Heads up, nonprofit executive directors!
This is the 21st century, and you need to buy your staff technology that was developed in this millenium, not the previous one.
What's that I hear you whining? Is it that you don't have the money in your budget for technology?
Here are two urgent messages from Reality:
1) If you don't have the money for technology, you don't have what it takes to operate, and it's time to decide whether to close down or find the money.
2) These days the executive director of a nonprofit agency has to be its Chief Fundraising Officer, so get moving.
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If you don't have the money for technology, you don't have what it takes to operate, and it's time to decide whether to close down or find the money.
"What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
In my experience, the $ you spend on hardware or the software it uses, will be dwarfed by the $ you will spend either training your staff on using it effectively, or cleaning up the mess on your hands for not training your staff to use it efffectively.
Also, another rant. These foundations that give grants to NPOs for cutting edge technology pilot projects. Ridiculous! NPOs don't need cutting edge tech. we need reliable mature technology; I believe the vast bulk of the NPO sector (I don't mean the rich NPOs like Gates Foundations or the Council on Foundations or the tech-related NPOs like TechSoup or the on-the-margins NPOs...) will always be behind the technology curve. A little conservatism is sometimesa good thing.
especially non profits, especially in threshold countries, can easily work with machines from 1999. if you be able to scale down from a microsoft word based attachement heavy, i-print-everything-out workflow, and use more web based applications, use ubuntu and open office,
a thin client with a pIII will easily do it. And if your staff think they need an eMac, wifi-laptop or LCD instead of CRT they might better look for another job. so it can only be a joke and not an argument that non profits should first invest into the latest hardware, 3d cards, terabyte drives and dual core cpus... as long it's about office work, a mature setup, network security and backup strategy is far more important.
I think it's natural that nonprofit organizations are short of good, up-to-date technology. Where do they get money for that? And I also think that mature tech that nonprofits have used is more reliable.
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