Nonprofits are generally funded by governments, private foundations, the public, and to some extent, their customers. Yet, despite the fact that they are trying to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, just about any nonprofit executive director will tell you that one of their biggest challenges is the expectation that they should do "more with less." This mantra is understandable in any sector at times, particularly lean economic times. But while the approach tends to ebb and flow with the Dow in the for-profit sector, nonprofits have made "more with less" a lifelong operating philosophy.
Moreover, as seen more often in government and corporate America, technology needs to be viewed as an asset for non-profits. The "less" nonprofits are expected to get by with (or without) is called "overhead." These are expenses that aren’t directly or obviously directly tied to a program or program outcome. If you run a reading program, for example, books and the people who teach with them are direct program expenses. On the flipside, the computer the bookkeeper uses and the bookkeeper him or herself are overhead. Program funders like to pay for books and their readers; they don’t like to pay for computers and bookkeepers.
I’ve been working in the nonprofit technology space for more than 13 years now, specifically developing and implementing digital divide programs since 2007. The view of technology as overhead has the majority of nonprofits I’ve engaged with, and we’re talking about several hundred, swimming in technical issues, outdated systems, no plan for the future and no way to get there if they had one. I’m working with an agency now that has been saving unrestricted funds for years in order to migrate their 20-year old database system to something more current. The cost is expected to exceed $50,000 but they are overdue – long overdue – for the upgrade. This kind of infrastructure technology is not something funders will typically fund, yet it is absolutely vital to the organization’s success.
The scenario I’m describing with the nonprofit and the database is repeated time and time again in the nonprofit sector. Visit the techsoup.org forums and read the posts, or talk to a few nonprofits and you’ll hear about outdated and dying servers, crashing workstations and old software. Nonprofits with extensive technology challenges are no different than people using dial-up at home to access the Internet.
