Are nonprofit organizations technologically challenged? Are they going about their work without the cutting-edge software and hardware needed to function effectively in the digital age? What percentage are using sophisticated information technologies to support and enhance their delivery of mission-critical programs and services? And what are the challenges preventing or limiting nonprofits’ use of IT to deliver programs and services?
These are some of the questions raised and answered in the latest “communiqué” issued by the John Hopkins Nonprofit Listening Post Project.
The key findings include:
- The majority of nonprofits are relying on a range of current information technologies for both administrative functions and program and service delivery.
- However, most nonprofits are not content with the extent to which they have integrated technologies into program and service delivery and recognize that they could be doing more.
- Lack of funding, time and expertise are the major barriers preventing nonprofits from harnessing the full potential of information technologies.
The complete report, Nonprofit Technology Gap Dec. 2010, is available for download.
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This pretty much reflects my experience as a technical person who has worked in a Jewish nonprofit as well as a much larger healthcare nonprofit and a couple for-profit business in between. It is more about the size of the organization than the non-profit status.
It seems to me that Jewish organizations are disproportionately affected by the size issue, though. In the for-profit world, Amazon and Wal-Mart have displaced the locally-owned bookstores and department stores by using sophisticated, centralized technology. I’m just the tech guy so I don’t want to debate the merits of local ownership, but we don’t have corporate-owned, big-box synagogues and so we don’t have the same technology. I have long dreamed that organizations of synagogues should actually have their affiliates on the same computer network and able to share applications and data.
If there is any myth I’d like to bust, it is that IT is such a commodity that small organizations can entirely outsource it on demand, and this study confirms that it is the organizations who can afford in-house staff that are more sophisticated. (See figure 5 in the report: lack of time, money, staff and expertise are the top challenges, all of which basically mean a need for staff with time and budget to actually think using technology to improve program delivery.)
I had some more to write so I continued this on my own blog: http://jhacker.tumblr.com/post/2497658945/the-nonprofit-technology-gap-myth-or-reality
Managing information takes more than just buying the software. Too many non-profits pay for CRMs like Convio or Donorperfect or Salesforce without adequately staffing those assets. Too often, non-profits are simply not aware of what is possible with the technology they already have, and so they don’t invest in it. The classification of IT as a support service and indirect cost further disincentivizes making the up-front investments required to reap long-term savings and revenue opportunities.