Non-Profit Tech Blog

Check out the new blog, Today I Cried. The poor IT Manager is going through a tough love scenario with the office’s Exchange server. It’s a nightmare scenario that I luckily avoided by moving straight to Exchange 2003 and skipping Exchange 2000.

As for the rest of the blog, it’s true. If you happen to be in a smaller non-profit under 20, you shouldn’t have any IT people. Over that, there’s no choice but to have one. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed you won’t have IT staff if the place is under $10 million a year in revenues. As a result, the lack of specialization and little IT knowledge in the nonprofit sector leads to wild variations in the use of technology by nonprofits.

IT is considered a cost center by many nonprofits. As a result, IT costs are deferred for the most trivial reasons and ends up in even greater operational inefficiency. That behavior is a constant reminder of why my gig is much better than others. I’ve seen nonprofits at $11 million that were far worse off than nonprofits at $500,000 in revenue. And while I didn’t consider myself to be in a moment of utter, existential crisis when I first started my job, it was a difficult gig because of the lack of documentation and poor planning and even worse execution by the person who occupied my seat before me. “DSL doesn’t work with e-mail” indeed!

So I salute you, anonymous IT Manager, whoever you are! You are embarking on a road that is ultimately paid for not because you will be much loved by your co-workers but because you know that there are rewards even greater than that of Warren Buffett’s to the Ford Foundation! (Do I hear people softly coughing out there in the blogosphere?)