Blog: A Theory of Change for Nonprofit IT Management

The Nonprofit IT Problem Is Not Tech

Why capable people are stuck fighting fires, and what it would take to free them to work on IT strategy instead.

Picture one of the most capable people at a nonprofit you know. Maybe it’s the COO who somehow holds everything together. Maybe it’s the program director who built a services model from scratch. Maybe it’s the executive director who can make a compelling case to any funder in the room.

Now picture that person spending their Tuesday morning trying to figure out why the staff can’t log into the new database. Or chasing down a vendor about a licensing issue. Or being the de facto IT decision-maker for an organization that has never actually decided who owns IT.

This is happening right now, at nonprofits of every size and mission type, across the country. Talented, strategic people are burning their best thinking on problems that should be solved at a systems level. The missions those organizations exist to serve are paying the price.

And this is an equity issue at a deep level. The philanthropy sector is simultaneously recognizing and funding amazing organizers, executive directors, and staff on the front lines in the communities they care about, while expecting these amazing mission-oriented superstars to ALSO be genius at IT management, usually with little to no support to grow that capacity.

After 25 years of working exclusively with nonprofits on IT, Community IT has come to a theory of change about nonprofit IT management. We believe that the sector has a persistent, largely invisible problem. It is not that nonprofits have bad technology or that the technology doesn’t exist that can support nonprofits.

It is that IT management has become systematically separated from organizational leadership in ways that no other management function has. Unless we name that clearly, we cannot fix it.

The One Area Where Leaders Feel Licensed to Opt Out

Think about how nonprofit leaders handle financial management. An executive director who has never read a balance sheet in her life does not say, “I’m not a numbers person, so I’m going to skip the CFO.” She hires someone. She uses QuickBooks. She builds a board finance committee. She understands that financial management is her responsibility to ensure, even if it is not hers to execute.

The same is true for HR, for fundraising, for program evaluation. Leaders do not have to be experts. But they understand that these functions require ownership, investment, and accountability.

IT is different. Across the nonprofit sector, at organizations of every size and maturity level, leaders routinely say some version of “I’m not a tech person,” and then they stop. The sentence functions as an explanation and an exit. The assumption beneath it is that not being technical means not being responsible for IT management. That assumption is wrong.

It is true that IT as a profession developed its own language, its own culture, and its own systems of credentialing that can feel opaque to people who did not grow up in it. Non-technical leaders absorbed the message, often implicitly, that they lack the standing to make decisions about IT. Over time, IT became the one organizational function that leadership felt culturally licensed to hand off entirely, not just in execution, but in thinking.

If IT never gets a seat at the leadership table, it never gets treated as a strategic function. The people managing IT never develop the relationships or organizational credibility to make the case for investment. Underinvestment becomes the norm. Problems compound quietly. And then something breaks.

The Same Psychology Runs Through Philanthropy

This dynamic does not stop at the nonprofit. It travels upstream to the funders who support them.

Program officers, grants managers, and foundation executives use technology every day. But they have mentally categorized it as someone else’s domain. When a nonprofit grantee says “we need support for IT management,” many funders hear something technical and foreign, rather than something organizational and strategic.

The data reflects this. According to the Technology Association of Grantmakers’ 2024 State of Philanthropy Tech Survey, only 20% of grantmakers are providing support for nonprofit tech and tools, down from 23% in 2022. Funder support for nonprofit IT is declining, even as the need grows and the risks multiply. In a moment of AI adoption at nonprofits, the Center for Effective Philanthropy 2025 AI With Purpose research found that nearly two-thirds of nonprofits now use AI, but nearly 90% of foundations provide no support for implementing it.

Foundations find it easier to fund things than to fund capacity. They can write a check for a new CRM, a cybersecurity upgrade, AI licenses, new laptops. They find it harder to fund the experienced leadership, change management, and governance structure that would make those investments actually work. IT falls into a familiar trap: it gets categorized as overhead rather than as organizational infrastructure.

The overhead debate is well-documented in the nonprofit sector, but it has a particular bite when it comes to IT. Spending on a senior person who really knows what they are doing to lead IT can feel like spending on administration. And senior IT experience is not inexpensive. In reality, growing or hiring that IT management capacity is often the highest-leverage investment a nonprofit can make in its programmatic effectiveness.

What Well-Managed IT Requires

At Community IT, we use an IT maturity framework to help nonprofit leaders understand where their organizations stand and what it would take to grow. That framework describes five levels of IT maturity, from ad hoc and reactive at one end to fully strategic and aligned at the other. We want most nonprofits to live somewhere in the middle.

But the maturity framework describes two distinct and interdependent components of well-managed IT, and understanding the difference between them is essential to understanding where the real leverage lies.

The first is what we might call the operational side: the systems, devices, security practices, software licenses, and day-to-day processes that make up the technical infrastructure of the organization. This is the visible part of IT. It’s what people usually mean when they say “our IT.” The “IT people” they mean are skilled in the technology.

The second is what we call the management side: the governance, leadership, strategy, and organizational ownership that ensure IT is managed intentionally over time. Who owns IT decisions? How are technology investments made? Is there a plan for what happens when a key person leaves, or when a new platform needs to be adopted? This is the invisible part. It only becomes visible when it’s absent.

Here is what 25 years of nonprofit IT experience has taught us: you can have a functional operational side without a management side. Many organizations do. They have decent hardware, reasonable security practices, a few systems that mostly work. But they have no one who truly owns IT as a strategic function. And over time, that absence creates fragility.

The reverse, however, is essentially never true. We have never seen an organization with genuine IT management capacity that did not also have its operational fundamentals in order. When leadership owns IT as a responsibility, when there is a clear decision-maker, when IT is part of the organizational planning conversation, the operational side follows. And those nonprofits are far more resilient, capable, and flexible when it comes to their business needs and the technologies that support their mission.

The management side is the lever.

The Cycle That Keeps Organizations Stuck

The pattern we see repeatedly looks something like this.

A nonprofit underinvests in IT management, often because funders traditionally treated IT as overhead to be kept low. Without IT management capacity, the organization makes technology investments reactively: a new database because the old one broke, a cybersecurity upgrade after a scare, a platform migration because a funder required it.

The way funding works in philanthropy plays a huge role here. To invest in a new CRM, you need to know which one you want and how much it costs in order to ask for the funding to cover it. That usually means that nonprofits are constrained in their ability to experiment, demo, and fail upward. By the time they are making a major investment in a new tech tool, they have already built in constraints on which solution they will purchase, usually based only on demos and not on real life implementation. Their ability to negotiate is based on a grant they have received, or funds they have cobbled together from various pots of operating costs. Very rare is the funder who will support the total cost of ownership – beyond the licenses and devices to the change management, leadership, training, and tool optimization costs. As a result much of the management costs of IT never make it into the budget and those necessary investments in the people who use the IT tools never get made.

When IT investments are made without experienced leadership or change management to realize them, they underperform. Sometimes they fail. The lesson the organization takes away is: “technology is hard and doesn’t work for us.” The next time someone proposes a technology investment, there’s institutional resistance. The culture becomes risk-averse about IT precisely because past investments were poorly managed. And the underinvestment continues. The $50,000 CRM they purchased a couple of CFOs and a decade ago has to continue to work, no matter how inadequate to current-day needs or how many work-arounds staff create to keep it creaking along. Doing the large IT project must be put off until the pain can’t be overcome any other way.

Meanwhile, the people with the most organizational intelligence, the COO, the program director, the executive director, keep absorbing IT responsibilities that should belong to a dedicated function. They fight fires instead of building strategy. Every hour a senior leader spends on an IT problem is an hour not spent on the work they were hired to do: designing programs, building relationships, thinking about the future.

The cost of this is rarely counted. But it is real.

Research underscores the stakes. Salesforce’s 2022 Nonprofit Trends Report found that only 12% of nonprofits were “digitally mature,” and that group was four times more likely to achieve their mission goals. Digital maturity is not just about having good tools. It is about having the organizational capacity to use technology strategically. The gap between those two groups is largely a management gap. And it is showing up again with AI: in Salesforce’s 2025 edition, more than half of nonprofits not yet using AI said they did not know where to begin, and a third of respondents named a lack of internal skills as a top concern.

The Most Effective IT Leaders Aren’t Necessarily the Tech Person

We challenge a common assumption about what good IT leadership looks like.

Among Community IT’s clients, the primary contacts who manage their IT partnerships most effectively are almost never the most technical person in the room. They are experienced operational managers, often a COO or senior director, typically someone who has been in organizational management long enough to understand that every function requires ownership, accountability, and a trusted partner.

What they bring is not technical knowledge. It is management judgment. They know how to ask the right questions. They know how to hold a partner accountable. They know how to translate between technical realities and organizational needs. They understand that IT, like finance or HR, is something they are responsible for ensuring works, even if – especially if – they are not the ones “doing IT.”

The goal for our sector to unlock better IT management is not to make nonprofit leaders more technical. It is to help them recognize IT management as something they already know how to do. The skills required to manage IT well are organizational skills, not technical ones. The sector has plenty of people who have those skills.

What’s missing is a funded structure that puts them in the right role.

What the Intervention Could Look Like

The good news is that the funder conversation is already underway. In 2023, the Technology Association of Grantmakers published “Emerging Practices in Funding Nonprofit Technology,” a whitepaper documenting six funding models that leading foundations have developed to support nonprofit technology capacity. The models range from a “Strategy, Skills, Tools” assessment framework to cohort-based learning, fractional CIO support, and the simple but meaningful practice of adding 10% to any grant award specifically for technology expenses. These are not hypothetical approaches. They are already working at foundations including the Kauffman Foundation and Okta for Good.

A forthcoming whitepaper from Community IT Innovators and the Technology Association of Grantmakers builds on this foundation, examining in greater depth how funders and nonprofits can work together to grow IT management capacity specifically. The models vary: some involve grant funding for a senior IT leadership role; others involve capacity-building programs or cohort-based support for organizations at similar stages. Some foundations have developed explicit strategies for funding IT management as part of their organizational effectiveness grantmaking.

What the models share is a common premise: the intervention that moves nonprofits from struggling IT to well-managed IT is not a tool purchase or a one-time infrastructure grant.

The intervention that has the most promise is building the organizational capacity to manage IT as a strategic function over time.

When that happens, the effects compound. Tech investments get realized rather than abandoned. Staff stop absorbing IT responsibilities that should belong elsewhere. Senior leaders get their strategic thinking back. Organizations become more resilient to the inevitable disruptions: the staff departure, the platform change, the cybersecurity incident, the new AI tool that everyone wants to use but no one knows how to govern.

This is the theory of change: invest in IT management capacity, and you do not just get better IT. You get an organization that is more effective, more resilient, and better positioned to deliver on its mission.

A Different Conversation

The nonprofit sector is not short on talented, strategic, mission-driven people. It is short on the organizational infrastructure that lets those people do their best work.

For nonprofit leaders: the case for IT management is not a technical argument. It is a management argument. You do not need to understand the technical ins and outs of every platform. You need to manage IT. You need to decide that IT is your responsibility to ensure, find the right partner or staff member to execute, and make the case to your board and funders that this investment is part of how your organization delivers on its mission.

For funders: IT management capacity belongs in the same category as financial leadership, board governance, and executive development. It is organizational infrastructure. When you fund it well, the return shows up everywhere: in programs that work better, in technology investments that actually deliver, in staff that have higher morale and higher investment in daily processes not workarounds, and in organizations that do not fall apart every time something breaks.

For IT vendors, managed service providers, and consultants: examine whether your model inadvertently enables the dynamic this piece describes. When you position yourself as the people who “handle IT” so your clients do not have to think about it, you may be solving the immediate problem while reinforcing the deeper one. The most effective client relationships we know are partnerships with organizations that have genuine IT management capacity on their side. That capacity makes the work better, the decisions smarter, and the outcomes more durable. There is no shortage of work for consultants and MSPs in a world where nonprofits take IT management seriously. There is, however, a meaningful difference between being a vendor and being a partner. Lean toward partner.

For the sector: we have the frameworks. We have the evidence. We have the models. What we need is a different conversation, one that treats IT management not as a technical problem to be handed off, but as a leadership responsibility to be owned.

About the Author

Carolyn Woodard is Director of Marketing at Community IT Innovators, a 100% employee-owned managed IT services provider that has served nonprofits exclusively for 25 years. She is the lead author of a forthcoming whitepaper on IT management capacity that will be co-published with the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) and will present these ideas at the TAG2026 conference in Chicago. She presented a summary argument of the whitepaper in the webinar Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits. Community IT works with nonprofits of all sizes to build sustainable, secure, and mission-aligned IT capacity.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash