Mobile Hope: bringing structure to nonprofit planning with GanttPRO
“We’ve been using GanttPRO since 2019, and it has helped us stay focused and accomplish what we set out to achieve as an organization.”
A story about a nonprofit organization using visual planning, resource management, and online access to bring more structure to its community projects.
Company overview
Company: Mobile Hope
Roles interviewed: Brian Dejewski, Co-founder and Executive Director
Project types: nonprofit community development
External pressures: managing community rollouts with multiple participants
Tool history: Microsoft Project
Problems hinted at: limited use of project management software across the team
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
Mobile Hope is a nonprofit community development organization working with families in mobile home communities.The initiatives focus on education, youth and family programs, healthy activities, access to resources, and community support.
Brian Dejewski, Co-founder and Executive Director, explains how project visibility, online access, and resource management have made GanttPRO part of the nonprofit’s project workflow.
I felt that GanttPRO was pretty straightforward. I used Microsoft Project before, and it wasn’t as easy to understand or as accessible.
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
Brian was already familiar with project management from his previous business experience. Mobile Hope, however, had operated largely on a volunteer basis for many years.
“The organization has been around for a while, and for more than half of its history, the work was done on a volunteer basis. I was also running businesses during that time, which is where I learned about project management and gained experience that I later brought into the nonprofit sector.”
The need for specialized software became especially clear about six years ago: “When we were working on our strategic plan, I started looking for a Gantt chart that we could use. I appreciated the online aspect of GanttPRO, so we started using it to execute that plan and put together several activities.”
Solution
Accessibility was one of the first things that stood out to Brian: “I felt that GanttPRO was pretty straightforward. I used Microsoft Project before, and it wasn’t as easy to understand or as accessible. With GanttPRO being online, it’s much easier to give more people access. I also really appreciated that I could let people outside the organization view the project without making them members with the help of a shared private link .”
“Having a visual overview makes it much easier to keep us on the same page. I can bring it to the board or the team and show where we are, what’s on track, what isn’t, and what needs to happen next. That’s probably my biggest use of GanttPRO – keeping everyone aligned and making upcoming priorities clear.”
Since people management is a key part of the workflow, resource planning plays an important role in how each initiative is organized: “For us, GanttPRO handles people-focused resource assignment, both within and outside the organization. I like that we can assign resources by position when we don’t yet know who specifically will fill that role – virtual resources work great for that.
Besides that, the tool is also well designed for setting task duration and dates, and the drag-and-drop features together with dependencies are also a huge plus.”
Impact
What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?
“We’ve been using GanttPRO since 2019, and it has helped us stay focused and accomplish what we set out to achieve as an organization.”
For Mobile Hope, GanttPRO is mainly used as a strategic planning tool, helping organize work into phases, plan the rollout, and structure the next stages of work.
Now, Brian is the only one using the software, but he plans to involve more team members in the future: “The challenge with project management software in general is that it can be difficult for people who don’t naturally think like project managers. That’s especially true in the nonprofit sector, where people are often very caring and passionate but may not work from structured strategic plans. That’s why we want to involve more of the team, so we can use GanttPRO to its full potential across the organization.”