Podcast: Top Nonprofit IT Stories of 2024

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Senior staff shared these thoughts on the biggest and most overlooked nonprofit IT stories of 2024 and what they are looking at in 2025.

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast, New Year Edition. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director and the host.

Today, as is our tradition, I have asked some of our senior staff to tell me about the most important and the most overlooked nonprofit IT stories of 2024. They identified a lot of different types of stories.

Of course, AI is a really big story. It’s going to be impacting all of us in the coming years. Several of our staff talked about AI and different aspects of AI.

I was also really interested to find that many of our staff members touched on cybersecurity, both new hacks and new threats, but also the difference that AI is going to make in our security tools, of course, battling against new AI that is used for more tricks and cons.

And then also a couple of our senior staff mentioned data, particularly data and compliance. So that was interesting for me to hear about those overlooked stories.

I invite you to join us on January 22nd at 3 p.m. Eastern Pacific for our first webinar of 2025. We will have three of our senior staff in a 2025 Nonprofit IT Round Table discussing the trends of 2024 and what they’re looking for in 2025. You can register for that on our website, communityit.com and hope to see you there.

I hope you’ll enjoy the year end podcast from us.

First, you’ll hear from David Dawson, who is a Senior Engineer.

David Dawson:

Hi, Carolyn. I think that AI is the news of the year for the nonprofit industry. Here’s why.

I think that it’s going to grow an incredible amount over the next couple of years. But already over the last couple of years, we’ve had so many advances. I think in 2024, a lot of us are using this for document summary and review. We’re using it for creating meeting notes and to-do lists. We’re using it to write and rewrite important documents and grants. I think we’re using it in very subtle ways as well, even things like Grammarly and a little bit of widgets like that, that help with writing clarity.

Apple Intelligence has just been launched at the end of 2024. Which means that really everybody is going to be experiencing it. Microsoft is rebranding their co-pilot suite of services to Windows Intelligence. There’s just a lot of interest in it.

The amount of money that’s been thrown into developing AI in the last couple of years has been incredible. But it’s going to be dwarfed in the next year and the year after that, with even more investments. I think the story of AI is in some ways just beginning now and really will mature in 2025. But it really is going to be the big story for 2024, for productivity, for not replacing staff, but making them more productive.

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Steve Longenecker:

My name is Steve Longenecker, and I am the Director of IT Consulting at Community IT.

The biggest nonprofit IT story of 2024 was clearly AI. It was the biggest story for all of tech by miles. So it was almost by default, the biggest story for nonprofit IT as well.

That said, I think the real value of AI is still to come, both for the business world, the consumer world, and the nonprofit sector. These are still early days.

And if I were an IT director of a small or medium-sized nonprofit and we used Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, I would be piloting each platform’s AI functions, Gemini and Copilot respectively. I’d want to have an org-wide AI use policy, and I’d want to educate my staff to avoid using consumer-grade AI for any task that included sharing our organization’s data. So, I’d want some guardrails.

And I wouldn’t be pushing adoption, but I would be taking a let-some-flowers-bloom approach, give my enterprising early adopter staff members, Copilot or Gemini tools to learn with, and wait for the tech to mature. That’d be my position.

An overlooked tech story of 2024 for nonprofits, not through any fault of Community ITs, as we have been letting our clients know about this with increasing urgency, was the emergence of Microsoft 365 account compromise techniques called adversary in the middle, often abbreviated as AITM, that work even if the end user has Microsoft Authenticator number matching MFA.

IT security is a never-ending journey, and it turns out that plain vanilla MFA is not the end of the trip. If bad actors have found tricks to get around it, we have to renew our security training efforts, adding education modules about how these tricks works, and move towards what are called phish-resistant MFA methods, of which Windows Hello for Businessis one, if you are logging on with your Entra ID joined Windows laptop, and physical FIDO keys are another. Those are those little USB sticks, which you can either insert into your laptop or phone, or use hyperlocal wireless function called NFC to complete the MFA process.

I wish nonprofits could relax and take a breather in the area of security, but unfortunately, that was not the case in 2024, and almost certainly will not be the case in the years to come either.

Erik Solce:

I’m Erik Solce. I’m an IT Business Manager with Community IT. The most important new story of this year, I think, is the increase in account compromises from phishing and adversary in the middle (AitM) attacks to steal session tokens.

It seems like security awareness training and phish-resistant MFA are basically mandatory at this point.

The most under reported new story I’ve noticed is a trend among many of my clients who are simplifying the donation process on their websites to make giving easier. The process is much quicker, so when someone does decide to donate, it only takes them a moment to set up a one-time or recurring payment. For example, I’ve seen a brilliant use of QR codes at an event to generate new donors by only asking them to contribute $1.

Norwin Herrera:

Hello, I am Norwin Herrera, Business IT Manager at Community IT. For me, the most important story this year in the world of nonprofit IT is cybersecurity.

Most organizations are moving to more robust cybersecurity measures, and this move is of course pushed by AI. AI is moving faster than we thought, and all the aspects of cybersecurity should move two times faster than AI to catch up. Moving to the cloud is key, and implementing all foundational elements of cybersecurity is the road to success for most nonprofits.

Matthew Eshleman:

My name is Matthew Eshleman, and I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Community IT. I think one of the most important stories in nonprofit IT this year is really around the increased prevalence of compliance controls making their way into the operating environment for organizations.

Just as we saw a few years ago with cyber reliability insurance really driving adoption of technology controls like MFA or backup solutions, we’re really seeing an increase in the number of organizations being driven to implement various cyber security controls as a result of funder or government demands, meaning that they need to comply with formal compliance standards like NIST or CIS V8 in order to maintain their funding source. I think that’s something we just started to see in 2024, and I expect we’ll see a lot more in 2025.

Nuradeen Aboki:

My name is Nuradeen Aboki. I’m a senior consultant at Community IT.

This year, the nonprofit organizations I work with have expressed concerns about the use of generative AI tools across the organizations. Concerns pertaining to data privacy, especially donor information or PII, personal identifiable information that people may not necessarily know what those AI tools actually do with the data they share with the AI tools. They’ve asked us organizations like ours to look into providing guidance or guidelines around AI use policies. So that is one of the biggest, I think most important story this year for a lot of nonprofits that I’ve worked with in 2024.

In 2024, the most overlooked story has to do with IT governance. In general, nonprofit organizations may sit comfortably with doing the IT operations but without really paying attention to IT governance. What we’ve seen is that nonprofit organizations do grow, and when they are growing, little investment is made in the IT governance side of things, where decisions around data governance policies and enforcement capacity in terms of the resources that provide support, investments in technologies might not necessarily get a lot of attention, especially at the executive level. Related to this is data placement and retention schedule for data in general.

Organizations that have moved to the cloud struggle to find the appropriate locations where data should be placed. So, for instance, you may find organizations that deal with a lot of PII (Personally Identifying Information). The PII is often found in emails, in locations, and for instance, their primary private folder locations where they are storing data, but not necessarily. That data that is sensitive private data, that data should be placed in proper places.

So, without proper data governance, which links to the IT governance subject that has been under looked, organizations do run a risk of being in this non-compliance situation where data is found where it’s not supposed to be, and it’s not moved. The data life cycle isn’t managed at all within the organization. So, it’s under looked.

I hope that in 2025, we begin to create awareness about data placement and retention schedules so that organizations are more intentional or making more intentional investments and pouring resources to ensure the privacy of the data that they work with.

Johan Hammerstrom:

Hello, my name is Johan Hammerstrom. I’m the CEO at Community IT, and I think the most important story this year in the world of nonprofit IT is probably data and specifically data warehouses.

We’ve seen more and more organizations that have moved to the cloud, moved all of their data into cloud-based systems, needing to access that data in innovative and integrated ways. And the best way to do that is through a data warehouse. Figuring out how to transform data, put it in a data warehouse, and then get it out in a usable format is something that a lot of organizations, whether they realize it or not, are really starting to get focused on.

And even AI, which is definitely the most over-hyped part of technology this past year, is most useful and most interesting for organizations if it’s applied to their own data sets.

I think the most overlooked and under-reported story about nonprofit IT is SAS 145, which is a statement on accounting standards that was released last year by the AICPA.

SAS 145 basically tells financial auditors that they need to broaden the scope of risk that they evaluate as part of financial audits to include IT risk.

And this means that nonprofit organizations need to get more serious about their cybersecurity and more serious about mitigating cybersecurity risk.

This is something that people are starting to experience when they’re doing their financial audits, and it’s going to become a much bigger deal in the coming years.

Carolyn Woodard:

All good pieces of advice from our senior staff. I’m going to exercise my privilege and go last.

I also think that AI is the biggest story of 2024 for nonprofit IT. And here are three aspects of AI to keep an eye on in 2025.

The first would be nonprofit governance frameworks. There is a lot of thinking about the impact of AI on nonprofits and our sector generally. And this year, there are a lot more resources available to nonprofits to help us build our AI acceptable use policies and guide our adoption of AI tools and practices. We have a lot of those resources on our site, or we link to them from our site. You can just find a lot of them with a quick Google as well.

Related to this is strategic work on how to think about implementing AI at nonprofits with a big picture. A lot of nonprofits and academics are raising a lot of the big issues around AI use at all. I expect awareness of those issues to become a bigger story in 2025. I’m talking about issues such as energy use, the land use and who profits from land used for data centers, water and environmental concerns for data centers, the ownership of data and images used in generative AI, privacy and private AI tools that use only your own files and data to produce outputs, the risks of AI to vulnerable populations like children and women whose images are used without their consent, the use of AI for misinformation and coercion.

All of these issues may at first have been disassociated with cool new tools that nonprofits and the public are using. But I think those issues will cease to be adjacent and will become front and center as we move forward. The nonprofit sector will be central in raising awareness about the costs of using AI so that consumers can make more informed choices and companies can update their products to be safer for people using them and for the environment.

A third aspect of AI I’ll be keeping an eye on this upcoming year is the growth in productivity tools and how nonprofits use those tools to do more with what they have.

The first nonprofit AI stories we heard were focused on using AI tools in innovative ways to achieve missions. Like a story I heard early on about using AI to analyze public census data to identify potential scholarship recipients for first time college goers. Using AI like this helps the outreach officers in addition to their standard practice of visiting schools and posting flyers about the scholarships, hoping that the students who could be helped would apply.

In 2024, as more and more nonprofits experimented with AI beyond using it to draft cover letters and reports, we are building up a knowledge base on using AI for the more mundane, but just as important, aspects of nonprofit staff life. Clever early adapter nonprofit users are piloting ways to work a lot smarter and reach more constituents or just to reduce the stress on overworked staff by simplifying and shortening office tasks.

I’m sure we will continue to see sector-wide sharing of best practices using new tools or using the new updates to Google and Microsoft tools we already use. And because this sector is really investing in being learning organizations and a learning sector, I’m going to be looking for that peer-to-peer sharing around AI tools to grow.

For the most sleeper story of nonprofit IT in 2024, I’m going to pick the urgency of administration.

Nonprofits are generally innovative with IT, moving to online giving, creating viral marketing campaigns, moving early to cloud-based solutions and remote work. So those are some examples.

But there is also a competing tendency of inertia in nonprofits around back-office updates and improvements, and a real spirit of making do with what you have.

Because of the increased vulnerabilities that AI is creating in cybersecurity and because of the growth in AI search, any nonprofit that thinks they can leave their administration processes and policies as is, is going to be unpleasantly surprised.

It can seem daunting to embark on a big administrative project like organizing your file permissions or updating cybersecurity best practices or creating that governance documentation. Compared to initiatives and programs or fundraising, back-office initiatives are often the last priority. For me, the reach of AI into all aspects of almost every IT tool that we use is going to create urgency.

And as mentioned earlier, the new auditing guidelines in SAS 145 are going to require a rethinking of the necessity to assess our IT risks when we audit for financial risks and overall healthy practices. No doubt, new requirements will be coming to nonprofits as AI use grows.

My advice in 2024 is don’t overlook your back-office tasks that you’ve been putting off because they aren’t as exciting or sexy. Operating under best practices you developed a decade ago is going to bite you eventually, unless you take a look at your policies and governance as soon as you can in 2025.

Thank you for listening to our 2024 Wrap Up Podcast. Welcome 2025. There are so many stories that we can cover, so we really appreciate your help in identifying the most important, or maybe the most overlooked IT stories that can help you in your work. Thank you for listening to us in 2024 and looking forward to 2025.