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Nonprofits Should Develop Their Tech Fluency

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Tal Frankfurt

It is often said that every company is a technology company; is every nonprofit a technology organization?

While the business world is seeing powerful technological forces drive innovation across almost every sector, the nonprofit sector is having a hard time following.

Many will say that this is a funding issue; they are partially correct. Many donors still evaluate nonprofits based on their overhead instead of their impact — unlike in the for-profit sector, where overhead is expected, it is often considered a negative in the nonprofit sector. The focus on the overhead is limiting the ability to attract and retain top talent, take risks and find new ways to innovate.

While funding is an issue, I would like to suggest that the lack of “tech fluency” within nonprofit organizations is crippling their ability to be impactful. The concept of tech fluency is similar to being fluent in other languages. With basic Spanish, for example, a tourist could navigate the streets of Madrid, and a Spanish student would be able to find a job to pay for their summer abroad.

The spectrum of tech fluency is similar. It begins with the ability to understand and navigate enterprise technology principles and systems. It allows employees to avoid “shiny object syndrome” and understand how each tool can help further the organization’s mission.

Further along the spectrum, tech fluency is more function-based. Intermediate-level tech fluency means that the employees have detailed business-focused knowledge of how technology could help them raise funds and deliver better programs and services. Advance-level fluency offers the ability to sense future disruptive opportunities and leverage them to create sustainable and competitive advantages.

Over the last few years, I have seen great improvement in tech fluency within nonprofit IT departments. Nonprofit and higher education CIOs are coming to the table with innovative ideas on how to transform their organizations and create new value. However, more often their efforts are being blocked by fear of change and resistance to unlearn and relearn what is required to take the organizations to the new level.

I recently spoke with the CIO of a large national organization who realized that their average donor is in their late 70s. In order to continue to thrive (and survive), the organization needed to rethink how they engaged with their donors. It was clear that the current fundraising and marketing solutions the organization had been using for almost a decade were not going to support that goal; they were going to limit the organization’s ability to engage with new generations of supporters. After a long process of justifying the value of the digital transformation to the CEO and CFO, the organization decided to keep the technology it was using because it was concerned about the migration costs and afraid that the existing staff wouldn’t be able to adapt.

It became clear that organizational technology change was going to happen when the pain of staying with the current technology was greater than the pain of the migration. However, will it be too late when this organization realizes that?

How can you encourage tech fluency at your organization?

In order to engage and contribute to a tech-driven organization, all workers — from executives to interns — will need to learn how critical systems impact their capabilities and what their strategic and operational value is. Helping workers become more tech fluent can be key in achieving the mission the organizations were founded to achieve. IT departments have long been urged to “speak the language of business.” It is time that your nonprofit business users start speaking the language of IT.

Here are some suggestions on how to build tech fluency for specific roles:

  • Executives: I believe that even within the nonprofit sector, when it comes to tech fluency, executives should aim to be more knowledgeable than their counterparts at similar organizations if they want to have a real chance in competing for resources. For many executives, this could mean focusing less on numbers and spreadsheets and more on technology-enabled disruption. Executives should enhance their baseline understanding of the core systems that their organization is using with the understanding of what R&D and innovation might mean for the next five or even 10 years.
  • Marketers and fundraisers: In the digital age, we often forget to tell the story of transformation with the end in mind. For those who are charged with telling the story, tech fluency means developing a broad understanding of the organization’s IT environment and then being curious and flexible about possibilities that allow their organization to pivot for maximized opportunities. No matter where technology is going, marketing and advancement must follow it closely because to tell a technology story, one must understand it.
  • Finance: Big data and the ability to get real-time analytics has changed the way back-office employees see and approach their jobs. Many tools and practices that used to be backward-facing are now future-facing and focused on how today’s numbers can drive tomorrow’s performance. Tech fluency for CFOs means more than understanding financial systems and complex reporting; it also means understanding the value of the systems that drive revenue.

How does the reporting structure of your organization affect the organization’s tech fluency?

In many nonprofit organizations, the CIO still reports to the CFO and not the CEO. This is a missed opportunity. CIOs reporting into finance are often evaluated differently when it comes to budgets, business cases and overall return on investment. Digital transformation requires buy-in, support and active involvement of the CEO, often because it requires more than just technology change.

To thrive in an environment where the only constant is change, organizations need to make sure that all levels have both the opportunity to learn and the authority to operate in one of the strongest forces driving that change: technology.

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