Three Reasons Your Nonprofit Needs an Identity Solution

Nonprofits do society’s hardest work. They serve our most vulnerable people, protect our most precious resources, and advocate for our most worthy causes. In short, they strive to make the world a better place for all of us. That’s why Okta is committed to enabling nonprofits to leverage the world’s best technology. It’s also why every nonprofit needs a world-class identity solution.

More secure + more efficient at the same time

Security is not a luxury; it’s what employees, beneficiaries, and donors expect. However, there’s a common misconception that increasing security means increasing costs and friction. At a time when many nonprofits are being asked to do more with less, Okta helps nonprofits make the most of scarce technology resources. Take single sign-on (SSO) as an example. SSO enables your organization to adopt and deploy any number of technologies without increasing the number of credentials that people need to secure and manage them. Okta SSO includes the ability for your end-users to reset their own passwords, often saving a huge amount of time each year for IT teams that are already stretched thin.

Another example is lifecycle management, which automatically provisions and deprovisions user accounts in “downstream” applications. This saves time, reduces the risks of lingering access and human error, and can save money on product licenses for the downstream applications, providing increased security and increased efficiency—at the same time.

Protect vulnerable populations

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently noted that “as humanitarian action becomes more data-driven, humanitarians will have ever-greater access to large volumes of personal data, which will augur an urgent need for ethical data privacy and data protection policies to be adopted across the sector.” Nonprofits can’t meet that need on their own.

This is especially poignant for organizations working with vulnerable populations. Nonprofits obviously understand the urgency of their work and are aware that they’re operating in an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape. The Okta Identity Cloud is the only platform built to secure every digital touchpoint from employees logging into business systems, to developers accessing APIs and servers, to beneficiaries being served in the field, and more.

Every program is a technology program

We’ve all heard some version of the axiom, “every organization is becoming a technology organization.” That’s just as true for nonprofits as for any other organization, but what’s unique to nonprofits is that every program is becoming a technology program as well. More and more programs rely on technology for basic operations like beneficiary enrollment and tracking, volunteer onboarding and training, communication and promotion, etc. Many program models are being fundamentally transformed by technology. The Trevor Project, for example, has been serving LGBTQ youth in crisis for decades, but now leverages technology to serve exponentially more individuals than they ever could before.

Nonprofit leaders also understand that the line between “administrative” technology and “program-related” technology is increasingly blurry or non-existent. For example, many nonprofits keep records pertaining to staff, beneficiaries, volunteers, donors, and others across all of their programs in a single CRM. Whether technology plays a supportive or transformative role in your programs, your nonprofit needs an identity solution that is secure and seamless enough to support all users across all technologies.

Download our whitepaper, Empowering NGOs with Identity and Access Management, to learn how nonprofits like Plan International, Norwegian Refugee Council, and Crisis Text Line are leveraging the Okta Identity Cloud to achieve their missions.