Determining the impact of information technology (“IT”) on nonprofits’ organizational structure and outcomes
has become a crucial task for nonprofits and grantmakers. With the speed of communications and the pace of business constantly on the increase, nonprofits and grantmakers need to know how technology is affecting them and their grantees—what they need, what they could be doing better, whether their IT systems are helping or hindering them in achieving their missions. But certain knowledge of the impact of technology on an organization or a program is like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: its value is obvious, and it looks easy to find, but the path toward it is hazy and ephemeral.
For instance, Innovation Network recently worked with a large national foundation that created an area on its website with free content for other grantmakers. The content is outstanding—practical guides and suggestionsthat will undoubtedly help to positively shape the thoughts and actions of the grantmaking community. During the website planning effort, the foundation staff wrestled with a common web-design trade-off: the value of capturing information about the people who were visiting the site, versus the value of an easily accessible site without barriers for potential users. In the end, the foundation erred on the side of access, and allowed anyone to download information without requiring registration. After the first year of the site’s operation, 12,000 users had downloaded information from the site, and the foundation asked Innovation Network to help assess the impact of disseminating this information to the field. Traditional, in-person social services generally have wellestablished intake procedures, so that they have some idea who their clients are and what services they received. Given that there was no traditional intake process, no record of services provided, and no way to identify the 12,000 users, we had no way to find out what resources they had used or which web pages they had viewed—much less what difference the information or service had made to them. The rainbow disappeared,leaving no trail to the wealth of information.
Improvements in information technology can have dramatic effects on both the internal and external operations of a non profit organization. Internally, improved IT systems can enhance and strengthen organizational infrastructure and capacity by increasing the efficiency of client intake; service coordination; information sharing between departments, staff, board, and volunteers; financial record keeping and systems; fundraising efforts (particularly donor record keeping); and tracking of an organization’s production and impact.Externally, information technology solutions can fundamentally transform non profit service delivery. One of the most successful and innovative examples of such a transformation is the Technology Initiative Grants program of Legal Services Corporation (“LSC”). This program is an effort to promote full access and high-quality legal representation through the use of information technology: LSC grantees around the country create information kiosks through which underserved people can reach high-quality legal help immediately, inexpensively, and conveniently. This is a profound shift in the way that lower-income people can gain access to legal assistance.It’s easy to feel that internal organizational improvements and the success of new service delivery mechanisms are tied to new networks or faster computers or more muscular databases, but actually measuring the impact of the technology is a challenge.
Measurement of the impact of an IT investment is problematic for a number of reasons:
• There usually isn’t any baseline against which to assess new improvements.
• The process of planning for IT upgrades or installation—discussing how things are done, what the
bottlenecks are within an organization—can, in and of itself, free up sticking points and improve
efficiency, even without the implementation of new IT systems.
• New technology can be so intimidating for staff that an organization actually becomes less efficient in the
first few months following a technology upgrade—so an evaluation done too soon might result in a “false
negative”, reflecting inefficiencies that would be resolved with time.
• Sometimes new technologies aren’t used at all (for example, when adequate training isn’t available or
when organizational culture presents barriers), ossifying an anti-technology mindset and causing longterm
reductions in efficiency and impact.Correctly attributing improvements to proximate causes can be
a challenge: at what point does the technology stop having an impact, and other factors (that may be out
of the hands of the service provider) come into play?
Faced with such challenges, many nonprofits find the evaluation of technology an intimidating task. How can nonprofits effectively evaluate the impact of technology on their work? Innovation Network’s information technology evaluation efforts over the past five years have provided some key lessons for improving the use and measuring the impact of information technology within nonprofit organizations.
