Non-Profit Tech Blog

Ok, it’s time to be a contrarian. I’ve seen a lot of blog postings in the nonprofit tech and marketing sector lately about Org 2.0, widgets, Second Life and Web 2.0 and frankly, they’re starting to disturb me. Many of these postings are quite earnest about their good intentions and I share many of these intentions too. Their intentions (and mine) can be summed up as follows:

We’re all trying to get nonprofits up off their collective a**es and into some sort of advanced interaction with the Web.

It is TRUE that many nonprofits are missing the boat for whatever reason (my org included) on Web 2.0. However, the devil is in the details or to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, the implementation is sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic for many nonprofits.

My arguments here are NOT intended to stifle the many experiments in trying to bring the new Web to our sector. It’s just that there are long-standing, non-technological barriers of entry to these new strategies and they underlie many other concerns. In my original post about Nonprofit 2.0, I wrote:

But ultimately, non-profits live or die on one thing: “It’s the clients, stupid!” If our clients aren’t better served by our whizbang gizmos, then Nonprofit 2.0 is just another silly notion. It’s an ironic function of technology in the social services sector that the level of technology needed to implement a given initiative is usually in proportion to the amount of actual need within the client population. We serve homeless clients – perhaps the toughest sector of non-profit clientele to serve with technology. With little money and no permanent shelter, technology for our clients is usually limited to a pay-as-you-go cell phone or a quarter in a pay phone.

However, if you serve those clients with knowledge workers, you may end up with a more cost-effective outcome for that client. If the case worker for that client has better IT that allows them to save that client’s identification documents, keep their progress notes in good order, keep track of their entitlements, find them shelter, keep track of upcoming shelter availability, print out a referral letter, scan a check and send it to a landlord to prevent eviction and so much more then wouldn’t that be a better way to serve the client with technology? If so, that’s what Nonprofit 2.0 means to me.

May I point out that many Web widgets or Seth Godin’s Org 2.0 document do not directly address social services problems? Of course, that isn’t their intent but we, as nonprofit technologists, need to focus with laser-like precision upon the real items that are affecting our less technologically-inclined co-workers. What many of these suggestions are really doing is adding more seemingly peripheral work to the already difficult work loads that we are experiencing in this sector. There is a fine line between advocacy and ticking off the people who work around you and I feel that if I went to my co-workers with half of these suggestions I would get the deepest and most real feedback you can imagine: #*(&$, I already have enough work as it is!.

So again, I feel that as an IT director, you need to go back to the basics and many of these “basics” are related to the use of office technology. I know, I know, office technology is totally unsexy. Nobody seems to care about the functionality of MFPs in a suggested Nonprofit 2.0 workplace or document management systems or remote desktops or fax servers or smartphone-enabled workforces. However, we’re talking about culture shifts here, slowly moving line staff in social services towards a curve approaching the asymptotic limit suggested by Web 2.0 technologies. Social services orgs need a plan and all we’re getting on the Web is a vision statement.

So I’d like to discuss in the rest of this post how to move a social services organization towards technological nirvana from the viewpoint of someone who actually works for a nonprofit. Notice that there’s a shift in subjectivity occurring here. Put your social services worker hat on BEFORE you put your IT hat on. Please pay attention — there will be a test afterwards

You MUST learn your line of business. If all you take care of is making sure the networks and desktops are working, you are NOT providing value for your org. Even if you are only a one-person department, you must grok your org’s work so deeply that “alignment” is an unnecessary word. Sit down with your line staff for a day. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you do their work? Remember, case management is not particularly scalable so don’t try to suggest something stupid like putting RFID tags on all the meals your org hands out or making everyone do IM to talk to clients. It’s immediately offputting to social services workers. It lacks finesse and tact and frankly, sounds like you haven’t put in the time to learn about the business.

Always look for new tech opportunities AFTER you learn the business. Once you speak the language of your line staff, you will still need to figure out how to make technology work for them. It can occur in the oddest of places. For instance, my organization has food vans roaming New York city every night. Can you guess what technologies might be appropriate for them? What about a department responsible for receiving the snail mail for 2,000 clients? What technology would you suggest?

Hang out and establish rapport with your line staff. I don’t care how you do this but this MUST be done. Roaming the hallways, doing impromptu meetings there, making yourself approachable (within whatever bounds you want to set) are great ways to set the table. This is the only way to ensure that important clues about broken work processes float up to you. “You know, I’m having a problem with my [insert technology here]” can be a great lead-in for understanding how you can enact a new solution for your line staff.

Believe it or not, the people answering your phones at your front desk are quite often budding technologists. They have to be — they’re multitaskers and are very familiar with your phone system perhaps even more so than you are. And surprise, surprise, they might be interested in a VOIP implementation but don’t go around yelling, “VOIP! VOIP! You need VOIP!” Sell it as a new phone system with new functionality. This example applies to everyone in your staff that handles documents, prepares faxes, answers the phone. That’s probably almost everyone. Documents, faxes, phones — that’s all technology. Sure, it’s not state of the art stuff but turning line staff into knowledge workers is a long process and you need to work with what’s available.

Do not dismiss real concerns about work load. I can’t stress this enough. Technology is NOT meant to be a pain in the a**. Giving someone a document about Squidoo and how to read blogs doesn’t make sense without context provided by that co-worker’s work flow. Program managers should be polled early and often about the work loads their staff is experiencing. Figure out how to reduce that load by rearchitecting their workflow with failsafe gadgetry and applications. At the same time, the attention and care that can be paid to any workflow is a bit of a zero sum game. Any time you add something to someone’s work load you need to figure out how to relieve the time pressure on the other end. Your co-workers will at least respect the fact that you care and give you some slack should the technology invariably go awry.

Operate on the principle that all new gadgetry will in turn, create a cultural shift. Therefore, before you pick new gadgets, try to understand the impacts of the cultural shift you are creating. This also means that you have to understand your workplace culture before you pick the gadgetry. In other words, what VALUES do you want to promote? My general belief is that I want to implement more efficiency but with an eye towards more transparency and a more flat managerial hierarchy. Your mileage may vary.

New stuff has to be demonstrably better than the old stuff. You will not get adoption if the new technology you implement is not as good, fast or reliable as the “old way”. That’s what I’ve found with Basecamp‘s project management Web application. People hate the fact that they have to go into Basecamp to respond to messages. They want to do it via Outlook despite the fact that e-mail causes a huge problem in project continuity if you have turnover in the project’s membership. That issue is too abstract for my co-workers though. As it is, e-mail is the canonical method of document management in my agency despite the increasing costs for storage and the lack of a Google-like interface for text searches within Outlook. Obviously, I need to look for some other key to create cultural shift but I have yet to find it.

Raising funds is not a bad thing. IT departments historically have been seen as a cost center, an annoying line item that if out of control can screw up your org’s Charity Navigator rating. The great thing about new Web 2.0 technologies are that they can link up to your Web fundraising activities. Do try to inform your development department about this stuff. Squidoo is relevant here and so is Web CMS technology. Fundraising should be the most teched-out department in a social services organization. After all, Raiser’s Edge is probably going to sit there. Think about ROI for any new technology you bring in-house.

Whew! Finally got that load off my chest. So that’s it, I’m not asking people to stop trying to introduce great new Web 2.0 stuff. I love it too. But I do take issue with the seeming notion that if you’re not down with Web 2.0, you’re not one of the cool kids. Of course, we want nonprofits to be the best they can be. It’s just glaringly obvious to me that we need to acknowledge the fact that there are alternatives to the Web 2.0 hype that are much more reasonable and accessible to our nonprofit brethren and sisthren.