Are Nonprofits Staffing Tech Right?

In the past, nonprofits would just have someone on staff (usually the Communications person) run all things tech at the organization, plus their organizational duties, and sometimes that's still the case. Technology staffing is a full time job, and NTEN just released their 8th Annual Nonprofit Technology Staffing and Investments Report to dig deeper into what nonprofits are doing to handle the tech in this fast-paced technological world.

The report examines technology staffing levels, technology budgets, overall organizational approach to technology decisions, as well as technology oversight and management practices. Over 750 individuals from nonprofits participated in taking the survey, ranging from various operating budget size, staff size, and more.

A few key findings from the report that your nonprofit may want to take into consideration:

• Generally organizations designate tech-specific staff. On average, nonprofits have 4.4 technology-responsible staff.

  

• Size doesn't matter. Larger size and budgets don’t necessarily correlate with being at the leading end of the tech adoption spectrum: 7% of small organizations report that they are at the leading end of the technology adoption spectrum compared to 3% of the very large organizations from our survey.

• It's time to ramp up the data. Compared to previous years, there has been an increase in the number of "Data" staff.

• What does money look like? When looking at the per-staff budgets, it was disocovered that very large organizations may be spending the same - or even less- than small organizations.

• Strategic planning is key. Leading organizations are nearly 3x more likely to include tech in their strategic plans than struggling organizations. 64% of all respondents have incorporated technology in their own strategic plan.

It's important to analyze your own organizational needs, and to set up a technological strategic plan and a staffing plan. Will your organization be dedicating more resources to technology and staffing this year?

Read the full report here.