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The Top Three IT Priorities for Nonprofits in 2009

By V.L. Georgiev ⋅ December 23, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment
The worsening economy sooner or later is going to push a lot of nonprofits in a budget-cutting mode and IT spending will be one of the first items on the agenda.  Before you actually get to your IT budget consider these strategies:

  1. Cut Costs by Outsourcing some of your hardware and software — prime culprits are email, web and database servers that you probably don’t need to maintain in-house. Savings from your email server alone can reach up to $25K even for a modest office of fifteen
  2. Optimize your business processes – cut paper-forms invoicing, event management, and integrate otherwise closed data silos.  Savings can reach up to $50K depending on the size of your organization and current infrastructure
  3. A mix of strategies like reviewing software licenses and vendor contracts, GREENING your office and IT, optimizing your desktop support, etc. can yield also substantial savings.
Here are the details:
1. Cut Costs by Outsourcing some of your hardware and software:

I can think of very few reasons why any nonprofit, even the large ones with budgets of more than 10 million, would really need to host their own email servers. Perhaps you think there is no other way or that hosted services will be somehow inferior to your in-house set-up.  But you’d be wrong on both counts — there are plenty of providers who do email and do it for a living, meaning a lot better than you can probably do it yourself. I also bet that managing an email server is not in your mission statement and if the desired effect is communication by email it really would not matter where the actual hosting is.  Better performance and a chance to save close to a hundred grant over a period of four years (again, see example of fifteen mailboxes) should convince the most skeptical but if not see this webcast and even consider Google’s hosted services, which are free:

“Email sounds simple, but it’s complex technology that is difficult and time-consuming to manage. So more and more organizations are abandoning their on-premise email systems, and moving to a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.” (“Should Your Organization Get Out of the Email Business?”) Google’s Gmail hosting is an example of a free service that I use (a corporate version is $50 per user per year), and it’s now rebranded with many larger ISPs, too. One of the largest Exchange outsourcers is 123Together.com, which charges $10 per mailbox per month for its smaller customers. “We go to extreme measures to make our applications secure,” says Ravi Agarwal, the company’s founder. “We monitor our firewalls so that you don’t have to, and we haven’t had any security exploits yet.” (From “An IT Management To Do List for 2009“) Outsource your e-mail hosting. There are so many inexpensive solutions that will host your e-mail domain that it doesn’t make sense to have this in-house anymore. These services will make sure the backups are done, screen out spam and malware, handle support issues, and deliver redundant and reliable service to you.

Maintaining web and database servers is also extremely time-consuming, and it can easily run you a minimum of $20K a year — all, of course, conveniently included under the general IT budget item.  You are much better off with finding a reliable provider of those services and paying a fraction of that.  We’ve used webhost4life.com, mosso.com, godaddy.com and they will all offer you a superior hosting for under $200 a month.  An indirect benefit is that this new approach to IT will put a direct cost to each activity, and will force you to make cost-benefit analyses for every project and activity.  E.g. considering a new event management system or a fund-raising tool will force you first to assess how much time (and money) it takes (and costs) your staff currently.
2. Analyzing your current way of doing business is the first step of trying to optimize your business processes.  That simply means trying to quantify how much time it takes you to perform certain repetitive and labor-intensive activities.  Usually such activities are spotted most easily by how much paper they’re using — invoicing and billing, event management (see our article “The Difference between these two pictures costs you up to 50K a year”, coming soon ), fund-raising, mailings, all generate a lot of paper.  Again, ask yourselves if you’re in the paper, printing and copying business or is there a better way to capture, store and retrieve information and at the same time serve your constituents better.  There’s no excuse to ask  your constituents in 2009 to go to your website and print and mail event registration, newsletter sign-up forms, to bill your constituents with an invoice sent by mail, etc.
When analyzing IT solutions, don’t think in piecemeal fashion either as you would end up getting a dozen single-purpose systems — e.g. one for membership, another for event management, a third for fundraising, and so on.  Think best how these system would serve your constituents and if they are all making them register a dozen different times (into these different systems) obviously you would not be serving them but making them angry.  Integrating your otherwise closed data silos and tools also builds a single constituent view (comprised of contact, membership, event, fundraising, etc. information), and a single list of contacts (how many organizations really know the number of constituents they are serving without having to compile spreadsheets and address books).  For more see our view on “Integration of Closed Data Silos”, coming soon.
and “The NonProfit Executive Guide to Data Management”
3. A Mixture of other strategies can well save you thousands of dollars
  • GREEN IT:
    • cut the unnecessary printing and copying
    • shut-down your PCs and other electronics
    • when you outsource your server hardware (see #1) you also save on energy — check our article on the savings from electricity cuts alone here (http://www.vielgi.com/blog/?p=269).
    • telecommute when possible — use tools like LogMeIn, WebEx, etc.
  • Review of software licenses
  • Review your vendor contracts
  • Optimize your desktop support
    • IT support is substantially improved by telecommuting
    • Online Meetings instead of travel to remote locations

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4 comments for “The Top Three IT Priorities for Nonprofits in 2009”

  1. [...] The worsening economy sooner or later is going to push a lot of nonprofit organizations in a budget-cutting mode and IT spending will be one of the first items on the agenda.  Before you actually get to your IT budget consider these strategies from “The Top Three IT Priorities for Nonprofits in 2009″ [...]

    Posted by Data Management for Nonprofits » Save more than 50K next year and make the right IT investments; Happy Holidays | December 23, 2008, 1:08 PM

  2. [...] for … 23 Dec 2008 | 01:25 pm | Category: Uncategorized       unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBut you’d be wrong on both counts [...]

    Posted by Fundraising » Data Management for Nonprofits » The Top Three IT Priorities for … | December 26, 2008, 9:02 PM

  3. [...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBut you’d be wrong on both counts — there are plenty of providers who do email and do it for a living, meaning a lot better than you can probably do it yourself. I also bet that managing an … Usually such activities are spotted most easily by how much paper they’re using — invoicing and billing, event management (see our article “The Difference between these two pictures costs you up to 50K a year” ), fund-raising, mailings, all generate a lot of paper. … Read the rest of this great post here [...]

    Posted by Fundraising » Data Management for Nonprofits » The Top Three IT Priorities for … | December 26, 2008, 9:06 PM

  4. [...] Vote The Top Three IT Priorities for Nonprofits in 2009 [...]

    Posted by free check printing software | Digg hot tags | December 27, 2008, 6:02 AM

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