Nonprofit organizations often must deal with limited resources. To make the most of those, they need to use the data at their disposal as effectively as possible.
At least that’s one piece of advice Jen Bokoff would give to nonprofits. Bokoff is director of knowledge services for Foundation Center, which uses data on a regular basis to help nonprofits around the world remain competitive with their technology.
Nonprofits can use Big Data and analytics to deliver on their missions. However, nonprofit leaders and IT managers need to be aware of the data they have and how best to use it.
“Nonprofit organizations [are sometimes] staffed by people not naturally inclined to seek out data,” Bokoff told TechRepublic. “It’s a bit of a foreign idea and [many nonprofits] are not necessarily coming at data in a systematic way. We believe [data] is core to solving problems in our world, but it's not the intuitive solution to most of the actors in this field.”
Foundation Center encourages nonprofits to make data-driven decisions, because doing so fosters transparency and helps organizations think clearly about what they are funding and how they are learning from the data they collect.
“With often limited resources, nonprofits need to maximize and double down on efforts that are likely to succeed,” Bokoff says. “With fundraising in particular, a strategic review of field-wide data significantly helps organizations target proposals to well-aligned, appropriate foundations.” Although every nonprofit has different needs and resources, Bokoff argues that all nonprofits “need to recognize why they exist and how essential technology is to helping their mission and constituency.”
“In many cases, making the right technology investments can help operations immensely, but in other cases, it may actually create challenges or be overkill,” she says. “Really thinking about what the goal of new technology would be can help inform key questions, like: Do we build it or do we buy it? Are we better off partnering with another organization? How much do we need to worry about privacy and hacking? What integrations would we need to make new technology make sense in our current arrangement?”
Nonprofits that lean heavily on IT must “hire and develop staff skills to properly implement and maintain that technology. Without the right set of ethics and skills in house, it’s very hard to make a nonprofit technology effort work.
