4 Ways Adobe Document Cloud Helps the Southside Fund Give Back

The one thing I am most passionate about is helping people. Over the years I have had the opportunity to contribute my time and finances to many philanthropic causes. Recently, I have established my own philanthropy, Southside Fund, to empower youth in my hometown of Richmond, VA.

I learned quickly from my philanthropic work that there is a big difference between donating your time and finances to organizations and starting a philanthropy from the ground up. At Southside Fund, we use Adobe Document Cloud products to make everything a little bit easier. Here are four ways you can use Adobe Document Cloud for your philanthropic work.

Reviewing important documents

One of the most popular philanthropic causes is giving out scholarships or financial aid. Many philanthropies and nonprofits have an application process for those seeking aid. With scholarships, there are generally many more applicants than awardees. Making the choice of whom you decide to award scholarship money to should be a collaborative effort.

The process of selecting winners can be meticulous and arduous, which is why streamlined document sharing and reviewing comes in handy. Acrobat Pro DC allows you to easily share important documents with others as a collaborative PDF and the review feature allows others to edit and leave comments. This capability is not just relegated to text-based documents. I can upload any type of file to review and can even upload physical paper documents using Adobe Scan.

Empowering team collaboration

Running a philanthropy takes the dedication of many team members’ time, energy, and expertise. For this sacrifice to pay off, you need your philanthropy to be funded.

One of the more important tasks for many philanthropies is writing grant proposals. For many philanthropies, grants are essential to their existence. At Southside Fund, we are able to upload grant proposals into Acrobat Pro DC so that the team can work on them collectively.

We can easily invite any person – inside or outside our organization – to review, edit, and leave feedback in these documents.

Many times, when planning charitable events, we bring in external experts to help with strategy and execution. Even though they are not a part of the Southside Fund team, they can still be granted access to necessary documents such as contracts and spreadsheets. They do not even need an Acrobat DC Pro subscription to gain access or give feedback!

Finding a place to store files

The internet can be a dangerous place. Feeling that information is secure is invaluable. We trust Adobe Document Cloud to maintain the privacy and integrity of our digital documents.

We are able to store all of our important non-profit or philanthropic documents in a secure place with specific access based on the document or the individual. This includes financial budgets, organizational planning, volunteer hours and donor lists.

Still working with paper files? I hear you. You can use the free Adobe Scan mobile app to capture any physical documents, and then upload them into Adobe Document Cloud so you can rest assured that they are safe and can be found whenever needed.

Organizing expense receipts

Running a philanthropy means accruing a lot of expenses. Fortunately, many of these expenses can be included in tax write-offs. However, you need to keep track of receipts to qualify for this write-off.

Keeping track of expense receipts can be difficult and time-consuming, but being able to write off expenses is crucial to the success of a nonprofit.

Adobe Scan provides a simple and powerful solution. Whenever I have a receipt for any relevant expenses, I can use the free Adobe Scan app. Adobe Scan automatically creates a PDF and runs optical character recognition, turning the document image into live, searchable text. This makes it simple when I want to track down a specific receipt or invoice during tax season. All in all, this is a much better solution than sorting through a bunch of old, crumpled up receipts.

If you are running a philanthropy, you are already contributing so much to the world by investing a lot of time, money and energy for a cause. Don’t make it harder on yourself; use Adobe Document Cloud to take your organization further.