Having managed IT off the side of my desk (in addition to fundraising), I wanted to pass along a few nuggets of wisdom about information technology. Specifically, I was asked the other day how to hire a good “geek” for a non-profit. Seemed that all the best IT experts were either too specialized or too expensive to hire.

So I said to her, don’t just hire a geek. You need to step back and plan laterally. Here’s my two-part series on how to solve your IT woes…

Many non-profits face this situation, I suspect: they can’t offer the pay or pro-d funding that big corporations can. Instead, they offer new IT workers solid work experience and, hopefully, a supportive and interesting learning environment. But this means that your freshly minted IT guru demands a certain amount of patience and training - and will move on after only a few years, with experience under their belt, in search of a “real job.”

(As an aside, my description isn’t really fair to the poor IT support crew, who suffer long hours, low pay, and an uncertain future. This isn’t an ideal situation for your fresh-faced helpdesk coordinator, either.)

So, what’s a non-profit IT manager (who is also a full time fundraiser / office support staff / graphic artist / chief mug washer) to do?

No easy answers, but here’s how to start figuring out the puzzle. Start by gathering information, and asking some tough questions.

Who needs help?

Look at your organisation. How many people are in need of IT support? Not just the people behind the monitors in your head office, but the volunteers who cycle through your office; the visitors to your website; your Board members who are trying to share documents with eachother etc. Make a list of who exactly your IT support team will be helping.

What kind of support do they need?

Typically, IT support needs can be grouped loosely into a couple of categories.

First, network/hardware/business application support. This includes anything to do with the connections between your computers; your connection to the internet; your connections to printers/scanners/etc.; storing and sharing files on a server; and core business applications, like Raiser’s Edge or Microsoft Office. Support in this category is often “mission critical” - if it goes down, you stop working. It’s also, in a weird way, kind of like plumbing: it works quietly behind the scenes, and you don’t really notice it until it goes horribly wrong.

In contrast, next there’s the high profile realm of helpdesk and training. This category covers the general day-to-day usage needs of your people. For example, this would include the countless queries from staff about email, Excel and Office, or why a PDF is printing out all screwy. Obviously, there’s overlap with our first category, but generally you could discriminate these issues by both their almost daily presence, their urgent nature, and their ability to be quickly resolved.

Finally, there’s the world of specialized applications. This would include database gurus, website designers and managers, email server experts, etc. This category of issue is often very important to lots of your staff/clients, but also pretty narrow in scope and arises relatively infrequently.

So, with these questions in mind, sit down and figure out what support you really need. What kinds of applications will your team be using on a daily basis? Don’t think of specific applications, but instead of application types - i.e. not Word, but a word processor. The reason for this will become clearer in my next post…

Also look at simplifying where you can. For example, it’s clear that all 50 volunteers do not need to be using your donor database. You might need just 1 well-trained volunteer on the database, passing information out to the other 49 to make phone calls.

How much money do you have? How many people are you supporting?

Here’s the reality: when you spend money on information technology, you’ll need to spend more for support. If you’re a two-person operation, running out of a bedroom and a garage then, yes, you don’t need to hire anybody. You can rely on the kindness of strangers. Any bigger than that, and you’re going to need a budget. The killer truth is that there’s also a minimum threshold that you have to spend, whether you have a 5 person office, or a 50 person office. I’ve seen too many organisations think that the cost of support scales directly with the the number of people supported. It doesn’t: it jumps up in big steps. You will probably need to pay roughly the same amount of money to support 5, or 10, or 15 staff. Do you have more people than that? You’re looking at more money and more complicated systems. So budget for it.

Enough black cloud - here’s the silver lining. Increasingly, you can take advantage of outsourcing and “cloud computing” to squeeze the most out of your financial and human resources. In my next post, I’ll explain how.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second part of this post goes up on netfornonprofits.org on Friday! You can send Sean your nonprofit IT questions at editor@netfornonprofits.org