Trend analysis
Need and opportunities for tech effectiveness improvement
Nonprofit staff from all mission areas, budget sizes, and locations have used Tech Accelerate assessments to evaluate their technology practices and effectiveness for more than five years. While the tool was initially designed to provide support for individual organizations looking to prioritize their investments and changes, the data is also helpful to all of us, whether we are funders investing in technology and general operations, vendors and service providers, or other organizations looking to understand what’s happening in the sector around us.
This page shares the full dataset from Tech Accelerate assessments. While you won’t find organization names or details, you can view the trends, needs, and successes of nonprofits using technology for their missions.
We analyzed the data from the most recent quarter and found a few important results:
Security continues to need investment
Looking at the ten questions with the overall lowest average scores across all budget and staff sizes, the most common topic is security. This is unsurprising as we see increasing news coverage of data breaches and ransom attacks. Additionally, fears around security are common in NTEN community spaces.
Intent isn’t matching implementation
The only category that isn’t present in the lowest-scored questions is the Leadership category which includes questions about policies and plans. It’s great these are part of the highest-scored questions, but organizations are making policies they aren’t implementing or fully actualizing.
Budgets include tech with purpose
In the decade of NTEN’s research before creating Tech Accelerate, we found a high correlation between organizations that scored highly with tech adoption and those who budgeted for technology separately from other office supplies. Doing so allows better planning, reporting, and evaluation. It’s a positive sign that this trend has broadened and the practice of having defined technology budgets has become one of the highest-scored questions.
Explore public data
Tech Accelerate includes over 90 questions spread between four main categories. Below, you can view the average score from the full dataset for each category, and open each section to view data at the individual question level. Note the Tech Adoption Scale and Risk assessment keys in the boxes for more information.
We have made this data available publicly to support conversations across the sector, with funders, and with media. You are encouraged to use images and data from this page in your grant applications, strategic plans, new reports, and articles; please cite "Tech Accelerate by NTEN" when you do. Learn more about Tech Accelerate or contact us if you have questions.
