NPower Nonprofit IT Survey Results: What do you think?

Have you checked out the results of the nonprofit IT survey that NPower and Accenture conducted a couple months back? The full report (PDF) came out earlier this month and after looking through it, I'd have to say I wasn't all that surprised to learn that many nonprofits are spending less than 1% of their budget on IT and tech each year.

I've blogged about some of the other highlights of the report but would love to open the discussion to get other people's thoughts on the report as well as on how nonprofits are or aren't adopting tech planning into their budget process. Aside from that, it would help TechSoup to know more about what other nonprofits NEED from us in order to help them find solutions to their tech/IT problems.

With many of the more than 1000 nonprofit respondents saying that they rely on volunteers, other nonprofits, and personal experience to help solve IT problems, I know that there are things we at TechSoup can be doing better to help get the technology into the hands of nonprofits who need it and help them figure out how to use it.

What do you think? Check out the survey results (PDF) and post your thoughts here in response to what you've read and suggestions of what we can all be doing better.

Becky,

I found the report to be interesting, with a clear structure and presentation of data.

But it was so lacking in detail or quantitative analysis that I didn't find it to be very useful.

I also take exception to one of their conclusions; that IT does not play a prominent role in most non-profits due to lack of available funding. Nonsense.

When an organization is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations each year, there IS available funding.  They are simply choosing to allocate it elsewhere.

So to better define the situation and begin addressing the real problem, I submit that the statement should be reversed. Funding is unavailable because management has decided (rightly or wrongly) that the potential benefits do not justify a more prominent role for IT in their organizations.

-ENO

Just because they are not funding IT, does not mean they are not using IT. With the plethora of open source and low budget software and canned solutions out there, an organization can be highly technical on a "non-prominent" budget.

As a matter of fact, you might go so far as to say that the LOW BUDGET IT departments may even figure MORE PROMINENTLY in an organization due to their inate ability to do more with less.

I like to think that our NPO accomplishes a GREAT DEAL with IT, but if you looked at our IT budget you would think we were still using a blackboard and chalk.

The problem with this fundamental "misunderstanding" is that it dilutes the value of anything else that is stated in the article. If they can't convince me that they have a grasp of the non profit world of IT, how I am able to trust the rest of the findings?

I have to say, I feel very similar to ENO with regard to this effort.

Good points, Tim and ENO.

I would agree that just because and org spends less than $5000 a year on IT, doesn't mean they're not using tech, valuing it, and finding creative ways to save money on more traditional IT expenses.

At a prior small nonprofit where I worked, we had no internal staff tech person and did only consult out on an ad hoc (usually emergency only) basis. We did, however, have a number of people on staff who had at least general experience in some tech (whether they did some network admin stuff in a previous job, managed databases elsewhere, or had expertise in some new social or digital media).

We frequenlty leveraged the "talents" of in-house staff, volunteers, board members, friends, and resources like these forums and Google to troubleshoot and improve our systems.

Most of our funding was specific, program-related grant money that we didn't have the discretion to spend on IT, infrastructure, overhead of maintenance. On paper, our org looked as though our IT was not even on the list, but we accomplished a lot through our own ingenuity, finding free or heavily discounted resources and services, and calling in for professional help only when absolutely necessary.

One thing I found particularly interesting about some of the results was the low level of satisfaction expressed by many groups who are using spreadsheets and paper and pencil to keep track of donor information. With so many low-cost (or even free) tools available these days, it seems like we could be doing a much better job about getting those tools into people's hands.