If you find yourself with a little downtime, what should you work on?
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.
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Our list of 6 tips for nonprofit IT in December:
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!
Presenter
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.
Transcript
Carolyn Woodard: Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Podcast. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT and Host.
And today, I thought we would do something a little bit different for a holiday weekend. So, I’m going to talk about the top six things we recommend you do now to prepare your nonprofit IT for the new year. And this is drawn from several of our resources and podcasts and webinars over the past few months.
We hope that this will be helpful to you, maybe, when you’re thinking about what to do during December. November and December are typically a downtime for nonprofit IT. We’ve noticed definitely in the past two years, the gala is back, a fundraiser at the end of the year. Often these are all hands on deck. So, you have a lot of your staff people who are really putting all of their time into that party.
And that means sometimes that the IT staff doesn’t have as much to do.
Other people are out of their offices, so you can’t have a lot of meetings with them. Maybe you are out of the office too.
But if you are in the office in the next couple of weeks and thinking about what use you can make of this time when you have fewer distractions, but only a little time to work on things, here are some of our tips.
Create or Update Your IT Roadmap
Number one, 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. If you don’t have one or if you haven’t looked at it in a while, you can listen to our CEO, Johan Hammerstrom’s recent webinar or podcast about the advantages and the steps to create an IT roadmap.
I know I have told this story many times, but our client, the Academy of Hope, was literally ready to go during the pandemic when they needed to implement remote learning quickly because they had been planning to do it already and they had a roadmap. They are an adult charter school in DC working on literacy and workforce development, serving some of the community most impacted by the pandemic and in a lot of direct service jobs, so essential workers. It was incredibly stressful to implement a four-year plan in three months, but their funder wouldn’t have helped them put it in place if they hadn’t had a plan ready.
And by the fall of 2020, every student had a laptop and support for online learning that semester. Academy of Hope made an enormous difference in their community because they had that IT roadmap that they could accelerate rather than having to start from scratch.
You won’t be able to complete an IT roadmap by yourself this December, but you can certainly get it far enough along to be able to bring it to your executive team in the new year for discussion and completion. So, check out the resources on our site and make some time to get started.
Policies and Governance
Two, think about your policies and governance. This doesn’t mean that you have to write them yourself before January. We recommend that you work with a team of stakeholders to create or review your IT policies anyway.
But if you have an hour free, you can go through our checklist of the most important policies to have and review your existing documents, and then tee up for January which of them are fine as is, and which are going to need some discussion and updating. That way, when you come back with more energy in January, you can save yourself the step of that review and just jump in with whatever you need to discuss with others to get the ball rolling.
To review, we have several resources on our site around the most important policies and how to create or revise them and how often to revisit them and how to train your staff and include these policies in their onboarding in an engaging way, so they know where to find the information later.
In fact, one of our tips is that even if you share your acceptable use policies with staff their first week on the job, that you revisit those documents at the 90-day mark, when your new colleague has less coming at them and more of an understanding of the work of your organization and their responsibilities within that organization.
To learn about IT governance, I’ll point you to a webinar that we did and a bonus podcast episode available on our site, communityit.com.
And also we have Matt Eshleman discussing the most important policies to have from a security standpoint in his webinar on the re-release of our free Cybersecurity Readiness Playbook for Nonprofits.
And as a cheat sheet on the IT governance policies you should have, I’ll just give you some of the basics.
- An acceptable use policy. This is often part of your employee handbook.
- A data retention and security policy.
- Your privacy policy.
- An AI acceptable use policy.
- Your backups and disaster recovery policies.
- An incident response plan.
- Cyber insurance compliance.
- Onboarding and offboarding policies.
- Vendor policies.
- Cyber security training policies.
- And other policies appropriate for your organization. So, for example, if your nonprofit mission concerns health or education, you may have additional policies you must follow regarding your clients. Or if you work in certain countries or advocacy areas, you may have additional security protocols that you have to follow.
AI Acceptable Use Policy
Okay, a third tip. What is your AI policy?
I was at a conference this past spring where I asked this question, and an older nonprofit executive said that his organization was just forbidding AI use for anyone, which is a policy, but maybe not the right policy if you intend to hire anyone under 30 ever again.
After more than a year of AI, we have had some interesting case studies of nonprofits using AI to achieve their mission, but also of nonprofit staff using AI to work smarter, not harder. We also know more about the dangers of using public AI and letting it scoop up your information, and also how to train staff to use AI tools that are restricted to your own organizational data.
It seems that every IT tool we use is introducing a new AI feature in every update. And we also know a lot more about the environmental effects of AI and the effects on communities where data centers are going in.
So, AI may not be something where you want to or are able to keep up on all of the changes that are happening so fast, but we guarantee that someone at your organization is using AI now.
We created a policy template specific to nonprofits that you can download and adapt to your own organization’s values and needs. So, if you have an hour or two, some afternoon in December, you can download our template, do a little research on how nonprofits are using AI and what frameworks are available to guide your thinking about it, and then take a stab at drafting an AI policy if you don’t already have one. So that you have something to bring into that first meeting in January with your team, when everyone can focus on figuring out your philosophy, who your champions and early adapters are, and what your policy should be.
Map Your Data
Fourth, map your data. Find an empty room with a whiteboard, tape some of those giant post-its together, or go crazy on a digital flowchart, whichever works for you, and start writing down everywhere data is being stored at your organization.
Do you understand your map? Do you have a list of tools from each department? Do you have permissions set correctly on all of it? Do you understand your vendor agreements where staff are uploading data to third-party tools? Some of those AI considerations that I just mentioned, if your staff are using AI externally, is your data flowing to that AI tool?
This is a sort of project that’s good to take on when you don’t have a lot of meetings scheduled and when a lot of staff are out of the office.
Give yourself some time to focus and make the best map you can. Then take it to your colleagues and ask for input. What did you forget? What are you missing? Where are the risks? Which databases are full of trash from years ago? Which have value? In fact, which have data that could jeopardize your organization if it were hacked?
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. At the moment, most AI tools are going to follow whatever permissions the user has. They’re not really smart enough to know what they’re supposed to be able to see and what they aren’t. The AI tool is going to surface whatever it finds.
If you’re not sure what AI is going to find, you should start looking at your data map now.
In addition, many nonprofits have additional data compliance rules they must follow with respect to California and the EU laws regarding privacy. And while it would be nice to think that some AI tool of the future is going to be able to tell you where you have vulnerabilities, in the immediate future, those vulnerabilities can be real risks.
Taking the time now to map your data and examine your permissions and privacy requirements should make you feel better about unleashing the power of AI to be able to do more with your data.
Review File Organization in the Cloud
And related to this project of mapping your data enterprise-wide is taking a hard look at your file organization in the cloud. I recently talked with Norwin Herrera on our podcast about the benefits of creating and sticking to an organizing philosophy and training your staff to maintain your labeling and file retention policies.
Not just with databases, but also with files, AI is going to find whatever it can find. And it isn’t going to be able to find what you haven’t labeled correctly. So while you’re thinking about permissions and training, don’t forget about your files and where they are saved and shared.
Tracking Your Inventory, Subscriptions, and Licenses
A fifth project we recommend is tracking your inventory subscriptions and licenses.
If you haven’t been tracking these closely, don’t be embarrassed. It is one of the top requests we get from new clients and one of our top needs when we’re onboarding new clients. And there are a very high number of nonprofits that do not do a great job of tracking these expenses and assets.
It’s very common and you are not alone. If that sounds like your organization, take some time during your downtime to start tackling this project.
We did a few recent podcasts on the issues and how to start, which can be as simple as looking through your vendor reports to track subscriptions and licenses, and then take your employee list and volunteer lists and match devices, subscriptions, and licenses to your staff.
The first time you do this is definitely the hardest. Once you have an inventory system in place and maybe have discovered some policy areas where you need to do a better job of tracking onboarding and offboarding, for example, or where you could be saving money with an enterprise license rather than individual licenses, it just gets easier from there.
Working with your inventory to update it is so much easier than creating it the first time. But if you don’t have a good inventory system, taking a little time to get there is going to be really helpful to you in the new year.
Take Some Tutorials/Learn Something
And finally, our sixth tip is if you still have any time during your downtime, we recommend that you block off some time to take some tutorials. In June, I spoke with Karen Graham about the benefits of being or becoming a learning organization, and that is so evident in the realm of IT.
As new tools come to the market, as the tools you use release updates, as the environment changes both for cybersecurity and AI, learning the new IT is more important than ever.
Making time to turn off your regularly scheduled meetings and be the one where you’re getting the training for a change can really lessen your stress and improve your understanding of the tools your staff are using.
If there are others in the office this December, you can get together to try tutorials on the tools you use, or you can schedule a learn and share session where you can teach each other new features or best practices.
And I am sure that if you planned it around a hot chocolate bar or a cookie exchange, it would be even better attended. So, combining something that may be a little bit difficult with something that’s really enjoyable is one of the tips on making new habits, and it can definitely work with your staff.
Learning new IT and improving your understanding of the tools you use should be scheduled monthly or more often if you can manage it.
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 downtime in 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 bigger projects.
Make time when you have downtime to think about what you’re missing and where’s the most important place to start.
Setting priorities is important too and being realistic. So maybe one of these six projects is plenty.
Don’t think you’re going to finish any of these projects in 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?
I hope these tips were helpful. We have all of these resources and more on our website, communityit.com. And I’d just like to thank you for spending a little time with me today on the podcast, and I hope you listen again soon.
Ready to get strategic about your IT?
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.