How much are nonprofits spending on IT, and what are they choosing to spend it on?

In our annual Nonprofit IT Staffing and Spending Survey, we asked respondents to describe the components of their organizations’ IT budgets—everything from Overall Expenditures to what proportion they allocate for Staffing, Capital, Consulting Contracts and Other Discretionary Expenditures.

Here’s what we learned:

• The median budget for IT expenditures for all survey respondents was about $56,000.
• The average budget for all IT expenditures was about $431,000.
• On average, organizations devoted 2.7 percent of their budget to IT.
• Small orgs devoted the largest portion of their overall budget, at 7.1 percent, with an average IT budget of just under $17,000.

For many nonprofit organizations, as with the wider public and private business sectors, the last couple of years have been impacted by a general economic downturn. Did we see evidence of this in our annual Nonprofit IT Staffing & Spending survey conducted at the end of 2010? Well, yes and no.

Compared to previous years (this is our 5th year of conducting the survey), certain areas of investment did seem to drop. However, for the most part, investments in IT staffing and other areas stayed remarkably steady, and we even saw some year-over-year growth in some areas.

> Download the Report for Free Here

Gavin Clabaugh, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Suddenly you're a spammer.

One of your web servers has been hijacked and has been sending out hundreds of thousands of messages from some fellow named "Wilson." Wilson is offering a "Free Video on how to earn $251,283" from something called an "affiliate strategy" with, of course, links. The links connect to a malware site that installs a drive-by Trojan. It's been going on for a few days, at least. And now, all of your messaging queues are overflowing with bounces and undeliverables (and nasty notes from former friends and colleagues).

Moreover, your bandwidth is overloaded as the poor abused SMTP server loops through the other eight hundred thousand pending messages, seemingly unable to deliver anything to anyone, including all the bounce-back notifications — which are, in turn, generating more and more notifications. Everything is spinning out of control. It's a server gone rogue.

What happened?

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) conducts an annual Community Survey to find out more about the individuals and organizations in the NTEN community. We want to find out how you, the individuals and organizations who make up this community, use technology in your work. 

We also use this annual survey to gauge the impact of NTEN programs and services on your professional development and your organizations' missions -- and to track trends in the nonprofit technology community over time.

> Download the 2010 NTEN Community Survey Report

Flickr: Lydia Mann(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.) 

ForumOne's Chris Wolz wrote a good piece about crowdsourcing for foundations and nonprofits. He acknolwedges the challenges for our sector, but provides some good advice and examples.

Flickr: CGCWhen it comes to the Nonprofit Technology Conference and NTEN membership, our organizational calendars always seem to move so much faster than the calendar on my wall. You'd think we were already in 2011 with all the 11NTC activity going on -- and now that October is here, we're activating memberships for the 2011 calendar year.

We don't expect everyone else to time warp with us, of course, but we do want to say thank you to those who renew their memberships for 2011 this month:

> Renew your membership this month and get a free NTEN Webinar Multi-Pass!

(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)

Even on vacation Beth Kanter manages to be helping nonprofits become more tech-savvy! How does she do it, you ask? Why, by inviting guests to blog! Some of us here at NTEN are pretty interested in geo-tagging and geo-locating tools and their potential for nonprofit application, so we are thankful for this guest post on Beth's Blog about 10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World.

Flickr: cambodia4kidsorg(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharingtheir nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)

HaitiAidMap from InterAction(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharingtheir nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)  

(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.)