Let the Robots Do the Work | by Michael Park

Automation is for everyone!

I recently had a breakthrough realisation - automation can transform administrative duties. Here are my top automation hacks - perhaps you can apply them to your job too? 

It’s been a hectic few weeks for this newly appointed Major Donor Officer at Help Musicians, and the transfer between my Supporter Engagement Assistant role and my new job has left me little time for reflection. A few days ago though, a new Assistant took over my old role and left me free to concentrate fully on Major Giving; in the process of onboarding her, I realised how much automation I had incorporated into my workload, and how much faster my work had become. 

Automation hands a task that you would normally do off to a robot which learns it and then carries it out. This can be applied to even the smallest task:

Top Tip #1: Recurring meetings

Instead of setting up a meeting each time you need it, the functionality in Outlook can set up a meeting to recur every week. 

It is a small task, but you now no longer need to consciously think of setting up and inviting colleagues to this recurring meeting, meaning you can direct your efforts and brainpower to other tasks. Immediate impact!

You might think of automation as a somewhat mysterious term, as a key held onto by the leaders of business giants like Amazon and Toyota. However, as automation has become common across more and more aspects of life, its implementation has shrunk to the size of the individual, and we are all accessing and implementing automation without even necessarily realising it. For example, when you set a recurring meeting in your Gmail or Outlook calendar, you have automated a process. By recognising when you are automating, automation can start to feel like a much smaller and more manageable idea, and it can be transformed into a powerful tool that anyone working in an office environment can use. 

Thanking donors, a thankless task?

I started noticing opportunities for automation as I was building processes for thanking donors as a fundraising assistant at Help Musicians. I was keen to spend less time on manual tasks, and more time learning how to create reports and make meaningful improvements to our fundraising strategies, with the hope of having a real impact on the amount of money Help Musicians raises. However, the original processes in place meant that I spent most of my time inputting data from cheques sent in and manually writing letters and responses to our supporters. Luckily, in a previous role, I had used the mail merge function in Word and could see that mail merge had also been occasionally used in thank-you letters to supporters. I decided to incorporate this into Help Musicians’ thanking process for donations. 

Top Tip #2: Streamline your mailing process.

Microsoft Word’s mail merge function creates multiple letters from one template by pulling data about each supporter inputted into Excel and filling the letter with that data to personalise each letter. I would therefore need two templates; the Excel template for name, address, and donation information, and the ord template containing the copy sent to supporters.

Once I started creating this process, I found more and more opportunities to automate. In the Excel sheet, I realised that I only needed the serial number attached to each person’s ThankQ, and the amount they donated, and I could pull the name and address data using the report function in ThankQ, and use VLookup to cross reference this data and ensure each donor was being thanked for donating the correct amount. On the word template, I realised that if you can insert the date as an item, in the same way, you include the name, address, and amount to be filled in on the merge. This date automatically updates, so that whenever you print the letter, the date is the same as the day you print it. It’s a simple fix but if you are using a letter copy from a template made one or two months ago, a wrong date really stands out. 

Top Tip #3: Use all the tools in your arsenal to automate

VLOOKUP is an advanced Excel skill that has multiple applications and is super handy for cross-referencing data, and Mail Merge items (such as ‘Date’) all have unique functions that can speed up the writing process. Investigate what would make your job faster and automate as much as possible. 

My Data Literacy/ Data & Insights for Business Decisions Apprenticeship put the impact of automation in sharp relief for me. While building a large data project that will have a significant impact on how the fundraising department at Help Musicians spends its resources, at every step I have learned new techniques of automation that have improved my day-to-day workflow. 

As  I mentioned in my introduction, it was only during the onboarding of my new colleague, who would be taking on the role of Supporter Engagement Assistant, that I was able to see the transformation that had happened. When I started the role, thank you letters sent to our supporters could take between 1 and 2 days of work for a batch of 30 cheque donations. By investing time in automating this process, I was able to cut this down to 2 hours of work, and when I trained my new colleague, she was also easily able to do the work in the same amount of time. 

How to Find the Robots in Your Life

This lovely article by Teamwork gives a really good overview of the kinds of work that can be automated, and how you can go about doing so. It also has a handy guide on how you can look at your workload and find ways to create automation.

Task automation: types of tasks that can be automated and how to automate them (teamwork.com)

Top Tip #4: Take time to appreciate the work you’ve done.

It’s not always easy to see what in your workday can be automated, but when you take the time to reflect and evaluate the processes you do, the benefits of automation are incredible, even on an individual level. 

Since automating the thanking process, I have been able to implement more complex stewardship plans for our donors, so that we can effectively communicate with different groups of donors according to their needs, and record the conversations that we are having with them. When these donors can be leaving gifts worth thousands of pounds, it’s important that we are getting these conversations right. Now that the basic admin tasks are left to automation, I have more time to focus on the most important aspect of my fundraising, those human interactions. 

Thank you for reading, I hope you also find ways to make your job less about being a robot person and more about being a people person.

Michael Park is a Level 3 Data Apprentice at Multiverse, UK, and is writing for The Apprentice Lens. Here's more about him: 

"Hi, I'm Michael, and I'm doing the Data Literacy/ Data & Insights for Business Decisions Apprenticeship. I have 5 years of fundraising experience and am now part of the fundraising team at Help Musicians, the UK's leading charity for professional musicians. I love being creative and when I'm not in the office you'll find me making films, playing music, writing, and always traveling!"