I'm also writing another series of posts about Drupal, SEO and information architecture that I think will be chock-full of actionable tips and testable conclusions. It's basically a call for nonprofits to rethink their online strategy regarding their websites. I think I've found a recipe that will consistently grow site traffic for even very small nonprofits. It doesn't rely on having a social media star or even consistently great content. It does take a lot of work though.

Look through their resumes and see if they ever held a front-line position as a programmer or a database administrator.

That's really critical for nonprofits that are tiny. For nonprofits below $5 million in revenues, there are still too many front-line IT tasks that need to be performed. The hectic nature of small nonprofits won't support the more leisurely pace of a non-technical IT manager. You need someone who is hands-on and very technically capable. I've seen IT managers with MBAs (not that I don't like MBAs but people seem to give them an awful lot more latitude than they deserve in the IT field) who can't even set up a table in Microsoft Access or write a simple HTML page. So what I'm talking about here isn't whether or not nonprofits shouldn't hire IT managers but, given their scant resources and lack of experience hiring IT staff, what rubric nonprofits should rely on that will achieve a minimal level of success.