Increasingly, organizations from both the private and public sectors are using shared services to help them on their journey.
Accenture helps nonprofits become high-performance organizations through enabling properly planned and deployed shared services operations. We believe that shared services is a critical enabler of an organization’s strategy, providing both the information and the resources needed to move nonprofit organizations toward realizing their missions.
With the number of nonprofits increasing every year, donors are beginning to place far more scrutiny on how their money is spent by nonprofits, increasingly restricting funds to go towards the organization’s mission and programs rather than administration. The demands for high performance from nonprofit organizations in an increasingly competitive market are leading nonprofits to focus on streamlining their operations.
Instead of competing, nonprofits with similar objectives and goals have the potential to team up to address common challenges, thinking of themselves as players in a broader network of organizations addressing the same agenda to minimize competition for funding and maximize the return on their efforts.
Most often, the business case for shared services focuses on cost savings and cost avoidance. Through Accenture’s experience in designing and implementing shared services, we can help nonprofits move from the original value model focused on efficiency and cost effectiveness toward a client value model driven by the need for better decision making and support.
Accenture’s shared services offerings provide an option to allow nonprofits to focus less on routine administrative tasks and more on their core missions and strategies for the future. Our extensive research into maximizing the value of shared services in the public sector readily applies to nonprofits’ challenges. In addition, our skills in shared services implementations have proven time and again to yield both cost reductions and service improvements through a new, dedicated focus on the routine aspects of nonprofits’ operations.