Human-Centered Nonprofit Technology Strategy: A Guide

In a better world than this one, nonprofits would have all the time and resources they need to strategize and plan and research, and someone would bring them the finest coffees and cakes while they were doing it.

In the world we live in, however, many nonprofit technology decisions happen in the moment, when a staff member or department leader has a problem, and reaches for the nearest thing that can help them solve it. That ingenuity is a feature, not a flaw—it’s nonprofit grit and determination at work. But it tends to leave a nonprofit with systems that don’t talk to each other, information that lives in exactly one person’s head, and reporting that requires chasing so many different spreadsheets that it crashes your browser.

A holistic nonprofit technology strategy can help you chart a sustainable path forward, build bridges between islands of data, create harmony between marketing and development, and relieve pressure on staff….But how, and with what time?

This guide is meant for internal nonprofit tech leaders. Maybe you’ve chosen that role, or maybe you just answered one too many of your coworker’s Salesforce questions and suddenly found yourself in charge. Either way, the approach below will help you undertake a sustainable, human-centered approach to technology strategy, build buy-in from internal teams, and develop actionable next steps.

We’ll cover:

• Mapping Your Nonprofit’s Technical Infrastructure
• Nonprofit Technology Strategies for Change
• Technology Strategy on a Nonprofit Budget
• AI Tools and Nonprofit Technology Strategy
• Prioritizing Ongoing Training and Support
• Nonprofit Technology Strategy as an Ongoing Practice
• Nonprofit Technology Strategy FAQs

Mapping Your Nonprofit’s Technical Infrastructure

Begin with a high-level inventory of your platforms, data, and processes. That sounds like a lot to pull together, but at this stage you only need high-level notes (think bullets in a list, not chapters in a book).

Here are some examples of the types of technology you’re likely to have and should include in your inventory:

• Constituent relationship management (CRM) systems hold contact information and (hopefully) more about your donors, supporters, and volunteers. Examples include Salesforce, Bloomerang, CiviCRM, Neon, and more.
• Email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Emma allow you to create and send mass emails, track how they perform, and manage your audiences. Specialized marketing automation platforms like Hubspot add a layer of marketing features over mass emails that offer more automation and CRM-adjacent features.
• Advocacy platforms like Action Network, ActionKit, or EveryAction provide tools for encouraging advocacy, messaging elected officials, signing petitions, and sending (and evaluating) email campaigns.
• Event management software like Eventbrite and Ticket Tailor ets you create events, register attendees, charge fees, and manage event communications.
• Accounting software is how you maintain your books, track revenue and expenses, file taxes, and prepare for audits. Popular platforms include QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage Intacct.
• AI assistants and agents—such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude—help individuals with their day-to-day tasks and support administrative processes.
• Middleware and integrations glue disparate platforms together. You might integrate different systems using Zapier, n8n, or various native integrations.
• Your website provides a public face for your organization on the web, and a content management system (CMS) like WordPress powers your website and gives you administrative tools to update your content andcollect form data.
• Collaboration tools like Slack, Asana, Jira, and plain old email are often central to staff workflows.
• Spreadsheets and documents are frequently key players in staff-created processes, and a well-tuned spreadsheet can sometimes be a long-term piece of your infrastructure, in the right situations.

Understanding your people, data, and processes

To go along with your list of technology, note each department at your nonprofit (marketing, development, communications, events, volunteers, etc.), whether they’re half a person or a team of fifteen. Often, you’ll be able to do this off the top of your head.

Next, identify who uses which platform, and what they do with it. Keep the list brief and high-level—see if it can fit on page or two. Note what data they work with, and where it’s stored. If data moves between platforms, or more than one team at your organization works with the same information (maybe in the same place, maybe not), note that as well.

If you’re visually inclined, try making a map or flow chart to show how everything fits together. You may find that it’s more complex than you expected, and a map can help you show other stakeholders how data moves through your organization—or doesn’t.

Nonprofit Technology Strategies for Change

Identify your goals and aspirations

Now that you have a birds-eye view of your infrastructure, it’s time to refine your sense of your immediate needs and your hopes for the future. Identify a key stakeholder (or two) who can speak for each department or team, and invite them to dump their bucket, and unload everything that’s frustrating or challenging about their current technology.

During this conversation, you should:

• Invite them to call out the things that make their job hard, or slow, or frustrating, or hard to train.
• Ask them to reflect on the places where your technology is negatively impacting your mission, by making your service worse or less consistent or creating risk.
• It’s also important to encourage them to imagine what they wish they could do if their technology were better, so you don’t miss out on aspirations that are feasible but unsupported by their current tools.
• Finally, be sure to ask about the things they like about how things work currently, and any key features they want to keep.

Once you’ve got a clear picture of their hopes, dreams, and frustrations, it’s often helpful to ask them what one change (or top few changes) would make the biggest difference for them. You won’t always be able to start there, but understanding people’s very top priority can help you work on the most important things first.

You shouldn’t get into field-by-field detail here, unless it’s necessary to understand the problems. Also, keep your ear out for problems that are actually organizational capacity constraints dressed up as technology problems. Better technology can make it easier to send an email, but it won’t magically give anyone time in their day to research and write a weekly newsletter.

Everyone should ideate freely, and talk about what they would do with unlimited time and resources, and then everyone should give themselves the grace of being realistic about their other responsibilities.

Develop actionable next steps

By now you’ve got a clear picture of how things are currently, and you understand your team’s needs and goals. Broad patterns of improvements are sometimes obvious (for example, sometimes literally nothing is integrated and every movement of data is entirely manual), but you don’t have to solve every problem all at once, especially because every individual problem may call for its own research and exploration, and that can get overwhelming fast. Moreover, planning ages quickly, so if you spend too long in meetings the ground can shift under your feet.

The best place to begin your strategic improvements is usually a set of low-lift, high-impact changes that improve the pieces of your infrastructure that are already in place. Don’t jump to a huge platform shift, unless you’re locked into a dying all-in-one platform or something similar, in which case you may be looking for more of a technology project rescue.

More commonly, a better next step is narrower than that: data cleanup and process improvements, so that you can start to trust your reports. Perhaps a high value integration, to ease some error-prone double entry. You’re looking for a change that will bring immediate relief for a pain point, or open up a new opportunity. Making improvements in one area often relieves pressure on the whole system, builds trust that change is possible, and frees up some time to potentially work on the next change in line.

Once you’ve identified the first things you’ll change or improve, it’s finally time to zoom in to the field level, to make sure every piece of data has a home and every key number you need for a grant report is calculable. It’s important to be meticulous, and work closely with the people who will be impacted by the change, but by narrowing the focus of the change you make that manageable.

Adapt as you go, and work up to the big changes

One key advantage of working in phases is that you’ll learn from every change, which will inform your next choice of updates. When you can, try to spread the improvements around, so that no team is left out. The more people see that technology can get better, the less likely they will be to spin up another one-off spreadsheet.

Also, as you make small changes, it often becomes clear whether and where bigger changes are needed. If you’ve got one platform that doesn’t play well with others, and you’re building data pathways around it, and the people using it don’t like it, and it’s got important gaps in how it supports your mission, then it should probably be replaced, even if that’s a big job. The advantage of working up to that, rather than starting there, is that everyone should have a clearer vision of what that change would mean, and what kinds of benefits it would bring. Also, with your data and other surrounding pieces in better shape, the platform transition is more likely to be successful.

Keep in mind: successful technology change is human-centered

Throughout the work of strategy and change, stay in touch with your team. Be sure you understand their needs (which will evolve over time), and make sure that people whose work is impacted by a change are bought in from the start. A technical transition isn’t complete until everyone has been specifically trained in every process or workflow that’s been impacted by the change.

As you go, remember that every system or process at your organization came about for a reason. Those cumbersome manual workflows happened because someone was solving a real problem. Think of your existing technical infrastructure as your team’s first draft; it contains embedded knowledge, organizational priorities, and expertise. Those factors can shift over time, but staying human-centered means taking the shared knowledge in your existing systems seriously, and keeping the good parts while providing more support and new techniques to work around the drawbacks.

Technology Strategy on a Nonprofit Budget

To make the most of a tight budget, keep your planning work high-level and actionable. Then, when it comes time to make a detailed plan for a specific change, consider the full range of costs you may encounter:

• Direct hardware, software, and service costs, whether license fees, subscription costs, or equipment.
• Staff time, both to implement the change and for any new ongoing responsibilities.
• Training and support costs, both during development and once the change is complete.
• Ongoing maintenance costs, for security updates (if needed), troubleshooting (integrations are notoriously finicky), moderation costs for user-generated content, spam and bot mitigation for public forms, and more.
• Staff and community friction is easy to overlook, but if you’re asking your staff or community to do something new (e.g., log in where they didn’t have to before, etc.), there’s a cost to that change, and you need to be sure the benefits are worth it.

As you translate specific goals and specific pain points into narrowly-scoped plans that have a clearer cost, you can make better-informed cost-benefit decisions, to give your nonprofit enough information to decide whether a given change is worth it.

If there are specific, dollar-associated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are calculable, include those in your thinking. For example, if we add a “cover the donation fees” checkbox to our donation form, and if half of our donors choose to check it, 3% of half of our individual donations is $X, so we expect that change to pay for itself in Y months. Don’t expect that for everything, though; many important changes have benefits that are more diffuse.

Once a change is complete, take a moment to review how it went, and collect feedback and/or data to inform additional changes. As you go, you’ll refine your sense of costs and benefits, which will give you the context to weigh larger investments down the road.

Don’t forget data security

Technical change of any kind can bring new data security risks (or improvements!). Be sure to consider the security impacts of any changes you make, especially when it comes to data about your clients or constituents. This is a big topic; read our Cybersecurity for Nonprofits article for an overview.

AI Tools and Nonprofit Technology Strategy

What about generative AI? How should that fit into your overall technology strategy?

When you’re looking at the big picture, you can treat generative AI like any other solution or tool (albeit a precocious one). You should always start with your human understanding of your organization, your data, and your team’s needs, but as you begin to consider what to change, and research possible platforms and solutions, LLMs can provide a valuable research assistant and sounding board.

In some cases, generative AI tools may even be part of the solution space you’re considering (for example, setting up a Claude Project or a Gemini Gem to transform or process your data). Meanwhile, many platforms are racing to integrate AI features (with varying degrees of success), so AI may find its way into your solution whether you seek it out or not.

Note that AI tools aren’t a goal in and of themselves. Don’t ask yourself “can I use AI for this?” but instead ask, “what are the best tools for the goals I’ve identified?” At the same time, you’ll need to keep in mind security and privacy, as well as the unique social and environmental costs of AI. Your organization should have an AI policy that covers acceptable use and offers guidelines for weighing all of those factors against the tools’ potential benefits to your mission—but that’s a topic for another article!

Prioritizing Ongoing Training and Support

Training should be part of every change you make, but it shouldn’t stop at launch. If people are using their new tools, they’re going to have questions. Training and support will keep folks engaged with the tools and keep their piece of the data ecosystem in balance, rather than fragmenting all over again because no one can figure out how to get the report they need.

Also, processes will continue to evolve, so be sure to build living documentation, so knowledge doesn’t become siloed again as teams do new things. The last thing you want is to be the only person who knows how everything works, so be sure to write it down, refer to your documents during staff onboarding and vacation coverage, and encourage everyone to check in and keep procedures up-to-date.

Nonprofit Technology Strategy as an Ongoing Practice

You can see that the process we outline here is not one-and-done. Rather, in our experience the best strategy processes are iterative and ongoing. There’s an initial framing exercise to map the current state of your systems, connect with key teams and stakeholders, and identify goals, but from there the work needs to proceed in phases to build trust, make change, and adapt with the lessons you learn along the way.

If you’re working with a consultant who specializes in noprofit strategy, or if you’ve spent a lot of time with nonprofit technology yourself, you can choose to develop a multiple-phase plan at the start, including planning for big changes right out of the gates. After all, it’s often helpful to see the big picture when you’re sequencing your individual changes. But the purpose of this guide has been to outline a strategy process that doesn’t rely on mapping everything all at once, and instead builds on your expertise in the workings of your own nonprofit. By working in stages, your first-hand knowledge and the lessons you learn from each change will give you the perspective you need to make lasting and sustainable change.

Get Started With Your Organization’s Strategy

We hope this guide provides a useful jumping-off point for everyone, and if you’re looking for a partner, get in touch! Nonprofit technology strategy is one of those areas where experienced support can reduce guesswork, shortcut research, fill in gaps, and save you some trial and error.