Jira

Jira is the flagship work management platform from Atlassian, a project management and software development company. The platform was first created in 2002 to track bugs for software teams. Since then, Atlassian has tried hard to make themselves relevant to any industry, including the gamut of nonprofits.

Your tasks, which Jira calls "work items", are divided into layers of types in a hierarchy. How each task is recorded and goes through status change is determined by a workflow users can customize. Teams can view these tasks in numerous ways, including a priority list, a calendar, and what is in your backlog. Jira encourages you to build reports, views and dashboards to make it easier to identify which tasks require the most attention.

There are two things you will find built out more robustly in Jira than most other PM platforms; structure and customization. Structure partially comes from the task hierarchy, though the UI makes this work once you put in the time to learn it. As for customization, which also takes investment, Jira is clearly meant for molding it to the needs of your organization, rather than forcing you into a format that may not fit well. Leveraging these two strengths make it easier to handles a large number of teams, custom fields, and dependencies better than other simpler tools. Just always keep in mind all this power comes with the price of a more difficult to build and manage tool.

• Medium to large multifaceted organizations with numerous teams a roles, who need to set clear stages, owners, and deadlines.

• Grant and development teams can leverage Jira for tracking applications, reports, and renewals through a pipeline that you build once, and it works every time.

• Tech, data, and product teams within nonprofits, with the option of creating a space for other non-tech teams.

• Organizations already using Confluence or Loom, since Jira will come in the Atlassian bundle.

Jira could be a good fit for your team if you have 10+ people on multiple teams, a cyclical workflow, and someone tech savvy on staff can own setup and administration. Given that Jira is free for nonprofits for up to 25 users, the 10-25 member organization range is in an ideal place to try their extensive customizations for no cost.

If you're looking for a tool that is simple and clear visually right away, Jira might not be your best pick. Because the tool takes time to set up and learn, having high turnover would likely end up making your workflows slower. Jira is ultimately a tool that requires investment. The more a team puts into it, the more they get out of it.

Jira is a large and powerful tool, that makes it hard to simply explain. Atlassian has a number of videos that help you get a better picture of what Jira is, here are a few resources for you to review.

The Introduction to Jira YouTube playlist has short videos to help you understand what Jira is.

The Jira Software Demo Den playlist is a large collection of demo videos covering specific aspects of Jira.