The Gala is back! If your nonprofit is focused on an end of the year fundraising event, you may find yourself and your IT team with a little extra time on your hands this December as the rest of your staff are pulled away from their desks and are calling the help desk less frequently. Carolyn Woodard reviewed our recent webinars and podcasts for advice on what projects you might want to start now to be ready to hit the ground running in the new year.
Like podcasts? Find our full archive here or anywhere you listen to podcasts: search Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Pandora, and more. Or ask your smart speaker.
1. Do you have an IT Roadmap? This is one of the most important planning documents you can have as a nonprofit IT professional and leader. We have resources on our site to help you get started.
2. Think about policies and governance. This doesn’t mean you have to write them yourself before January. But if you have an hour free, you can go through our checklists of the most important policies to have, and review your existing documents, and be ready to meet with your leadership team in the new year with advice and priorities ready to go.
3. What is your AI policy? We created a policy template specific to nonprofits that you can download and adapt to your own organization’s values and needs. As AI tools and issues come at our organizations faster and faster, make sure you are setting the policy rather than just accepting whatever happens.
4. Map your data. The more AI tools come into use within our organizations, the more important permissions are going to become as those tools interact with our data. Not just with databases, but also with files, AI is going to find whatever it can find. Think about permissions, and training your staff, and how valuable your data is to you and to hackers.
5. A fifth project we recommend is tracking your inventory, subscriptions and licenses. Once you have an inventory system in place – and maybe have discovered you can do a better job of tracking onboarding and off boarding, or where you can be saving money with an enterprise license rather than individual licenses – it gets easier from there.
6. If you still have any time during your down time – we recommend you block off some time to take some tutorials. Did you know that learning a new skill and improving your confidence in new tools can actually lower your stress levels as an IT professional? If you haven’t been making time for learning, and you have a little down time this December, why don’t you see if you can get in the habit?
During the regular hustle and bustle of your IT job you may not feel you have time to get started on any of these important projects, so make time when you have down time to think about what you are missing and where to start. Setting priorities is important too, and being realistic. Maybe one of these projects is plenty! Don’t think you are going to finish any of these projects this December, or that you have to do them entirely on your own. But putting a little prep work in now can help you get them off the ground in the new year, with specific questions for your colleagues and specific goals and strategies.
And won’t that be a great feeling to greet the new year with!
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College. She was happy to share these 6 tips for nonprofit IT in December, pulled from our expert webinars and podcasts over the past few months.
Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for over twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.
We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand.
We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.
If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.
CTO Matthew Eshleman, Director of IT Consulting Steve Longenecker, and IT Business Manager Team Lead Norwin Herrera hold a lively and specific discussion of all things nonprofit tech for 2025 and beyond. January 22 at 3pm Eastern, Noon Pacific.
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