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In part 1, Alethea presents research on the benefits of board members with tech experience and gives two case studies with real world examples. In part 2, she delves into how to recruit a tech-savvy board member and takes audience questions.

Nonprofit Tech Board Leadership 101:
with Board.dev CEO Alethea Hannemann

Board.dev Co-Founder and CEO Alethea Hannemann on how to recruit tech leadership to join your nonprofit board, and why you should have tech leaders an/or a tech committee on your board helping your organization to grow and thrive.

Do you have tech expertise on your nonprofit board?

Board.dev was founded to help nonprofits recruit and engage tech leaders for your board—so you can fully and responsibly harness the power of technology to maximize your impact. Board.dev also helps educate tech leaders from the for-profit world on the benefits of joining a board, and helps train them to help them be effective quickly in the nonprofit world.

Alethea Hannemann is the co-founder and CEO of Board.dev and an architect of the pro-bono service movement, with a career in nonprofits, investing, and advising. She will share Board.dev’s insights into the necessity of having board members fluent in tech and nonprofit needs, and how to build tech expertise on your board.

Why tech board leadership? Why now?

Technology is increasingly a key differentiator for nonprofit performance, from operational efficiency to better service of the community. Yet too few nonprofits have the technology resources they need to achieve their missions.

Board service is a high-potential lever for tech capacity-building in social sector organizations. By placing a tech leader on your board, you bring a unique technology perspective to board conversations, add to your general business knowledge, and engage a valuable strategic technology planning partner to the CEO. Making technology risk and opportunity a regular topic at the highest levels of leadership can transform an organization, driving mission success and building greater support for the community.

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.

Presenters:

Alethea Hannemann


Alethea Hannemann is the Co-Founder and CEO of Board.dev, a new social enterprise working to develop the field of social sector technical governance. Board.dev places corporate technology leaders on nonprofit boards in tech-focused roles to help transform and power missions that matter. A Strategic Advisor at Jobs for the Future, COO at God’s Love we Deliver, VP for National Programs at the Taproot Foundation, and a Social Impact Consultant, Alethea serves on three nonprofit boards. Alethea has degrees from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business LEAD program in corporate innovation.







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 five 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 conversation with Alethea Hannemann from Board.dev on nonprofit tech board leadership 101.





Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to this Community IT webinar, the Nonprofit Tech Board Leadership 101 with Board.dev. 

I’m so happy today to welcome Alethea Hannemann to our monthly webinar series. She is the CEO and co-founder of Board.dev, and she’s going to walk us through the reasons having tech expertise on your nonprofit board is so beneficial to your organization, and how to go about recruiting tech leadership to your board to help you set up your nonprofit to take advantage of those levers that technology can give you to advance your mission.

My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I’m the moderator today. And I am so happy to hear from Alethea about Board.dev because I attended a presentation, she gave a couple of months ago, and I instantly invited her to come give us a webinar and share these ideas and research and her practical approach with our audience here.

But before we get to her presentation, I’m going to go over our learning objectives. We hope by the end of this session that we’ll all 

And with that, I would like to turn it over to Alethea to introduce herself and Board.dev.

Alethea Hannemann: Thank you so much, Carolyn, and it is great to be here. Great to see everyone in the chat as well. Hello to you.

I’m excited to get into a conversation. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Board.dev. 

Introduction to Board.dev

Board.dev is here to strengthen nonprofits by bringing tech expertise to the board level.

In the same way that every board knows that they need to be talking about finance and legal issues, we believe every board needs to be talking about technology as well. All our programming and community events are related to that. 

We do three things.

Number one, we set and share standards and resources around what that board level conversation for technology should be. What are the key questions? Where should boards go? And where maybe should they not go as well? And we’re assisted in that by a great advisory council. 

Number two, we help up level all boards everywhere on how to talk about technology in a meaningful way. We do trainings and share those resources and help board members really reinvent and rethink their board compact. 

And then third, we help organizations to find place and support tech leaders on their boards to really drive this effort and tech transformation generally.

Background

My background, quickly, I’ve been working in cross-sector leadership, bringing the best of corporate America to two nonprofits for quite some time.

My co-founder, Aaron Hurst, was the founder of the Taproot Foundation. And I worked with him there for 10 years. Taproot is all about bringing pro bono resources to nonprofits. We learned a lot about nonprofit needs and capacity building while also building our own organization. 

But also, my personal mission is to get change makers what they need to power their missions. Whether you’re a nonprofit leader or you’re a tech professional, I want to make sure you have what you need to engage in the social sector mission that really drives you.

I mentioned that we set and share standards. I wanted to give you just a quick look at our amazing tech governance congress. This is our advisory board, and it’s composed of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs from the nonprofit sector, as well as philanthropy and corporate America, specifically technology.

And we brought these folks together because we wanted to make sure that we were bringing the right guidance that was really tuned both to what nonprofits were saying they needed and what industry professionals could bring. So huge thanks to all of these folks. 

Carolyn Woodard: Great, Thank you so much. I was just going to say, I see a lot of people that I follow on LinkedIn there on that slide.

Alethea Hannemann: Excellent. Good sign.

Carolyn Woodard: Just great people with really good thinking about this sector. 

Community IT

I’ll introduce myself. I’m the Director of Marketing at Community IT.

Before I worked at Community IT, I worked at a couple of different nonprofits, a very small local one and a large international one, where I ended up being in charge of IT. I’m living proof that you do not have to have an IT background to manage IT at a nonprofit. But it does help if you have some support and some trusted partners that you can talk to. Just to ask your questions and kind of figure out how you’re going to manage what you need to manage. 

And then a little bit more about our company, before we begin, if you’re not familiar with us. We are a 100% employee-owned managed services provider. We provide outsourced IT support exclusively to nonprofit organizations. Our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of technology. We’re big fans of what well managed IT can do for your nonprofit.

We serve nonprofits across the United States, and we’ve been doing this for almost 25 years. We are technology experts. We are consistently given the MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor. I can do a sneak preview. We just received it again for 2025, but they haven’t put the graphics out yet. This is the 2024, but we are back on the list this year.

We host a weekly podcast and a monthly free webinar series. You can also access all of our previous webinar videos and transcripts on our website at communityit.com. And you can register for upcoming webinars there and ask your questions.

For these presentations, Community IT is vendor agnostic. We only make recommendations to our clients and only based on specific business needs. We never try to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or benefit from it.

We do consider ourselves the best of breed IT provider. It’s our job to know the landscape, the tools that are available, reputable, and widely used. And we make recommendations on that basis for our clients based on their business needs, priority, and budget.

We try to be that trusted person, that organization that you can ask your questions to. 

And just a little bit more about our mission. Our mission is to create value for the nonprofit sector through well-managed IT, as I said.

We also identify four key values as employee owners that define our company, trust, knowledge, service, and balance. We seek to always treat people with respect and fairness, to empower our staff, clients, and sector to understand and use technology effectively, to be helpful with our talents, and we recognize that the health of our communities is vital to our well-being, and that work is only a part of our lives. 

So now I’m going to turn the presentation over to Alethea, and I believe we’re going to start with a poll.

Poll 1: Tech Governance and Tech Board Leadership

Alethea Hannemann: Thanks, and everyone, if you could take a look at this, and just tell us where you are thinking about tech governance and tech board leadership.

Are you curious? Are you actively doing this on your board? Have you been doing this for a while, or are you just not sure? Please do share.

And as you’re putting those answers in, I would love to say, Carolyn, I just really resonate with the values that you named just now for Community IT, particularly balance. Something similar we talk a lot about at Board.dev is how board service can really build connections. Folks in the tech industry are looking for balance in their lives and connecting with the social sector can be a really important piece of that.

So, excellent. Well, thanks everyone for sharing on the poll. Looks like curious, building, and not sure.

Great. Well, we will tackle all of those things as we get into this today. 

And first, before we get into the how to’s, Carolyn walked us through what we’re going to be learning today, including how board leadership looks or how tech leadership looks on a board, what type of tech leader you might need and how to find them.

Case Study: God’s Love We Deliver

But first, I want to tell you a story about a little bit about how we came to this work and a case study. God’s Love We Deliver is an emergency food organization in New York. They home deliver meals to people who are too sick to shop or cook for themselves over across all five boroughs of New York City, 10,000 people a week and 2.5 million meals a year, all made in this building you see on the left and packaged and frozen and then delivered.

There’s a 30-driver team to do all of those deliveries. They’ve got nutrition counselors and protected health information going back 40 years. The technology challenges here are immense.

I know all this because I served at God’s Love We Deliver as COO for four years. I’m really, really fortunate to be able to engage with such a compelling mission and such a powerful team doing really, really great work. And when I stepped into that role, literally the first day I came in, I started getting requests related to technology.

And what Carolyn mentioned earlier, you don’t have to have a tech background to be in a tech responsible position and make good decisions at an organization. That was me. I was not a technologist.

I’d run tech teams before, but these were tech challenges that were really above and beyond. It was a lot to think about there. I mean, literally a hundred things that people were asking me to think about related to technology in that first month.

And I was lucky enough at that moment to engage a very senior leader from Morgan Stanley. She led tech transformation at Morgan Stanley, came on as my personal board member, helping me to sort through those hundred things that everyone was screaming were a priority and figure out what were the top three things that we really needed to take on immediately and why. 

Then, you know, once we had that priority, how could I talk about that with my leadership team and with the rest of the board, none of whom were really tech fluent at all? You know, how do you translate those needs? How did we make the case to funders so that we could resource the things that we needed to do? 

She was brought on pro bono, and was able to secure donations from Morgan Stanley, which just really helped us power ahead in technology.

And just to give you one example of results, when I came on board, we were losing 7% to 9% of our meals every day because they would go out on the van to be delivered to clients, or the client unexpectedly had to be at the doctor, or they forgot they had the appointment and they were downstairs at their neighbor, or they were too sick to get out of bed and come to the door. 

Whatever it might be, once those meals went out on the van, they could not be put back in circulation. This obviously had huge impacts.

By changing some of the ways we were managing our existing record keeping and communications with clients, we were able to get that down to 2-3%, which on 2.5 million meals a year and 10,000 clients a week, is a huge, huge savings, both financially, but also in terms of client experience and what we were able to do for them. 

That’s just one story of many. But this is the type of transformation that we see with a tech-fluent board and tech-focused board members. And this is the type of experience we want every nonprofit CEO and tech leader to have, being able to bring on that type of expert expertise. 

Poll 2: How are you leveraging tech at your organization?

All right, so let’s talk a little bit.

You are all technologists in some way, I imagine. I’m pretty sure you’re going to know the challenges in nonprofit tech. But first, let’s hear what role technology plays in your organization.

Are you using it for operations? Is it supporting your programs? Is it a core part of the programs you deliver? Meaning, maybe you deliver tutoring online, for example. Are you not really leveraging tech very much? That’s very few organizations that say that.

Or are you unsure? Let us know where you’re at.

Carolyn Woodard: I love this. I shared a couple of resources in the chat and they’ll be in the transcript as well. But yeah, it just resonates with me as well, hearing the challenges of which IT you tackle first is just a huge thing.

And finding those mentors who can help you, it’s really, really important.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah. That’s great to have a roadmap template. Cool. This is great to see. Yeah, this makes sense. You’re using tech for programs, but for one of you, it’s a core part of your mission. Great.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s really interesting. Actually, I just want to jump in and say that a huge 64 percent said that tech is key to supporting your programs. I love to see that. I’m interested to see what else comes out throughout the presentation.

Alethea Hannemann: Excellent. 

Challenges to Nonprofits Around IT/Tech

Well, despite tech being key to most of what you’re doing, maybe you’d agree with this statement as well, that many funders are limiting funding and technology. 

This is the number one challenge non-profit leadership is facing. Funders are not investing, and yet we know that not having the right technology is keeping so many organizations from delivering in a highly effective way.

Let’s look a little in a little more detail about that. Some of the things we’ve heard from out in the fields that tell us, non-profits don’t have the right technology tools for the missions they’re taking on.

You know, number one, cybersecurity risks are increasing erratically. 65% of the world’s largest global development organizations are feeling unprepared for cyber threats. 

This figure comes from an organization called NetHope. And they engage organizations like Save the Children and UNICEF and IRC, you know, really large, well-resourced organizations with incredibly complex operations. And yet, even those organizations are saying, we do not feel prepared for cyber threats. This threat and the unreadiness is magnified in organizations that don’t have those resources.

Second figure here, only 16% of nonprofits are saying that they are digitally mature, and that has an impact because nonprofits that are digitally ready, tech savvy nonprofits are four times more likely to achieve their missions. 

And this is just what organizations are doing, often duct taping together tape or their tech, or doing very well with what they have, but knowing that they could be doing much more. 

Facing the Nonprofit Tech Challenges

Tackling this is going to take two things.

Number one, it does take investment, right? Nonprofits spend only one third what equivalent size for-profit organizations spend on technology. So that’s a challenge right there.

We already talked about funders not investing what they should. 85% of grants include no provision for technology whatsoever. So that’s a real challenge.

But then there’s also a skills gap. The tech talent that you want to need is sometimes, nonprofits either can’t hire it, or it just doesn’t fit in their staffing model. It’s both money and the expertise that is keeping nonprofits from doing what they need to do.

Tech governance and tech board leadership is one way that we can help address both of those things by helping organizations to figure out how to use the money they have on tech more effectively and also bringing in the right expertise. 

Tech Governance and Nonprofit Boards

When we say tech governance, we just mean the tools and the processes that you’re using to really harness technology in service of your mission. So pretty simple concept there.

How you get there can be a little bit more complex. And why boards are important to this? I want to walk through some of the figures on this slide.

A board in general is responsible for managing strategy and resources and risk. Those are the things that a board focuses on; all of those things are key to succeeding with tech. Boards do that with finance. They do that with legal issues, with program issues. And now they need to do it with technology as well. 

We’re seeing this as a growing trend, not just in the nonprofit sector, but also in the for-profit sector, which where tech expertise was not overrepresented on the boards there as well until a few years ago.

So recently, we’ve seen a 33% increase in corporate board members with tech expertise. So, they’re seeing a real need for this. And for good reason, the companies that do have tech expertise are outperforming their peers by 1 to 6%.

Nonprofits are also seeing this. You know, 45% of them are talking about tech at the board level. They’re regularly reporting on tech spending, and about 65% of non-profits are saying that they will change tech tools based on input from the board.

People are starting to have these conversations. What we’re hoping to do is make sure that everybody from the non-profit CEO to tech staff members to the rest of the board are really feeling prepared to have these conversations, to have these conversations well. 

Tech Governance Essentials

When we talk about tech governance, we talk about four key areas, and all of these are probably familiar to you as technologists or non-profit leaders.

First area is risk management. Do we have our security practices wrapped up? Have we thought about data privacy? Are we thinking about the ethics of our data use? This is the stuff that a non-profit CEO will tell me is what’s keeping them up at night. Really, really important stuff to have in hand, particularly right now when cyber-attacks and scrutiny are increasing for non-profits.

Number two, tech planning. This is the roadmap Carolyn was talking about. How are we using tech right now? Do we have a long-term plan? Do we know what we need to do over the next two or three years? And are we moving to that?

Number three is tech resourcing. This is about tools and people. It’s also, you know, it’s about product. Figuring out, do we have what we need to execute on our programs and on our plan? Could we be bringing in pro bono? Do we need an advisory board? Do we have the right team? 

When I came on board to God’s Love We Deliver, I said we were serving 10,000 people a week. We were doing that with 130 people on our team. And I had one director of IT, and an IT manager, and I don’t even know how this person even gets the hardware out there. How do you get people their laptops with that? It was a lot.

I knew I needed to upgrade that team in some way or expand but didn’t know exactly how. This woman from Morgan Stanley was incredibly helpful in figuring that out. Even that was just one problem, that was really critical to have her voice in there.

So that’s tech resourcing. 

The fourth area is what we call tech in the community. And these are really the sort of generative conversations and future visioning that help you use technology to really amplify your impact.

If risk management and security is what keeps a nonprofit CEO up at night, this sort of technology vision, those exciting things you can do, is what gets them up in the morning. 

How can we really use technology to do something that our community desperately needs? And that’s where having a tech expert on your board can be super, super helpful.

And, you know, across one, two, and three for sure, but especially in those generative conversations, it’s really great to have someone who’s so steeped in technology, they can help you skate to where the puck is going. 

Poll 3: How Tech Fluent is Your Board? 

All right, so let’s talk about what technology looks like on a board.

Another poll for you here, interested to hear how tech fluent you think your board is.

Carolyn Woodard: And can you read the description?

Alethea Hannemann: Number one is not very; our board members want to talk about the gala. That was my board at God’s Love We Deliver for sure. Amazing, talented people did not want to talk about tech at all. 

Next is pretty comfortable. If you talk about tech, they can engage. 

Then really fluent and engaged. They want to talk about tech at every board meeting. It might be on your agenda, or you don’t know. 

And then we do have not applicable, but that would be if you weren’t using tech and you didn’t feel like they, they needed to engage at all. All right.

Carolyn Woodard: Wow, that’s interesting. Between not very/they just want to talk about the gala to pretty comfortable, if I bring up tech topics, they’ll engage, it looks pretty even – 27 percent and 36 percent. 

But very fluent, we talk about tech at every board meeting, is a big 0 percent. That is really, really interesting. 

Then I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it or not applicable are coming in also under there.

If you haven’t talked about it at all, it’s fair to say probably you’re in that not very category, although you don’t know until you bring it up. You might want to put it out there so you can get that conversation going.

Alethea Hannemann: And are those results what you would expect, Carolyn?

Carolyn Woodard: I’m surprised that no one came here with a very fluent, we talk about tech at every board meeting, although that is kind of our experience with the nonprofit clients that we have. It can sometimes be difficult to get it to be a priority.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah. And I will say again, you know, in boards where I found they’re not talking about tech, like very talented, very dedicated people, they’re just not technologists themselves. And so sometimes that’s uncomfortable for folks. They don’t want to talk about it. And if you’re not bringing it up, then they’re definitely not going to bring it up. 

As Carolyn said, just getting it on the agenda is one thing we always recommend. Even just saying, what should we be talking about in relation to technology? And then opening it up from there. 

But here on this side, you’ll see some of the things we often hear from board members when they’re thinking about technology.

Number one on the left, we know we’re investing in tech, everybody is, but I don’t feel like we have a long-term plan. The board really wants to be involved in figuring and understanding what that is. Or, you know, the CEO will say tech people have offered pro bono work, maybe some free product, but we’re not sure how to engage them because I don’t speak tech. I’m not a tech project manager. How do I do that? 

People are thinking about risks. There are likely technology risks that boards everywhere are not talking about because they just don’t know what they don’t know. 

Many CEOs will tell us that I do have someone with tech expertise on my board, but I’m not sure really how to engage that person. I’m not sure how to start that conversation. We hear that over and over and over again, and a lot of our resources are dedicated to activating rather than finding someone new, just activating someone you have on your board. 

Many organizations recognize that they’ve got a small team that really needs mentoring. Tech teams at nonprofits, and I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, you know, if they’re smaller teams, sometimes it can be a really lonely role. You don’t have anyone who understands what you’re doing, let alone values it sometimes, and it’s very difficult to, you know, get that sort of learning and perspective building. And a tech board member or a tech focused board can help with that. 

And then finally, over here on the lower left, technology is just moving so quickly right now. It’s hard for folks to feel even remotely proactive, but you got to have it on the agenda in order to get ahead of it for sure. 

Benefits to Having a Tech-Savvy Board Member at Your Nonprofit

Here’s how talking about technology at the board level and bringing on tech focused board members can help you change all that. 

Number one in benefits is, in addition to the tech expertise that a tech focused board member will bring, they’re also bringing general business expertise from a different perspective that can be really helpful to your organization.

Number two, the advice that they’re bringing, because they’re around for the long term and are really dedicated to the organization and frankly have some skin in the game, they’re able to give advice or counsel that is more contextualized. Tech advisors are amazing, but if they’re kind of in and out, that can be difficult for folks. 

Creating funding leverage, one of the most important roles that we’ve seen a tech board member play is helping to explain the ROI or translate the importance of an investment to a funder or just give you messaging around that. They can really help increase your funding. 

Most great tech board members are going to answer questions, not just raise them. Many times, nonprofit board members know enough about technology to say, could we be doing this differently? But they can’t answer that question. And so, you want someone who can help you do that. 

And also, someone who can say, this is an instance where a technology fix is not the fix. A technology change is not the solution. Knowing where tech works and where it doesn’t is really important. Tech board members can help you truly evaluate the ROI of your tech investments.

And then also think about opportunity as well as risk.

I mentioned that what keeps CEOs up at night is the risk, and what gets them up in the morning is thinking about these generative conversations. Sometimes, especially when you don’t know tech, you approach it in sort of a fear-based way. And this can be a really… having a tech board member can help you kind of lift that cloud. Here’s where, if you have a person focused specifically on technology on your board, here’s the lens that they are bringing to that work. 

A tech-focused board member should be a board member like any other, right? They’re also thinking about strategic planning and risks and finance, but they’re bringing a tech lens to that. And this is how they do it. 

How to Utilize a Tech-Savvy Board Member at Your Nonprofit

Number one, they’re a member of the strategic planning committee or in that process. Again, bringing that tech lens, making sure that technology is really built in rather than bolted on. 

They can partner with you or your team, to make sure that the board understands what’s going on with technology. That’s really, really important. It’s hard for them to support technology changes unless they know what’s going on. 

They can help with these generative conversations. 

They can help you think about the right team, bringing on the right team and how you might mentor them.

They definitely help you evaluate the case for tech investments. 

And they can help you find and manage pro bono volunteers to really amplify the value of your team.

Carolyn Woodard: Can I jump in and ask you a question on that slide? I think almost every nonprofit I’ve ever come in contact with has some tech tool that is not working, either not working the way it was supposed to or just was not a good fit, has never been a good fit. Is that something else that you would think a board member could jump in and help evaluate if they can rescue that tool or if they need to look for replacing it?

Alethea Hannemann: Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the resources actually that we’ve had that has been most requested for us from boards is, how do you evaluate the total cost of ownership of a tool? How do you make product decisions? How do you evaluate the ROI? 

So many stories from folks who got a donated product, sometimes from a board connection, and then all of a sudden they realize it’s costing them a quarter million dollars a year for the staff they had to hire, and the add-ons they had to buy, and yeah, that’s a really, really important place for a tech board member to be able to dive in. Yeah, great question.

Q: Can you claim pro bono tech work is a donation to the nonprofit? 

And I’ll tackle the pro bono question here. Actually, you cannot donate for pro bono work, unfortunately. That’s something that we worked very hard on at the Taproot Foundation, and we’re not able to get them to do that.

Differentiating Roles

That also brings up an important point about the role of a volunteer versus a board member. The board member, they really are going to be advising you and helping you steer the strategy. But just as the lawyer on your board is not serving as general counsel, the tech person on your board is probably not doing a lot of the projects.

They will help you to think about how those projects should get done. But that looks different in different boards of different sizes. There are smaller, more working boards.

But as you get to the larger organizations or more mature boards, they are really going to be in that strategy area rather than the two.

Carolyn Woodard: And just to jump back, the question was, could you do a zero-dollar invoicing for IT people doing pro bono work? Your answer was not really no.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah, I mean, believe me, sadly, I disagree with that very strongly, but I thus far have no power to change it. If I did, we might not be having this webinar, because you’d all have great funding and have all the tech you wanted anyways.

Benefits to Board Members

Here you’ll see some of the benefits that board members see from serving in a tech board role with a nonprofit.

Nonprofit leaders often ask us, really, does someone really want to do this and what are they getting out of this? Lots is the answer. In the middle, that impact column is the most important thing. That’s why it’s in the center. 

Tech professionals are really eager to engage in meaningful ways with nonprofits and missions in their communities. And they’re excited to connect with your team. They’re excited to help build out an organization. And they’re excited to really advance a critical issue about which they are passionate. So that’s number one.

But people also see really immense personal growth. They are using their skills in a new context. So learning about your business model and how you do what you do can be incredibly rewarding.

They are building strategy skills. There are many really talented tech professionals who will never set foot in a corporate boardroom. And to be able to do that with you is just incredibly helpful for them in building their strategy and their leadership skills.

And then in terms of relationships, I mentioned connection earlier on. Connection is really important. They love meeting you and your team and maybe the stakeholders you serve. They love having something meaningful to talk about in their communities and really maybe mustering those people to support your mission as well. And they also learn so much and connect with their fellow board members. So just ample benefits.

Board service, when it works, is just incredibly rewarding for a tech professional. 

Focus Areas for Tech Professionals on Nonprofit Boards

So here on this slide, we want to, we are walking through some of the focus areas for a tech-focused board member or a tech governance committee, probably together. 

We recommend that folks build a tech governance committee if they’re really serious about diving into technology at the board level. Or you could have an individual kind of steer these things as well. 

Some of the things you’re going to be thinking about are the tech strategy, thinking about policy reviews and compliance, doing some risk assessments and cyber auditsto make sure that you are all wrapped up tight and secure. 

Definitely going to be thinking about budget and the financial implications of technology.

They’re going to help you think about those innovations and, you know, staying ahead, skating to where the puck is going. Knowing what’s coming down, coming at you. They are going to help potentially understand the technology needs for stakeholders and help you think about your team in terms of a tech succession plan.

That can be super, super important, particularly when you have a tiny team. And they’re going to just help you think about your overall IT governance framework. All of these things can be really useful at the board level.

Again, they’re not necessarily doing the things, like they may not create the IT governance framework, but the right professional could really help you develop one that feels really powerful. 

Tips to Success

Thinking about how people get started, you know, the first six months is really critical for getting a tech board member up and running.

Here’s some of the moments that we recommend, you know, the moments that matter. 

Number one, introduction and onboarding will look similar to what it looks like for other board members. You just want that person to make sure that they understand your organization, they’ve met your team, and they understand what your priorities are.

But then these last two bullets are really unique to a tech board member coming on board. 

We have a tool called a technology governance assessment that helps you go through certain key areas of those four tech governance points, including risk management, tech planning, resourcing, and generative tech.

And going through those things, you can figure out what’s a hotspot, what’s an opportunity. You don’t need to be experts in all of those areas, but where are some places you really want to dive in? And then ideally, this person, the tech board member is, you know, putting that together, compiling that report, finalizing it with nonprofit leadership or the tech leadership at the organization, and then presenting it to the rest of the board so that the board is bought in and everybody feels accountable and ready to go.

Case Study 2: LemonTree

We’re going to get to how you can define and find a board member in just a couple of minutes, but I want to give you one more case study about how this looks in real life before we get there. 

This is an organization, another organization in the food space, completely different operating model. This is a small organization. They are five full-time staff at this point. Their program is all technology. 

They started out as kind of a Yelp for emergency food service, a listing system. Emergency food is a really hard system to find your way around if you are a person in need. Oftentimes food resources are operated out of church basements and there’s no website or the website is out of date or you make a phone call and they’re never there.

People sometimes find themselves going from spot to spot, because the place is closed when they said it would be open or they don’t have any vegetarian protein or they require documentation that you don’t have. Knowing all of these things is incredibly important. 

LemonTree (Food Helpline) started out by listing those resources.

They have since moved to be more of a helpline. They have a chat feature where you can chat in and say text in and say, okay, these are my hours that I’m available to go get food. And this is my location. What’s out there for me? And they will counsel you on where to go get food. 

They also do the feedback loop. You can see a picture here on the left, a picture somebody shared of what they found at this food pantry, so that they’re helping to increase the quality of those resources as well. 

You can imagine the tech resources that are required for that. 

LemonTree has been scaling really rapidly. They started in one city a couple years ago. Now they’re in 18 cities serving more than 10,000 people a day, all of whom, may have spent hours on a bus only to get to a food pantry that was closed. They do really incredible work.

You’ll see here that the top row, Alex on the left and Kasumi on the right, those are the co-founders of LemonTree. They are not technologists. They know about technology, but they’re not engineers, they’re not developers, and they haven’t really built any tech tools.

But of course, their whole program was dependent on tech. They knew pretty early on that they were going to need some tech expertise at the board level. So they brought on Ratul, who’s in the center at the bottom here. Ratul is a FinTech founder. He’s launched several companies, has worked at large enterprises as well. 

When he came on board he really just accelerated them.

He was able to answer basic questions like, as their traffic increased, their website crashed a couple of times in a month. And they said, whoa, how bad is that? And he said, actually not that bad. Here are the fixes you need to invest in, you can investigate, but, you know, that’s a common scaling challenge. Great, we’re not going to worry too much about that. 

He helped mentor the developer that they ended up hiring to make sure that that person felt like they were learning and also that they were making good decisions.

He was also able to bring general business expertise about scaling and bringing on more clients while maintaining quality. Just really, really, again, I’m going to use the word transformative expertise and counsel that he was able to bring to LemonTree. And as I said, they’ve scaled immensely and done so in a way that really brings quality food and services to their non-profit, to the clients that they serve.

How to Find a Tech-Savvy Board Member?

All right, so let’s get to the fun stuff. How you find a tech board member. 

Number one, defining the tech leader that you need.

Carolyn dropped in the chat. You can check out our resource page. And that’s really where you can find all of these tools.

As we jump into it, we want to hear from you whether you’ve tried to recruit a tech board member. And if so, how did you do it?

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I’m curious about this too, because it’s not like you can just Google them.

Alethea Hannemann: Right, right. “I need tech board member.”

Carolyn Woodard: Ask AI.

Alethea Hannemann: Exactly.

Carolyn Woodard: And I think that’s so interesting, that story that you shared about LemonTree, because in the clients and nonprofits that I’ve interacted with, it seemed that a lot of the nonprofits that are very tech oriented, tech savvy, their founder was in that sphere. So, they were looking at whatever social problem they were interested in, and thinking like, how can tech help me tackle this? 

So that was a really interesting example of the people starting LemonTree, who kind of knew what they wanted to do, but they weren’t technologists themselves. That wasn’t their wheelhouse. They knew they had to have someone help them.

Alethea Hannemann: I’ll wait just a couple more minutes on the chat question. Nobody is sharing whether they’ve tried to recruit. So I’m going to…

Carolyn Woodard: Because some people said they had one. So I want to know.

Alethea Hannemann: I know. How did you do it?

Carolyn Woodard: Maybe that person found them.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah. Well, the LemonTree story is even more interesting because both of both Kasumi and Alex started in the food space, so they were delivering physical meals, I believe through food rescue to schools in New York City.

And then during the pandemic, they entirely pivoted, kind of closed for a while and then started doing this online tool because that proved way more useful than bringing actual physical meals.

Carolyn Woodard: Sure.

Alethea Hannemann: So yeah, they started in a totally different domain.

Carolyn Woodard: But still solving a problem, like you were talking about that by the time you get there, it’s not open. So trying to maximize for people who need the services, getting to a place that has what they need when it’s available.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah. It really is just a patchwork system. And for people who are low on time and resources anyways, it’s really difficult.

All right. So we’re seeing, “I’ve sourced from my personal network” in answer to the chat question about where you recruit tech-savvy board members. I would love to see more answers there.

However, I will not delay indefinitely. Let’s talk about how you can find tech leaders. 

Number one is starting to think about who you might need.

And on the left here, we’ve got some of the aspects that we encourage people to think about. 

Do you need someone in your area or could you have a virtual board member? 

What’s the business stage? Sometimes people really want startup advisors or they want someone who’s been in a larger enterprise. That’s something you might have a preference on. Maybe they have some specific or they will need to have some specific expertise.

Often, we don’t encourage people to try to find a match with your tools and somebody’s skill set just because they’re not going to be doing the work. And sometimes having a sort of a helicoptered-up perspective can be helpful, but you might need a particular skill set. 

Their mindset, absolutely, a sort of consulting mindset and a curiosity about understanding your challenges and opportunities and how together you might solve them is really important.

And then of course, underlying this all is the mission match. It’s just critically important that they feel passionate about what you do. 

You are all tech folks, so these typical role tracks will probably sound familiar to you.

Three sort of archetypes that we see are product folks, the CIO (Chief Information Officer) type track. This doesn’t mean they are a CIO, but they’re on that track and can really help you think about security, for example. 

And then the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) track, which is more generalized. These are some of the key aspects you might think about. We’ve got a couple resources that will be helpful to you. 

There is a resource, a sample role description that can help you describe more about what you’re looking for.

Even if you’re not sharing that role description publicly, it’s helpful for you to think about it so you can start evaluating folks. 

And then Carolyn just dropped in the link to our LinkedIn guide, which helps you look on LinkedIn to get, you know, beyond your network. You can use second and third connections or even beyond to find folks with the particular attributes that you are looking for.

LinkedIn can be a great tool, ping someone with a message. You would be surprised how often people are super excited to be recruited for their expertise. 

Another resource I definitely want, you to know, if you’re interested in this, is we want you on our roster.

Most of our placements right now are with big companies like those you see listed here, but we are always expanding our kind of roster and wait list of nonprofits, and would love to have you on there. 

So please scan this QR code. We’ve got a really basic intake form that will tell us a little bit about what you’re looking for, so you can be on our list.

And then, here’s just a summary for the key steps of how you might do this. 

Conclusion: Nonprofit Tech Board Leadership 101 

All right, so finishing up, I want to make sure we have time for Q&A. You know, our website has a bunch of information about what we do and more information about how we partner with nonprofits. I’m really excited to hear from you if this feels like something that is on your priority list.

And we’d love to share more stories.

Carolyn Woodard: We’re getting to Q&A. If you have a question for Alethea, while we have her and can ask her all of our questions. We do have one from registration, Alethea, I wonder if you could answer. 

How do you convey the opportunity for fractional technology support? My guess would be that means a virtual CIO or a part-time CIO?

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah, so is this kind of how you might source that person, do you think?

Carolyn Woodard: Whoever asks the question, if they’re in here, go ahead and elaborate. But I think if people don’t know a virtual CIO or a part-time CIO would be somebody filling that role, either outsourced or it could be someone doing it pro bono, but they would act as that chief information officer for the nonprofit, instead of hiring a full-time person. Do you have thoughts on that?

Alethea Hannemann: This sounds like a really interesting opportunity for someone. I should say tech professionals often get really intrigued by the particular challenges of a nonprofit, whether there are resource constraints or not. So I think this could be a really interesting opportunity for someone.

I would absolutely recommend LinkedIn for this. Do a post, see what you get. Try to be specific.

What you don’t want to happen is to have a lot of interests and then have people who flake and go away after they’ve gotten into the conversation. That’s the challenge with fractional advisory and certainly any pro bono.

And that’s why one of the reasons board service can be really helpful. So you might want to say, just be clear – we’re looking for a long-term advisor or something. You want somebody who’s going to get to know you so that the recommendations they’re making are contextualized for sure.

But doing all of the same avenues we talked about for posting for a board member, you could absolutely do this for fractional IT support or technology support.

Carolyn Woodard: There also are companies and consultants who do this as well. It’s something for if you’re having difficulty hiring for that position. 

Because as we know, someone who has experience to be a CIO can make so much more money in the for-profit than a non-profit actually could ever offer them. But there are consultants who will do that. So you might look into that too, if that’s something that you could afford better than a full-time person with the road skills. 

This next question, I want to also turn back out to the chat, because I’m sure that people in the audience also have some expertise and might be able to make some suggestions.

But the question is, what are the best resources for continuing professional development and training while in a non-profit IT role?

Alethea Hannemann: I love this question. Yeah, I’m really interested to see what people share in the chat. I mean, I’m a huge fan of organizations like NTEN, for example.

I also think, yeah, LinkedIn Learning is great. 

This is an interesting case where more funders are talking about technology education for their grantees. So that something like peer to peer research might be interesting. Where are your peers getting their professional development? Or what do they want professional development in? You might be able to go in with someone on a training for your team, for example.

And, oh, yeah, The Human Stack is also really great. 

But again, I would highlight asking funders for support to do this specifically. We want funders to start to recognize that staying up to date in technology is critical and that nonprofits need resources to do that.

That feels like a really important thing to do.

Carolyn Woodard: And I think with the gaining popularity of trust-based philanthropy, you do have some funders who are really working with grantees to partner with them of where their needs are and what resources they need to be able to address those needs. 

In many situations, if you can be really open with your funder about this need, they may also be able to put you in touch with their network. 

Alethea Hannemann: Yes.

Learning Objectives: Nonprofit Tech Board Leadership 101

Carolyn Woodard: I think we can move to go back over the learning objectives, which I feel like we just hit all of these. So, thank you so much, Alethea. 

And I think that is the QR code, Alethea. Just get in touch with you.

Alethea Hannemann: Yeah, that’s where to start.

Carolyn Woodard: Sounds great. All right, well, I’m going to then let you all know that I’m so excited to invite you back next month for a new cybersecurity webinar on how to do what’s called a cybersecurity tabletop exercise. And I feel like this kind of dovetails right in with what we were just talking about, of how a tech savvy board member helping your executives can help them prioritize something like this. 

If you don’t know what a tabletop exercise is, it’s kind of like a choose your own adventure a little bit. If you have a disaster response plan or cybersecurity, more specific response plan, it’s an exercise to go through that before you’re having an actual emergency. You go through and you have these scenarios and you try to figure out where you have gaps or risks. Maybe you have a single point of contact and if that person’s on vacation, your whole response plan is out the window.

You can do a tabletop exercise annually, quarterly, whatever makes sense for your organization, and it helps just prepare your response to a crisis, which given the way cybersecurity is going nowadays, it might be a when, not if you’re going to be a victim. 

Our CTO, Matt Eshleman, who is also our cybersecurity guru, is going to walk through how you do this type of exercise and how to get your board maybe to support you or your executives to make time for it. If you don’t know what it is, we’re going to go through it. If you’re an old hand at them, you’ve done them before, we would love to have you in this webinar and help share some resources and expertise. So please join us next month. That’s going to be on Wednesday, July 23rd from 3 p.m. Eastern noon Pacific. You can register on our website right now. That’s communityit.com. You can check out all of our previous webinars at communityit.com/webinars. And you can register for next month and then for all of our monthly webinars coming up. 

So, Alethea, I just wanted to thank you again so much for coming and sharing this presentation with our audience. I feel like I learned so much more about boards and the interaction with them and how this can be just a game changer for your nonprofit to have someone that you trust who has this position of some authority and can talk to your executives, kind of in your corner for IT strategy and cybersecurity and all the other things that we’ve been talking about.

I just want to thank you again for coming and spending your time with us. I want to thank everybody who joined us this afternoon. It was an hour of your time. We really appreciate it. We know you have a lot of other things you could be doing. So, it was a gift to spend this time with us and we really want to thank you for it.

Thank you so much, Alethea. Thank you.

Alethea Hannemann: Thank you for having me. It’s really great to learn more about what you do as well. Thanks to all the folks who joined and good luck.

Carolyn Woodard: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Alethea Hannemann: Take care.

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash