Top questions asked by nonprofit customers - answered!

[#1]

Hi nonprofits! As Program Manager of our Ask an Atlassian program, I see common questions come up time and again from social impact teams looking to get the most out of Atlassian. Over the next few weeks I’ll share the top FAQs—plus clear, actionable answers and links to help you go further, faster.

Feel free to ask any follow up questions or share your own experiences/answers to the questions!

Q - Which Jira should I use for managing nonprofit projects? What about Trello?

So you’ve realised that your projects have become too complex for spreadsheets and you’re exploring project management tools. Here’s how I like to think about each of them…

Jira, particularly in List View, is most similar to a spreadsheet. It allows you to have columns for due date, status, labels, categories and assignee, and group related work items under a broader work stream. Start with Jira for most projects.

If you haven’t yet prioritised your nonprofit’s projects or initiatives, explore Jira Product Discovery. You can easily rate projects for social impact, effort and reach giving you an objective way to defer lower priority work. There’s always more we can do in social impact so being able to say no confidently is imperative!

Jira Service Management is specifically for managing intake requests from internal or external stakeholder groups that may be your community members or functions across the organisation. You can customise forms, workflows and fields to make it suitable for your use case.

Trello is how each individual in your organisation can stay on top of their work. With its new personal productivity features, such as inbox and planner, tasks from your email, instant messaging tools and browser can flow to your board so that you see them all in one place. Plus, it's handy for simple projects especially when collaborating with volunteers as you can invite them as guests to a single board without paying for them. 

Need help deciding what’s right for you? Request support through Ask an Atlassian.

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Thank you, @Lauren Black for your guidance here.

I work in a non-profit where most of our work is run by volunteers. When they interact with our tools, most of the time they work with their phones. Do your recommendations stay the same with this in mind?

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Good to know! Takk.

[Lauren Black]

@Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ great question as we know a lot of organisations are similar to yours! 

Both Trello and Jira have Board view on mobile, with the views similarly showing the task, due date and assignee.

For those with Trello lists set up as statuses in a workflow e.g. To Do, Doing, Done, Jira and Trello will be similar on mobile. 

However for those wanting lists in a board view to represent categories of work or something other than statuses in a workflow, Trello may be a more suitable option. The other benefit of Trello is the use of coloured lists and labels which are visible on mobile. 

Would love to hear how your nonprofit is using the tool!