Nonprofit IT Management Capacity Growing with Carolyn Woodard

Johan Hammerstrom hosts the podcast this week, interviewing Carolyn Woodard on her nonprofit IT management capacity growing pet project.

100% of nonprofits struggle with IT management capacity – whether it’s optimizing limited budgets, selecting the right tools, or building sustainable tech staffing models. Or just knowing where to turn for trustworthy, professional advice. We need structured connection to share best practices and elevate what works in IT management at nonprofits. We hope this community of practice will gather best practices and that it will snowball, attracting more participants with more experiences and ideas to share.

By publicizing proven approaches, we can develop the scalable best practices the broader nonprofit sector needs. By sharing widely within the philanthropy sector, we can reach more nonprofits and stakeholders with the opportunity to manage IT effectively.

• Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) is a membership organization of foundations, funders, and vendors, that shares knowledge and experiences with technology in philanthropy.
• Carolyn Woodard has been working in collaboration with Jean Westrick and Gozi Egbuonu at TAG to create a community of practice around better defining the challenges around IT support for nonprofits and grantees, and to gather and better disseminate best practices. 
• When nonprofits have functioning and strategic IT they are 4 times more likely to be effective at achieving their missions. How, as a community, can the stakeholders come together in partnership to grow IT management capacity, IT funding, and IT strategic planning as a leadership component of any effective nonprofit? 
• Together, TAG and Community IT curated a series of three events around this topic: a panel discussion with experts from providers, foundations, and TAG laying the groundwork of the issue; a mini-convening meet-up of interested stakeholders at the TAG Conference in 2025; and the release of a white paper in early 2026 outlining the nonprofit IT management landscape, existing resources, and areas for building out best practices. 
• To join this community of practice and stay updated on events and publications, get in touch with Carolyn, through our contact us page or on Linkedin.

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• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn

Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Johan Hammerstrom: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Podcast. I am the CEO of Community IT, Johan Hammerstrom, and I will be a guest host today. But for those of you who are familiar with our regular host, Carolyn, and miss her voice, fear not, she is our guest today. You’re going to still get to hear from her. And Carolyn, welcome to your own podcast. Great to have you here as a guest today.

Carolyn Woodard: Thanks, Johan. My name is Carolyn Woodard, and I am the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I usually host this podcast. But today we wanted to talk about something a little different.

Johan Hammerstrom: You’ve been really involved with TAG and a special project that they’re working on at TAG. I was wondering maybe if we could just start by talking a little bit about who TAG is, what the acronym stands for, the work that they’re doing. Let’s start there. Tell us a little bit more about TAG.

Carolyn Woodard: Okay. Well, it’s the Technology Association of Grantmakers, and they are a member-driven organization that convenes a conference annually. It started out several years ago with the CIOs of several foundations informally getting together to talk about their IT needs, what they were seeing, what they were doing, how they were doing cybersecurity, how they were handling CRMs and grantmaking tools and technology. And so, just sharing best practices amongst each other. 

And then it became, it kind of expanded more organizations were like, hey, we need to talk about our IT too. And so, it’s turned into this membership organization, and they have a website you can join there. They have webinars, other assets, they have local groups, regional groups that get together and talk about what they’re doing locally. And then, yeah, they have a conference every year. Well, it skipped a couple of years in the pandemic. They kind of bounced around a little bit, but it’s in a different location every year. And they’ve gone back to an annual schedule. 

And at that conference, it’s really this amazing coming together of all kinds of foundations, foundation staff, leaders, consultants, vendors, and all talking about kind of what’s the state, what’s going on with technology in philanthropy. 

It’s a really wonderful group of people that I’ve been lucky to get involved with. They have a very, very active slack channel, if you join. People are always sharing resources and networking and trying to find best practices and do what they can around making their IT in philanthropy better.

Johan Hammerstrom: Is their focus primarily on their own approach to IT as foundations and grant makers, or are they also thinking about the IT of the organizations that they’re supporting through funding and grants?

Carolyn Woodard: That is a great question. I think it really started out with what IT foundations need to do the work that they do and how could they do that better. But of course, the grantees and the IT for the nonprofit sector is very adjacent, it’s not very far away. 

I’ve had conversations with the CIO of a large foundation. When I asked him, how does your foundation provide tech support to the grantees? He’s say, well, they call me. I am the tech support. It’s difficult because the technology, the IT, that is needed at a nonprofit, particularly a small nonprofit, but even a large nonprofit is different, the approach is different from the IT that a large foundation will have. He said he was not always the best helper. People could bounce ideas off of him, but he didn’t always know what IT they needed.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, they’re very different environments, foundations and the nonprofit organizations that they support. I could imagine how they use IT is also different. 

But it’s great that they’re extending their interests in IT capacity building to the organizations that they support. And is that what led to the project that you’re working on?

Carolyn Woodard: TAG has a new Executive Director, Jean Westrick. She joined them two years ago, three years ago. And this is one of her passions as well, is the IT support for the grantees and the nonprofit sector. She’s been instrumental in building out several different frameworks. She worked with Project Evident to build an AI framework for philanthropy, so how to think about how to do it. 

And she’s very interested in thinking out a similar type of a framework for how to support grantees’ IT management needs and capacity.

Johan Hammerstrom: And how did you get involved with this project?

Carolyn Woodard: Oh well, anyone who’s talked to me over the last 10 years, as you know very well, this is also kind of a pet passion of mine as well. I have a degree in nonprofit management from Johns Hopkins University, and I worked at a small nonprofit, and then a large international nonprofit, where I was the IT director. And then, you know, eventually through a winding path, I ended up doing outreach and marketing for Community IT. 

And we work with hundreds, we’ve worked with thousands of nonprofit organizations over the almost 25 years that we’ve been operating. And you just see, you see a lot. 

You see that IT is a point of stress for nonprofits, I would say, 100%. 100% of nonprofits have stress around IT. I think maybe the only more stressful thing might be fundraising, like their funding, where the funding is coming from. But I would say, IT is a very strong second, maybe equal source of stress. 

To me, it’s been kind of an ongoing question of why does that persist? In the nonprofit sector, when you have a challenge, you have an issue, you have a problem, it’s often, I mean, everyone just jumps in, to figure out, how can we solve this? What can we do? What do we do differently? How can we think about this? What’s the learning? What are the best practices? How do we share what we know? How do we make it better? 

And this IT problem is this very persistent nut that it’s really, really hard to crack. And so, we’ve seen it a lot from our work supporting nonprofits of why is it so difficult to find the right IT support model? Why is it difficult to get funding for it, support for, you know, your operations, operational support for functioning IT? And why does that persist? 

To me, it feels like a kind of a gaping opportunity, hole that no one is jumping into, but there’s this huge opportunity there to really support this sector in being effective. 

That’s something I’ve been interested in for a while. So, when Jean came in at TAG, and was also very interested in this, I kept talking about it, they kept talking about it. And last spring, we decided to do this joint project together, to do a series of events, to, I guess, talk about it some more.

Johan Hammerstrom: Let’s say raise awareness. Raise awareness.

Carolyn Woodard: We are the nonprofit philanthropy sector, so we got to talk about it a lot.

But that’s, you know, one of the assets that we bring to it is that we’re very thoughtful about where the challenges are and where the assets are. And so, that was something I really appreciated about the collaboration with TAG is that they’re very asset-framing focused. 

And they also know a lot about what the foundations that are their members are doing. And so, they could bring that institutional knowledge as well to this conversation that we could have about what the best practices are and what they could be, and how to share and disseminate that information.

Johan Hammerstrom: Are there any best practices right now, or are those in development? Is that kind of the first step of the process to start thinking about best practices around technology capacity building?

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I think that that is, that’s the first thing that everyone wants. Well, how do we solve this? Right? 

And that’s the good thing about the nonprofit sector is that usually there are people saying, let’s take a step back and think about what are the underlying problems, the environment, the different players, all the stakeholders. There are probably people out there who have a lot of knowledge about this. But you never want to jump in and assume that nobody has done anything yet, you know? 

So, that has been really wonderful to work with them on. And we started, well, we decided that we would have the series of events to kind of define the challenges, the problems, the assets, and go from there to try to categorize and catalog the best practices that are happening now. But also, build a community around exploring those best practices and trying to bring other people, other stakeholders, other practitioners into that conversation so that we draw on all of the expertise, we try to snowball it, right?

We start to get it rolling, and then as people hear about it, hopefully they’re going to jump in and join us and say, oh, I have this experience over here, or I tried this model over here, and so we’ll build more assets as we go. 

But to step back, as they always say, step back, we decided to start out with a panel discussion that we had last summer around the issue kind of defining what was going on with IT and nonprofits. And, Johan, you were part of that.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, I was going to say that sounds very familiar.

Carolyn Woodard: I think one of the things going forward that we realized with that panel and that we really want to emphasize and grow, is having the practitioners from different spheres of this challenge come together to talk about it. So, in that panel, we had you, the CEO of Community IT, talking about our institutional knowledge, providing IT support services to nonprofits and what we’ve seen over 25 years. 

We had Jean Westrick talking about the TAG experience and also her own experience and why this project is so interesting to her and she’s so passionate about trying to get more nonprofits, more of the IT support they need to be functional and effective, etc. 

And then we had Hannah Kahn who joined us, who’s worked at several different large foundations. She’s just a thought leader in philanthropy and technology right now. She was the co-chair of the TAG conference that they had in November. So, I got to talk with her a little bit about this project there. Surprise, surprise, I was talking about my thing. But she could bring in her experience at foundations and different foundations that are doing some really remarkable things. 

So, your original question was about best practices and what’s happening now. And she was able to point to the Bloomberg Philanthropy Tech Accelerator that they have, which is one of the only foundations that is doing something specific around technology support. It’s only for arts organizations and only of a certain size, but it’s a really fascinating program and project. It’s fairly new. They have a website about it that we can share in the show notes. 

And then Kauffman Foundation as well. The Kauffman Foundation also is very forward thinking in terms of the operational support, the trust-based philanthropy and tying IT technology support into strategic planning and long-term operational support. They don’t have a specific tech program like Bloomberg does, but they’re very intentional about building in IT support into all of their programming work that they fund. So that’s an interesting model as well. So there’s two.

Johan Hammerstrom: That’s fantastic.

Carolyn Woodard: I’m sure there are others out there. That’s one of the ideas about building this community, is that as other people hear about it and join us, they bring other models into it.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. That’s great to hear that there are examples of this, to learn from and to build on. Because you’re right, it is something that has been front of mind for the entire nonprofit sector for at least a decade or more. I think often it gets articulated as, are there grants for technology? Is there funding for technology? But I think this broader, more expansive way of thinking about the issue is going to yield better long-term results for nonprofit organizations, for grant recipients. 

It’s great to see the and hear about the very intentional way that TAG is pursuing this project. And I agree, Jean’s been a fantastic leader over at TAG, and she’s extremely knowledgeable and very passionate about this topic. It’s just really exciting to see what’s happening over there.

Carolyn Woodard: For sure, for sure.

Johan Hammerstrom: So what’s next? I know you all just had the TAG Conference in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, and just curious what the big takeaways from that event were, and what’s on tap for 2026.

Carolyn Woodard: So our second event of our series was we had a small convening at the conference, a little pop-up meetup that we had after lunch, one of the days, and we had about 15 people come, and so we just talked amongst ourselves of other models, what our interest was, where we were coming from. It was a fantastic group of people, so we are all in touch with each other now through, again, the TAG Slack channels and email as well. 

The next step is that I am writing a white paper that’s pulling together some of the things we talked about at that initial panel, those different pieces of the stakeholders, the practitioners, the funders, the academics. Of course, the nonprofits are the biggest stakeholder of all and need to be involved. Donors, tech savvy board members, all of these different pieces of the puzzle. 

In this white paper, I’m trying to draw together what we talked about in that panel, defining the challenges and the assets, what our experience has been, what my experience has been, and then pulling that together into the beginnings of a framework, to start pushing out what our best practices, what best practices could be. 

It will be both a resources list of what’s happening now, in addition to the Bloomberg and Kauffman, and there’s some other models out there, and then also kind of questions going forward. 

It’s very new, this conversation at least is new. The problem feels very old. But the conversation involving these stakeholders is fairly new. So, in terms of having a white paper that comes out and says, well, here’s the problem, here’s what you do. We’re not there yet, like by a long shot. 

But we want to start asking those questions of where do we go next? How can we better disseminate some of these funding and support practices so that other foundations can pick up on them, other nonprofits can learn from them. We can try them in other areas with maybe different types of foundations or different types of nonprofits. So the paper and the community are just really looking at the different models that exist. 

As you know, we have the MSP, we are an MSP. So this model of outsourced IT is really good for a certain size of nonprofits. And we can talk a lot about that, like we have the experience and institutional knowledge. So that will definitely be part of the white paper. 

But the big question, I think, for everyone who is at this convening, this little meetup was the smaller nonprofits. And potentially also the non-tech savvy nonprofits, if we can term it that. And so there aren’t a lot of great models for tech support at that level. 

So we are trying to pull together what the best practices are, and help funders and nonprofits experiment, and try to get better IT support to the nonprofits. 

And not surprisingly, a big part of the white paper, and the reason we named it the IT Management Capacity Growing Project, is that, that seems to be part of the consensus, is that you can have all the tech you want. You can have all of the funding for tech that you want. Often, the funding for tech is to purchase iPads for the kids in your program, or to purchase the laptops for your staff. 

But if you don’t have the management and the strategic planning around that IT, it’s not very sustainable. And so, trying to grow that management capacity in partnership with people who know how to do trainings and retreats and classes and strategic planning, all of those good pieces, I think is what the next steps will be in trying to define some of those practices and grow the community so that we can share them more widely.

Johan Hammerstrom: That’s great. It’s a very exciting vision and it’s an exciting project. I know, here at Community IT, we’re really proud to be a part of it and it really speaks to something that is fundamental for us and our purpose as a business in helping nonprofits use technology effectively. We do what we can. We believe we have a particular role to play in that process, but clearly funders and grant makers have a role to play as well. It’s just really exciting to see that that’s coming together. And it’s an honor to be a part of it. 

And just want to thank you, Carolyn, for all the work that you’re doing on this project. I want to thank you for your vision and energy around this. And I’m really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the new year.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, me too. I think that’s a good way to wrap it up, is that a lot of the marketing activities that I do, the webinars, the free webinars every month, that anyone can join and learn about some tech topic. And often we have management topics as well. And we have, you know, guest experts. We have experts from our own staff talking about fundamental concepts and how to incorporate those into the IT management that you’re doing at your nonprofit. 

We have so many free resources. We have downloadable e-books about how to know if an MSP model is the right one for you. What kind of IT you need at different stages of a nonprofit life, like if you’re a startup, if you’re middle-aged, if you’re a mature nonprofit, you need different types of IT. Even technical topics like, should you be using Google Workspace if you’re a startup nonprofit? And how does that work? How do you think about it as a manager, as an IT leader, as a leader at your nonprofit, making those decisions, Microsoft, Google, other tools that are out there? 

And we try to provide all of that for free, as you said, to make sure that those resources and knowledge are flowing through our sector because we can all be better, and we can all achieve our missions better if the technology functions better. Going back to what we were talking about, technology is a source of stress for nonprofits. The more we can get that knowledge out into the community, the better the community is.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, that’s a great note to end on. Thank you for being our guest today here on the Community IT podcast, and thanks to all our listeners for joining us today, and we encourage you to take advantage of all the resources that we make available here at Community IT.

Carolyn Woodard: Thank you, Johan.

Johan Hammerstrom: Thanks a lot.