New Study Finds Differences Between Reality and Perception of Nonprofit IT Staffing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 29, 2008

CONTACT: Holly Ross 415.397.9000 or holly@nten.org

A new study released this week finds a gap between nonprofits’ perceptions of being understaffed in IT and the reality of actual staffing levels. Organizations that feel they are in trouble when it comes to technology are overwhelmingly more likely to report being understaffed than organizations that feel ahead of the technology curve. Yet the struggling organizations reported slightly higher staffing levels. The most striking difference was not number of staff, but the length their employment, and the number of IT staff that had been at their jobs less than one year in particular.

The report is freely available at http://nten.org/research/it_staffing.

The study was released by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) and the NonProfit Times. The report includes information on IT staffing, recruiting and outsourcing gathered from over 1,000 organizations. This is the second in an ongoing annual initiative to assess the state of nonprofit technology staffing. 

"It is so important that nonprofits are able leverage technology to improve their efficiency and effectiveness", says Holly Ross, the Executive Director of NTEN. "Most nonprofit leaders don't have technology training, and don't know what kind or how many IT staff they should be hiring for. Our staffing survey offers nonprofit professionals insight into some of the realities of IT at nonprofits and helps put their decisions about technology staffing into context."

Additional findings of the Nonprofit IT Staffing Survey include:

  • On average, nonprofits employ one IT staff member for every 26 employees.
  • IT staff spend their time in much the same way, regardless of organization size or level of technology adoption. For the second year, the largest percentage of staff time, roughly 40%, is spent on desktop and application support.
  • The average tenure for IT staff at nonprofits is 4.3 years. Tenures were longer for larger organizations and organizations that felt they had greater technology adoption.
  • For the second year small nonprofits self identify lower on the technology adoption spectrum than larger organizations. Almost 50% of small organizations feel behind the curve.
Additional information on IT budgets, salaries and management at nonprofits will be published in a second report in the near future.