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6 Tips for Nonprofit IT in December with Carolyn Woodard

• Community IT Innovators • Season 5 • Episode 49

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If you find yourself with a little downtime, what should you work on?

The Gala is back! If your nonprofit is focused on an end of the year fundraising event, you may find yourself and your IT team with a little extra time on your hands this December as the rest of your staff are pulled away from their desks and are calling the help desk less frequently. Carolyn Woodard reviewed our recent webinars and podcasts for advice on what projects you might want to start now to be ready to hit the ground running in the new year.

Our list of 6 tips for nonprofit IT in December:

1. Do you have an IT Roadmap? This is one of the most important planning documents you can have as a nonprofit IT professional and leader. We have resources on our site to help you get started.

2. Think about policies and governance. This doesn’t mean you have to write them yourself before January. But if you have an hour free, you can go through our checklists of the most important policies to have, and review your existing documents, and be ready to meet with your leadership team in the new year with advice and priorities ready to go.

3. What is your AI policy? We created a policy template specific to nonprofits that you can download and adapt to your own organization’s values and needs. As AI tools and issues come at our organizations faster and faster, make sure you are setting the policy rather than just accepting whatever happens.

4. Map your data. The more AI tools come into use within our organizations, the more important permissions are going to become as those tools interact with our data. Not just with databases, but also with files, AI is going to find whatever it can find. Think about permissions, and training your staff, and how valuable your data is to you and to hackers.

5. A fifth project we recommend is tracking your inventory, subscriptions and licenses. Once you have an inventory system in place – and maybe have discovered you can do a better job of tracking onboarding and off boarding, or where you can be saving money with an enterprise license rather than individual licenses – it gets easier from there.

6. If you still have any time during your down time – we recommend you block off some time to take some tutorials. Did you know that learning a new skill and improving your confidence in new tools can actually lower your stress levels as an IT professional? If you haven’t been making time for learning, and you have a little down time this December, why don’t you see if you can get in the habit? 

During the regular hustle and bustle of your IT job you may not feel you have time to get started on any of these important projects, so make time when you have down time to think about what you are missing and where to start. Setting priorities is important too, and being realistic. Maybe one of these projects is plenty! Don’t think you are going to finish any of these projects this December, or that you have to do them entirely on your own. But putting a little prep work in now can help you get them off the ground in the new year, with specific questions for your colleagues and specific goals and strategies. 

And won’t that be a great feeling to greet the new year with! 

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