What is the baseline of operations that IT at a nonprofit must cover?

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What Are 10 Nonprofit IT Essentials? with Johan Hammerstrom

Carolyn Woodard explores the operations essentials of nonprofit IT with Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT. 

If you are new to managing technology at your nonprofit, or you oversee an IT vendor without a technical background, it can be hard to know where to start. Before any conversation about transformation or AI, there are basic requirements your organization needs in place just to run, and none of them require technology expertise.

Johan walks through ten essentials that keep IT meeting the business needs of your organization, from making sure every staff member has a working device to naming an IT owner who accepts the responsibility. 

His larger point is that most IT problems sit downstream from business processes. If you already have processes for hiring staff, signing contracts, approving invoices, and building a budget, IT just needs to ride along. 

He also shares a client story about an online booklet that stopped working, with no one left on staff who knew who built it or where it was hosted. You probably have some legacy tech at your nonprofit too without documentation. Doing an IT assessment can help you uncover issues like that before they become a critical problem.

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Presenters

Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT Innovators

Johan Hammerstrom’s focus and expertise are in nonprofit IT leadership, governance practices, and nonprofit IT strategy. In addition to deep experience supporting hundreds of nonprofit clients for over 20 years, Johan has a technical background as a computer engineer and a strong servant-leadership style as the head of an employee-owned small service business. After advising and strategizing with nonprofit clients over the years, he has gained a wealth of insight into the budget and decision-making culture at nonprofits – a culture that enables creative IT management but can place constraints on strategies and implementation.

As CEO, Johan provides high-level direction and leadership in client partnerships. He also guides Community IT’s relationship to its Board and ESOP employee-owners. Johan is also instrumental in building a Community IT value of giving back to the sector by sharing resources and knowledge through free website materials, monthly webinars, and external speaking engagements. He has assisted hundreds of nonprofits over his decades of experience at Community IT and has been instrumental in assuring that all clients have access to strategic planning – a service that is uncommon at outsourced IT providers but that Community IT feels is an essence of what we can provide to nonprofit clients to help them be successful at their missions. Johan was happy to discuss how to write a better RFP for IT support for your nonprofit.



Carolyn Woodard

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 have this podcast conversation with Johan about the 10 operations IT essentials for nonprofits.



Ready to get strategic about your IT?

Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty-five years. In fact, we celebrate 25 years of Community IT this month and all year. 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.

Being 100% employee-owned is important to us and our clients. It is an important aspect of our culture as a business serving nonprofits exclusively for 25 years. Your Nonprofit IT Budgeting strategy is important to Community IT. Unlike most MSPs, Community IT considers budgeting and strategic management a major part of our services to our clients.

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.

More on our Managed Services here. More resources on Cybersecurity here.

If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.

Transcript: 10 Nonprofit IT Essentials with Johan Hammerstrom

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, your host, and I’m here today with Johan Hammerstrom, our CEO, today, to talk about some essentials in nonprofit IT. So, Johan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Johan Hammerstrom: I would, yes. Thank you. My name is Johan Hammerstrom. I’m the CEO at Community IT and happy to be here today talking about some IT essentials for nonprofit organizations.

Carolyn Woodard: So it’s come up recently that we often get questions from maybe a new tech person or someone at a nonprofit that is maybe in technical difficulties, or just wondering where to start and what are the things that have to be covered for their technology to work.

Not even the bells and whistles of, oh, we’ve got this wonderful CRM or we’ve got this crazy database over here or whatever, but just the essentials for operations.

So I was hoping that you could talk through some of the things that we consider those essentials, so that people who are maybe starting out or managing a vendor or managing an IT department at their organization can have in mind the must-haves.

So what do you consider those operations essentials?

Demystifying 10 Nonprofit IT Essentials

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, and I’ve got a list of 10 essentials, which may sound like a lot, like, oh my gosh, 10. Couldn’t we make it three or four? But I promise you, as we go through these, it’s not overwhelming. It’s not going to be a to-do list where you’ll never get to all of the things.

It’s really intended to demystify managing IT at small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations. Because I think there’s, even to this day, sort of a mystique around IT. And people who maybe have strong backgrounds in operations management, or other aspects of working at nonprofit organizations, may not have as much experience with managing IT and may feel like too much is being asked of me, or I’m not an expert in that area.

And as I think you’ll learn, these 10 things do not require any expertise at all in technology. What they’re really geared towards is making sure that IT is meeting the business needs of the organization. So that’s really the objective of these 10 essentials.

Because oftentimes when IT gets talked about in the nonprofit context, the discussion is often happening at a very high level. What do we need to do to transform our nonprofit organization? And nowadays with AI, there’s a lot of pressure on nonprofits to be transformative in their use of AI.

And I think there are just some very basic run-state requirements that you need to have in place before you can be transformed. So that’s what we want to focus on today.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, IT definitely has so much lingo involved.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard: And so I love the idea of putting this out plainly. Here are 10 things, or 10 functions, or 10 areas that form the essential IT that you need at your nonprofit. So where would you start? What’s the first thing?

Essentials 1 Through 5: Devices, Onboarding, Offboarding, Core Tools, and Getting Help

Johan Hammerstrom: I think the first one is everybody should have a working device. That’s something that I think maybe gets overlooked.

And that includes a couple of things.

One, and this is also one of the 10 security essentials, it ensures that everyone has a device that is being managed and protected by the organization for that person using it.

But it also means that devices are being replaced on a regular, predefined life cycle, which could be three years, four years, five years. That’s number one.

Especially now, with a lot of organizations working remotely, that’s how people work: on their computer. If you don’t have a working device, if you have a device that’s unreliable, you’re not going to get any work done. You’re not going to get any work from your team, and it’s going to bring the organization to a standstill.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, it’s just so frustrating. And we run a help desk, so those are calls that we get, where I can’t log in, or this just isn’t working. And then you can’t work. Your whole day can be ruined, all the very important stuff that you had to get done.

I love starting with that. And it seems obvious, but sometimes some places have people sharing a laptop, or remember you used to have the dock that you would come in and hook up to? So yeah, making sure that everyone has their own device that works. I think that’s a great place to start.

What else?

Johan Hammerstrom: Well, kind of related to that, if you have new staff starting, how do you make sure they have a working device? That’s something that should be happening in the onboarding process.

So new staff onboarding should be primarily an HR function. And there should be a long checklist of things that are being set up: trainings, orientations, benefits enrollment, all those things that go along with new staff starting in an organization.

IT needs to be on that list as well, making sure that the person has the right accounts, access to the right systems, and working equipment.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and I would just jump in and say, and the training for it, right? How do we do this? Is everything on Teams? Is everything through Slack? What are the norms and etiquette exactly?

And then what else?

Johan Hammerstrom: Well, number three is sort of the converse of that, which is offboarding.

So when someone leaves the organization, making sure that their accounts are shut down and that the equipment is being returned to the organization. Those are really important security measures that often get overlooked by organizations.

So: working device, onboarding staff, offboarding staff.

Related to onboarding, and this goes back to what you were saying just a minute ago about training, is making sure that people have the core tools they need to do their work, and that those core tools are defined for the organization.

A great example of this is the debate between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Which one is the organization using? Oftentimes, especially with smaller or younger organizations, you’ll have some staff that prefer one, some staff that prefer another, and you may even have situations where people are using both. Now, it’s possible to set up an environment with multiple tools, let’s say, but that needs to be done in a very deliberate and intentional way. And if that’s not the intention of your organization, you need to be very clear with staff early on: these are the tools that we use here, and this is what you should be using to do your work.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and you just need to have those norms and standards. I just think it’s so important to be communicating that with new staff as they’re joining, because they don’t know. And often, especially if you’re working remotely, you might not even know who to ask.

So being proactive about that as you’re bringing staff on, I think is so important. Which I think is the next point.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. How to get help.

A clear way to get help. You should have a help desk. You can’t see me putting air quotes around help desk, because it doesn’t necessarily need to be an official help desk, like a call center, but it needs to be a place where people can go to get their problems solved.

Some organizations do that in-house, some organizations outsource it, but there needs to be some clearly defined way for all staff to get assistance with their IT problems when they arise. Because they will. There are going to be IT problems that come up; that’s inevitable. How do the staff in the organization get the help that they need?

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, so they can keep working as soon as possible. Get back on the road.

Essentials 6 Through 9: Inventory, License Keys, Vendors, and Budget

Johan Hammerstrom: So we’re halfway through. The first five: everybody has a working device, clear onboarding, number three, offboarding procedures, settled core technology tools, and a clear way to get help. So that’s the first five.

Number six, inventory and licenses. Making sure that you’re tracking all of your assets.

There are kind of two kinds of assets. There are hard assets, primarily laptops, in some cases potentially mobile devices, or other equipment. There are plenty of examples of HR staff who have printers in their home office. They still need to print things out. But you want to track all of your hard assets, like equipment.

As well as all of your soft assets, like the software that you’re paying for, and making sure that that’s documented and you know who is using what.

Carolyn Woodard: And that is so important. I think this is one of the number one things that we find when we work with new clients: if that hasn’t been tracked, there’s often so much savings in there that we can find. So it’s very important for the health of your organization, as well as your security and just your budget, to have what you’re paying for be clear.

All right, so number seven?

Johan Hammerstrom: Number seven is making sure that the licensing keys are all written down and documented, particularly for the less common software.

Some software, particularly Google or Microsoft, the licensing is integrated into the person’s identity. So by virtue of their ability to log into those systems, they’ll have licensed access to the software.

But other software may have keys associated with it that need to be applied, or may have a single account that’s used to license multiple instances of the software.

So just making sure that that’s being tracked and documented is very important.

Carolyn Woodard: And it is true that nowadays you can often figure it out. You can contact them or reset your password, whatever it is. But it’s definitely something where the more documented and complete that list is, the more helpful it’s going to be to you.

Johan Hammerstrom: The next item would be documenting your vendors.

So making sure you have clarity on who your vendors are and who’s responsible for what. I think this is something that is really important but often gets overlooked.

If the website goes down, who’s responsible for that? If you have an office and the internet goes out, who’s the vendor that’s responsible for that?

If you work with a third-party managed services provider, they can be your one-stop shop to some degree, where if there are any IT issues at all, you can reach out to them and then maybe they’ll point you in the right direction. If it’s a website issue and they don’t manage the website, they should hopefully track who the web developer is.

But it’s not uncommon, especially for organizations that have 15, 20 plus staff, for departments and teams to go out and build their own relationships with IT vendors. And you want to try to grab those as much as you can.

We had a situation where one of our clients had about 40 staff, a lot of different teams, very entrepreneurial, always building things. And one day they had this sort of online booklet that suddenly stopped working. The people on the team who supported the booklet sort of knew that that was a problem, but no one else had any idea who built the booklet, where it was hosted, or why it would suddenly stop working. Because their predecessors, who had worked with a third-party consultant to build this booklet, never documented that information and never communicated it to anyone else. It wasn’t on the same platform as their website. It had nothing to do with any of their other IT systems. And it took a really long time. We had to go back to the previous team members’ emails, search through those, and figure out what was going on. It was a real sort of murder mystery situation.

Documenting vendors is really important.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, for sure. And I feel like if you’re in management, this one is obvious. You need to know who your vendors are. Sometimes you can even just go through your QuickBooks and be like, well, who are we paying?

Johan Hammerstrom: Exactly.

Carolyn Woodard: What are we paying them for?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yep. No, that’s exactly it.

And I think in some ways, this gets to the heart of this whole IT essentials idea. All of these problems or issues that sort of arise with IT are downstream from business processes.

So ideally, your organization has a process, has signing authority around your contracts. Obviously, somebody had to sign a contract with this vendor to get this online booklet built. So who has signing authority? That needs to be tied into payment authority.

This vendor was obviously invoicing the organization and getting paid. So there should be connections drawn between the invoice, the payment, the contract, and what the service was for.

So in some ways, these should all be routine business processes that a nonprofit organization has in place and is following. And then there’s just an IT component that sort of rides along.

You have an HR process for bringing on staff; make sure IT is integrated into that.

You have a signing authority and invoice authorization process; make sure that IT has visibility into that as well.

This applies to our next one, number nine: replacement and budget plan. That ties back into the first one, about making sure everybody has a working device.

If your laptops are all five years old this year and they’re all going to be six years old next year, those should all be replaced. Is that in the budget? Has the budget been set up in such a way that you’re going to be buying new laptops for your staff in the coming year? So make sure IT is a part of the budgeting process.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and it’s a strategic part of that process, because as we said in that first one, if your staff don’t have working devices, they can’t work. So it’s definitely a planning issue to make sure that your staff are covered in the budget for what they need to do their job.

Johan Hammerstrom: And if you’re adding a new program, if you’re going after a grant that’s going to potentially add new staff to the organization to fulfill what the grant is for, make sure that you have IT, new laptops and computers for those staff, built into the grant as well.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. And then, I think we’re up to nine, right?

Essential 10: A Named IT Owner (Who Doesn’t Have to Be a Technologist)

Johan Hammerstrom: We’re up to nine.

So number 10: there needs to be a named IT “owner.”

In all of these, we’ve talked about how IT needs to be involved in the business processes.

Well, that should always come back to a person: who’s the “owner” of IT for the organization? HR says, great, we want to have IT included in our onboarding and offboarding processes. Who do we talk to? You talk to the IT owner. So who’s that for the organization?

There needs to be somebody who owns IT for the organization. Oftentimes it’s someone in an operations management role, especially for smaller organizations that may not be large enough to have an IT team or department.

But I think as you’ve seen with these 10 essentials, they’re fundamentally all business related. And they’re something that anyone who’s in a business leadership role for the organization should be able to add into what they’re already doing.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I’ve been at two nonprofits where IT fell under the CFO and coordinated with the CEO around leasing the office and how many offices and cubicles there were, so that each person had a place to work, and then they also had the devices to work on.

And I don’t think that IT owner has to be a technology person or have a technology background. In fact, often with someone who’s the IT person, you just have to ask: do they have that management experience? Do they have the insight into these HR decisions or budget decisions, those sorts of things?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, I think having management experience is the key.

In the same way, if you’re an operations manager for an organization, you may not come from a finance background, but you have to understand budget management. You may not come from an HR background, but you have to understand HR compliance. You may not come from a legal background, but you have to understand legal compliance, if there are compliance frameworks that the organization is subject to. And all organizations face legal issues at one point or another. So you have to be familiar with it, even if you’re not an expert: familiar enough to know when to bring legal counsel in and how to have an intelligent conversation with them about the legal ramifications of whatever issue the organization is facing.

The same is true with IT. You don’t have to be an IT expert, but in the same way, you have to understand IT implications for the organization and know that, okay, I need to bring in an expert that I can be the business interface for and with, to make sure this issue gets addressed for our organization.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I think a lot of management is knowing who to call, and knowing that you need to call someone who knows what they’re talking about, and when you need to call them, or when you’re likely to need them. So you anticipate that as well. I think this is all just so helpful. I hope it’s helpful to our listeners.

The 10 Nonprofit IT Essentials List

Let’s just go through the list of 10 again to bring it home.

Johan Hammerstrom: We’ll summarize it. And I hope, if you’ve been listening to this, you’ve been encouraged that you don’t need to go out and get a degree in computer science to manage IT for your organization. It really is pretty straightforward.

And so the 10 things are: making sure every person has a working device;

number two, ensuring that IT is integrated into onboarding;

and number three, offboarding;

that the organization has defined core tools that they’re using to do their work.

Number five, everyone has a clear way of getting help, knowing where to go to get help with IT issues.

Number six, that hard and soft assets are inventoried and licenses are tracked.

Number seven, that administrative access, credentials, and license keys are documented.

Number eight, clarity on which vendors are doing what: documenting all of the IT vendors that are providing services for the organization, either one-time or ongoing services.

Number nine, making sure that IT is part of your annual budget.

And number 10, making sure there is a defined and named IT owner who knows who they are and who accepts that responsibility. Because sometimes you’ll have situations where, well, they said I’m the IT owner, but I don’t know anything about IT and I’m not going to do it.

Carolyn Woodard: Right.

Johan Hammerstrom: So you don’t want that.

Carolyn Woodard: Or you’ve designated a person who has no authority and no way to do the job.

Johan Hammerstrom: Right. The intern cannot be the IT owner.

Carolyn Woodard: It can’t be the intern or the volunteer.

Johan Hammerstrom: Right, right, exactly. Well, I will say there are cases where there are very dedicated volunteers who are sort of baked into the life of the organization and have been there for 20 years. There are always exceptions to all of these. But don’t create a volunteer position to be your IT owner and then have a different person filling it every year.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, and absolutely, whoever it is, you need to have a succession plan, right? They have to be able to hand it over to someone when they take a vacation, or if they leave the organization, you have to be able to hand over the keys to someone else.

Johan Hammerstrom: I should say the volunteer thing rarely works well. Not to say it’s impossible, but you wouldn’t have a volunteer CFO. You wouldn’t have a volunteer, you know, legal. Well, you might have volunteer legal counsel. So yeah, it’s somewhere in there, depending on the size of the organization and the nature of the work that you do.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, but it’s an important function. So treat it accordingly. If that’s a volunteer, then it better be a super volunteer.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Carolyn Woodard: Great. Well, this was so interesting to talk about, and I hope it’s very useful.

I’ve never seen it broken down like this: here are the 10 essentials that IT needs to be able to do at your nonprofit.

I know we didn’t have time to talk about security, which I feel is maybe number 11. You can have all of these things, but if you don’t have any cybersecurity protocols or techniques, or aren’t doing anything to protect your organization, then all of this IT is going to go out the window when you get your first phishing email and click on the wrong thing.

So maybe we’ll do a different podcast to talk in a little bit more depth about the security things that the IT manager should be aware of and can be putting in place. So we’ll have you back for that, Johan.

Johan Hammerstrom: I look forward to it. Thank you, Carolyn.

Carolyn Woodard: Thank you.

As advocates for using technology to work smarter, we’re practicing what we recommend. This transcript was drafted with the assistance of AI, and is not a verbatim transcript. The content was edited for clarity, and was reviewed, edited, and finalized by a human editor to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash