Cloud Storage for Nonprofits: Tips for Organizing Your Digital Space

Spring is right around the corner, and with spring comes spring cleaning. This time of year is when we clear out our closets, throw away the items we don’t need, and do a deep clean of our home. In this post, I’m going to give you some spring cleaning tips for cloud storage platforms like Google Drive and OneDrive.

Organizing your nonprofit’s cloud storage is important because an organized drive leads to more accurate search results, saves space ( and potentially money), and accelerates the search process. You’ll more easily find documents and conserve your cloud storage for necessary items. 

Let’s talk about how we can do some spring cleaning in the cloud.

1.Organizing By Year Isn’t Always the Answer By default, you may think the best way to organize your cloud storage is by year. Many of us were taught the importance of dating items and placing them in chronological order as students. Unfortunately, this default does not always apply well in the modern world where organization’s can save a large number of files and pull up search results with a few keyboard clicks. Because we’re working with so much information, it’s unlikely you’ll remember the year a file or document was created. Instead, you’ll remember the document’s name (even partially) and why it was created. So, for example, your association offers a variety of nonprofit cloud storage classes each year. When you need to find the onboarding documents for an old class, are you more likely to remember the year that class was launched or the class’ name? Will you get the most accurate results from typing the year or the document’s name in the search bar? Speaking of names…

2. Follow Good Naming Practices What makes a good naming practice is consistency. How an organization decides to name files is completely the organization’s choice and should be based on how they plan on using their cloud storage (whether it’s OneDrive, Google Drive or another option). For example, you’re a new nonprofit association only operating within a small region. As you collect materials from nonprofits interested in joining your network, you can name the files following this template: [Document Type]_ [Organization Name]_Signed. If you’re a much larger association with several years under your belt, your naming practice might look more like this: [Document Type]_[Organization Name]_[Region]_[Year Signed]_Signed.

3. Delete Copies Somehow, you’ll find three or more copies of the same document in your cloud storage. These copies will be exact duplicates of each other or have minor changes that do not affect the overall content. Because cloud storage programs like Google Drive include a version history feature, managing changes in a document is easy, and there’s not usually a reason to have multiple versions of a single file. If you frequently find yourself referencing the same document, review its format to create a template.

4. Use Parent & Subfolders No, it’s not as simple as you think. When organizations first start using cloud storage, they’re not considering how to best organize the platform. This is how nonprofits find themselves with OneDrives full of documents but only a few folders. By the time they realize some arranging is in order, the number of documents they have is overwhelming. Examining these files then placing them into categories (which will become the parent and sub-folders) is a job itself. The folders an organization has may seem sufficient in the beginning, but as they grow, the folders and files get out of hand. For example, you manage an after school program and save all your documents based on the school’s name (e.g., contract with Whitson Academy goes into the Whitson Academy folder). As you continue operating your programs, you’ll create subfolders within each parent folder based on year, grade, and specific program.

5. Review Every Quarter We recommend reviewing your cloud storage every three months to avoid a pileup of work. However, the choice is really yours. Organization’s are working with limited staff, so if every six months is more realistic for your nonprofit, then go with that. What’s most important is organizing and reviewing your nonprofit’s cloud storage to optimize your work in a way that fits your needs.

If you’d like to learn more about organizing and maintaining your nonprofit's cloud storage, schedule a free consultation with Spark & Thrive. We look forward to seeing you thrive!

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