I am honored that MassNonprofit.org featured the importance of Strategic Technology. Reprinted here with permission:
A Strategic Technology Plan Is Mission Critical for Nonprofits
By Lionel Silberman
Technology is an investment in your nonprofit’s capacity to deliver on its mission, but just like other aspects of organizational management, it requires planning.
Most importantly, a strategic technology roadmap avoids a piecemeal approach that typically results in redundant costs, ineffective software interfaces, and a maintenance nightmare. It’s a blueprint that guides technology purchases, upgrades, and customizations, and lets you leverage an integrated system for multiple projects and opportunities. It sets priorities and outlines what your organization will do and when.
A Technology Plan Is Foundational
A technology plan is intimately linked to the organization’s strategy, and is not an afterthought.
One large organization without such a plan was spending over $1 million/year on patchwork and emergency maintenance of a homegrown solution that dissatisfied clients and led to staff burnout. Like all organizations today, it competes on its data and accessing and understanding that data is vital, but technology problems got in the way. A plan was created that shifted resources to take advantage of a partnership with a major cloud provider that facilitated migration to a more robust technology with a three-year breakeven.
Another, smaller organization’s plan that called for best-in-breed technology allowed a shift from in-person to fully remote services during the pandemic and now facilitates the strategy to double the clients served in two years. Increasingly, fundraising demands an elevated role of technology and data that needs a plan to be successful as well.
Stakeholder Views Are Critical
Before creating a technology plan, senior management needs to actively support it. Management’s role is to convey the importance of developing the technology plan, be a decision maker as the plan proceeds in phases, and guide the team in considering other important organizational issues.
To get started, a technology team needs to be established. Not all stakeholders need to be on the technology team, but their input regarding deficiencies and opportunities needs to be considered. Depending on the size of the organization, the executive sponsor/decision maker, staff, clients, and a board member should participate. Team members should understand the range of possible solutions and at least one member should be well versed in technology – or you should engage an outside expert to provide guidance.
Also, depending on the size of your organization, it is important to have developed a formal strategic plan, or a focused, clearly written set of goals, as doing so will guide the technology plan. The technology plan will then be tightly coupled to your strategy and goals.
It’s All About Your Mission
A strategic technology plan starts with a succinct description of your organizational mission and the major service or product offerings you provide, and focuses on how technology will support that mission. It inventories your current technology, along with accompanying financial and partnership commitments.
The technology you are using (or missing) for your constituent relationship management (CRM) system is a key element. Such technology is needed to give a complete and integrated data view of clients, donors, staff, and partners.
Independent of external data that is integral to your service, your internal data should be reviewed to ensure effective support of regulatory and donor reporting, fundraising and presentation of organization effectiveness. The plan will identify and prioritize deficiencies and opportunities according to budget and need.
Stakeholder interviews help determine specific areas that are unique to your organizations. Your specific challenges will dictate whether technology capitalization, contingency planning, security, data protection, and privacy should be included in more depth.
Depending on the current technical sophistication of your organization, planning will occur at different levels, e.g. infrastructure, data, reporting, support of digital marketing, and communication campaigns or social media or gathering engagement metrics. The budget should account for training and include schedules and next steps to make the plan actionable. Often overlooked, but important to define, is how you will measure the success of your technology plan. A phased approach to creating the plan with executive check-in helps ensure that budgets and recommendations fit with other organization priorities.
Final thought
Given the speed of technology change, nonprofits owe it to themselves and their stakeholders to be as technologically capable as possible; their sustainability depends on it. If you haven’t reviewed your technology use in a while, now’s a good time to get started.
Lionel Silberman is a senior technical consultant who helps nonprofits with technology planning and technology challenges at strategictech.org/. Call him at 781-789-1075 or email: lionelsilberman@gmail.com .