so easy to fit an organization like Kenan Institute Asia (K.I.Asia) into a description of your typical NGO. We’re as likely to design an intellectual property rights training curriculum for SMEs as we are to conduct IT workforce training for a factory worker, or just as likely to teach business professors in Vietnam the concept of sustainable enterprise as we are to teach a farmer in Cambodia how to be an entrepreneur. The only truly amazing part of all this is that we’ve been doing it for 15 years now, and it took us 14 years to realize we needed to do it smarter - that meant better technology.
K.I.Asia is a Thailand based, not for profit development organization conducting sustainable development activities in Thailand, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Vietnam and Southern China. Working from our main office in Bangkok, Thailand and conducting activities in five countries means our staff of 50 development professionals can be on the road for a considerable amount of time every year. As we all need to pitch in to do project work, including reporting for some very demanding clients like USAID, and project development fundraising, from diverse organizations like Microsoft, the United Nations Development Program and New Zealand AID, our staff were getting hammered using old technology. In particular, we were spending too much time e-mailing data to be reentered manually and not enough time collaborating effectively.
Thanks to a US $136,000 software grant from Microsoft, which included Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint, this is all changing. With CRM, we are much more efficient at updating our project opportunities and recording meetings notes, client deadlines and underlying funding cycles of our clients and potential clients. With Sharepoint, we have created specialized project pages, where project managers, finance and accounting, and the key client manager can have updated information at their fingers tips and remotely update this information in real time, unlike with an FTP server. All of this has meant less time e-mailing and requesting information, which has led to better client services. Ultimately, this means we are generating more resources and implementing more projects to help develop the region more efficiently.
The result, in 2010, K.I.Asia implemented 33 discreet projects in five countries that allowed us to build the capacity of nearly 6,000 direct beneficiaries, including professors, principals, teachers, and students; migrants, at-risk women, farmers and rural community members; entrepreneurs, small business owners, business associations, corporate managers; public health professionals and government officials; and small and community NGOs. Although this may have been possible without our new Microsoft technology, it would have taken much more time and had a much higher opportunity cost.
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