THE EDITORS

Holly Ross is the executive director of The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

Katrin Verclas is a former executive director and current board member of NTEN. She is an IT consultant and project manager.

Alison Levine is a special projects fellow with NTEN and has worked in the nonprofit sector for over ten years.

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) provides hands-on training, sector-wide research and a network of peers to nonprofit staff to help them effectively use technology in their work. They believe that technology allows nonprofits to work smarter, more efficiently, and with greater social impact.

Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Holly Ross, Katrin Verclas and Alison Levine
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-34365-4

Chapter One

Mission First: Achieving IT Alignment

Steve Heye

This book is filled with great advice about how to manage the technology in your organization, but none of it will do you one bit of good unless you remember this: mission first. As a nonprofit leader you are, in many ways, lucky in this regard. You are bombarded daily with technology news, requests for software or gadgets from staff, and advice from everyone about what technology you should use. This cyclone of technology activity can be maddening, but if you use your mission as a filter, the cyclone will become a soft breeze.

Ever since the first desktop computers made their way into the non-profit sector, information technology (IT) has helped organizations become more efficient and more effective, while also driving nonprofit leaders a little crazy. For many leaders, technology is a necessary evil. However, if nonprofits are going to leverage technology to its fullest potential, their leaders need to change that way of thinking. They need to view technology as a partner in achieving organizational goals. In other words, they need to align their investments in information technology with their efforts to further their mission.

This chapter will explore the relationship between mission and technology, clearly define the concept of IT alignment, explain its many benefits, examine its different stages, and provide a clear road map for real-world implementation. Although the following information and stories were developed specifically for YMCAs by YMCAs, all of the presented principles and ideas can be applied to any organization. However, you will need to take some time to define your own situation and needs. Your staff, funding, daily operations, technical ability, mission, and organizational culture will directly impact how you adopt and employ IT alignment. Therefore the following is not a set of rigid rules; rather, it is a basic framework meant to spur ideas, questions, and concepts that can easily be applied to your own situation.

Mission First

Why is mission the first topic of a book about technology? Because mission is what makes the nonprofit sector matter. Unlike for-profit entities, nonprofits are not accountable to a financial bottom line; rather, they are responsible for serving a social bottom line. It’s true that nonprofit leaders must be good financial stewards, but that’s because their organizations won’t be able to keep providing services (delivering the mission) to their communities if they go out of business.

The goal of IT alignment is to use technology to support and enhance the work that you do to meet your mission. In other words, IT alignment will help you select and implement technology to achieve your mission and to avoid the trap of implementing the latest technology because it’s shiny, or because someone told you to. To make the most of this chapter, then, you’ll need to know what mission really means.

Vision Versus Mission

Many organizations use the terms vision and mission interchangeably, but they are not the same.

Vision

Your vision is the description of the world you wish to create. According to BoardSource:

tip

Through a vision statement, a nonprofit defines its ultimate motivation, its dreams, and its image of a desired future. A vision statement describes the ideal situation if the organization could fulfill its utmost wish.

Vision statements should be future-oriented and establish a standard you are trying to reach. Vision statements often look like this:

A community where no child goes to bed hungry

Healthy wetlands that sustain a diversity of species in our state

Clean drinking water for all Nigerians

Mission

Your mission, on the other hand, is what your organization does. Although your organization may want to achieve clean drinking water for all Nigerians, how you go about realizing that vision is what’s articulated in your mission. You may choose to work at the policy level, or you may provide direct services in Nigerian communities by providing wells, water treatment, or other services. BoardSource defines it as follows:

tip

The mission statement provides the basis for judging the success of an organization and its programs. It helps to verify if the organization is on the right track and making the right decisions. It provides direction when the organization must adapt to new demands.

Here are some sample mission statements:

Mercy Corps: Mercy Corps exists to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities.

A local United Way: To inspire the people of York County to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors through financial generosity and volunteer commitment.

Save the Bay: Save the Bay is committed to fostering a personal connection between people and Narragansett Bay and encouraging investment in the bay’s future.

Notice that all of these examples are specific enough to tell you a little bit about how each organization plans to reach its vision (inspiring people to volunteer in their communities or connecting people to a natural resource), but they are not so specific that the organizations are locked into specific strategies or numbers (like recruiting a thousand volunteers, or connecting people to the bay only through nature walks).

The Intersection of Technology and Mission

Ultimately, every decision you make as a nonprofit leader should be grounded in your mission. Whether it’s hiring more staff or starting a new program, you do it because it will help your organization achieve its mission. It can be tough at times to draw the line between technology and mission. Many leaders think of technology in the same way that they think of office supplies: it keeps the office going, but it isn’t critical to the mission.

But technology is not just another office supply. Let’s say you run out of paper clips one day. You can probably still work toward your mission fairly effectively (unless your mission involves paper clips somehow). But if your computers are crashing every hour, or your staff members don’t understand how to use the software they are given, your ability to meet your mission slows down drastically. The kinds of efficiencies that well-implemented technology affords can allow your organization to serve more clients, plant more trees, and so on. A recent study reported that “information technology and telecommunications hardware, software, and services turns out to be a powerful driver of growth, having an impact on worker productivity three to five times that of non-IT capital (e.g., buildings and machines).” In other words, the new computer that you buy for your administrative assistant will make her three to five times more productive than practically any other investment you could make.

Of course, technology is different from your average paper clip in one other key way. Increasingly, nonprofits are using technology tools like handheld computers, smart phones, and websites not only to create efficiencies but also to become more effective. For example, online chat forums are connecting mothers of children with birth defects so that they can get the support and advice they need, regardless of the time of day or their location. In the past, this kind of service could only have been provided by expensive and time-consuming face-to-face meetings. Neighborhood associations are using smart phones to email reports of potholes, damaged lights, and other city services that need attention to city hall, rather than waiting for city hall to be open to place a report. Examples of the direct connection between technology and mission abound. You can’t say that about a paper clip-or any of your other office supplies.

Knowing now how technology and mission relate, you can begin to explore the process of aligning technology with mission in your organization.

Definition of IT Alignment

To many nonprofit leaders, technology is like a foreign language-full of buzzwords and three-letter acronyms that cause an immediate disconnect. So let’s begin by defining the term IT alignment. At its core, IT alignment refers to the coordination of an IT strategy with the goals, strategies, and processes used to meet an organization’s mission.

For example, an organization may use a database-rather than a slow and often inaccurate paper calendar-to quickly access client records and schedule new appointments. This creates efficiencies for the staff, allowing them to serve more people. Taking this example a step further, the same staff could be trained to interpret the client records and scheduling data and use it to make decisions, such as which classes should be offered more often or which classes should be dropped. That information could then be shared internally across functions and possibly with collaborating organizations. The organization could also create a website that allows clients to access their own data and schedule their own appointments any time, day or night. So with IT alignment, technology is not only allowing staff members to work faster, but also helping the organization serve more people and serve them better.

Elements of an Organizational Mission

To fully comprehend this concept of IT alignment, it is important to identify and understand the three critical components of achieving an organizational mission: goals, strategies, and processes.

Goals are the tactical objectives that are set based on your mission and strategic plan. Goals can be set for many areas of your organization, like operations, administration, programs, or development. For example, you may have a program goal of serving one thousand meals per week to your clients, an operations goal of reducing the amount of time spent on data entry, or an administrative goal of producing more effective financial reports for the board.

Strategies are the methods that your organization is deliberately using to meet their goals. This could include raising more money, hiring staff, building an email list, or any number of other options.

Processes are the steps or procedures your organization uses to get its daily work done. This includes accepting donations, paying bills, tracking clients, identifying prospects, hiring staff, communications, delivering services, and much more.

If these three elements are not clearly defined or articulated, most IT alignment efforts will fail. But when an organization’s leadership and IT staff work together to understand its goals, strategies, and processes, they take the first significant step towards achieving true IT alignment.

Benefits of IT Alignment

It’s easy to focus on the costs of addressing your organization’s technology, but the benefits of implementing IT alignment are numerous. There are three benefits, though, that are particularly important to non-profit leaders: avoiding legal and financial troubles, creating efficiencies, and improving effectiveness.

Avoid Common Legal and Financial Troubles

Technology that is aligned with the administrative goals of an organization can help prevent fraud within the organization, provide more accurate reporting information for funders and government agencies, and prevent the theft of stakeholder or client data such as sensitive health information or credit card numbers.

Although fraud and theft are rare, they do happen. According to a New York Times article, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that all organizations (for-profit and nonprofit) lose, on average, 6 percent of their revenue to fraud each year. In 2006, that amounted to $40 billion in the nonprofit sector. Beyond the monetary loss, any nonprofit that loses money or data will have to face public-and possibly legal-scrutiny, costing the organization valuable time and harming its reputation. At a time when public confidence in the nonprofit sector continues to drop, you can’t afford to give your stakeholders another reason to doubt your ability to effectively steward their contributions.

Streamline Operations to Create Efficiencies

Aligning technology with the operations goals can help nonprofit leaders better understand how an organization completes work and accomplishes day-to-day tasks. You will be able to eliminate unnecessary or redundant procedures and minimize the staff time spent on data entry and systems maintenance. You will also be able to identify possibilities for enhancing services or program delivery, highlight new opportunities to serve your community, and gain a better understanding of how your organization is functioning on the whole.

A common operations problem that technology alignment can help address at nonprofits is double data entry. Every week, thousands of nonprofits around the country spend countless extra hours first entering donations into their donor database, only to have the finance staff enter the same data into the accounting software. Not only does this waste time, but the data from the two systems rarely match, and donor information is often misentered in one or both locations. Technology aligned with the operational goal of reducing double data entry can help nonprofits avoid this common problem and create more time for staff to perform mission-related work.

Improve Effectiveness

When technology is aligned with the administrative and operational goals of your organization, you often see a savings of time and money, or improved efficiencies, as in the preceding example. When technology is part of the overall organizational strategic planning process, you can begin to see improved effectiveness-the types of benefits that let you not only do more, but also do it better. This is where IT alignment really starts to pay off.

The argument can be made that eliminating double data entry frees up staff time and allows your organization to then serve more clients, but the connection between technology and mission in this scenario is one step removed.

When you include technology in your organization’s strategic planning, you will find that you are able to tie technology to your program goals as well, creating a direct link between technology and your mission. A great example of this connection comes from the legal services community.

Legal services agencies provide legal expertise in everything from divorce to eviction to taxes for underserved communities across the country. Many legal services agencies work with populations of migratory workers, located in remote rural areas of the states they serve. Often the lawyers have to travel by car for hours to reach their clients. Before the recent advances in technology, inevitably, during an interview, the client would pose a question that required further research. The lawyer would have to get back in her car, travel back to her office, and go online to access her legal database and find the answer. More often than not, by the time the lawyer was able to make the rounds to that part of the state again, her client would be gone. It was a waste of time for both parties, and a lost opportunity to help someone in need.

Wireless remote access has solved that problem. IT staff at several legal services offices, involved in the strategic planning process, recognized that they could help their organizations serve more clients, more effectively, if the lawyers could access the Internet-and their legal database-while they were in the field. Their organizations made the investment in laptops and cellular modems for the lawyers. Now that same lawyer can access the information she needs to successfully advise her client in minutes, not days.

These are just a few examples of the myriad benefits of IT alignment. The more that you commit to the process, the more your organization can get out of it. Now that you know what’s in store for you, let’s take a closer look at IT alignment.

continues…

Excerpted from Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission Copyright © 2008 by Holly Ross, Katrin Verclas and Alison Levine. Excerpted by permission.
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