Building an IT Department for the Third Sector

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Introduction

I have worked with non-profit "third sector" organizations for more than 25 years on projects involving technology, information and networks. I've built systems to allow community radio stations to catalogue their record collections, databases to allow crafts producers access to supply sources, and innumerable websites to allow organizations to communicate internally and externally. I've done technical support ranging from answering basic help desk questions through to specifying, purchasing and installing web systems.

The threads that run through all of this work are:

  1. Inefficient hardware and software purchase: Organizations buy equipment retail, and don't have the capacity to determine the best hardware and software for their tasks, often resulting in under-buying or over-buying.
  2. Lack of technical support: Organizations are often entirely without access to quality technical support. What to do when the printer breaks, the Internet stops working or you want to build a simple database to track something? Often there's no support at all for tasks like this, leaving staff and volunteers to pay for support, waste resources hunting for a solution, or to take advantage of generous nerds.
  3. Lack of system design expertise: The Internet has resulted in dramatic changes in the way we collect, manage and share information, and brought tasks which used to be expensive and complicated within the realm of small organizations. But this doesn't mean that systems plan themselves: databases, websites, surveys, email lists, and other information management tasks can benefit greatly from knowledgeable systems design expertise. Which is usually completely absent from non-profits, and not possible to purchase in the marketplace because of scale or cost.
  4. Lack of corporate memory: Non-profit IT projects are often funded as short-term projects; when the project funding ends, the project ends, along with the information it gathered and organized; there is a seemingly endless graveyard of abandoned information-gathering projects -- databases, resource libraries, etc. -- in organizations that are no longer maintained and gradually fading out of usefulness.