Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics
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Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics
Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits with Johan Hammerstrom pt 1
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In the first part of this two-part conversation, Carolyn Woodard and Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT, take on a question behind a lot of nonprofit IT frustration: who at your organization actually owns IT? Not who fixes it, but who plans, budgets, and makes the case for it.
Drawn from a Community IT webinar, this episode looks at what well-managed IT requires and why building management capacity does more for nonprofit resilience than buying more tools, devices, and licenses.
Johan walks through the hallmarks of well-managed IT, tied together by one theme: proactive rather than reactive. Carolyn then draws on her own experience as IT Director at an international NGO with close to 100 staff, where she managed an MSP that handled the technology but could not play a strategic role, and translated between an executive team that wanted new systems but needed to understand the budget and staffing needed to support them.
Her takeaway: owning IT is a management function, and it does not require a technology background.
This episode covers:
- The characteristics of well-managed IT: defined service levels, predictive management and monitoring, IT driven by organizational strategy and policy, automation where appropriate, and meeting business needs.
- Why defined service levels are about clarity, not complexity. What matters is that expectations are written down and shared, whether your organization is small or large.
- Why AI is not a shortcut around IT management. Systems that are easy to build still need a long-term plan for managing and maintaining them. If you are not managing IT well now, you will struggle to manage AI.
- What owning IT looks like in practice: strategic oversight and governance, setting and enforcing policies, managing vendors, and the decision-making authority that middle managers often lack.
- Why a vendor handling day-to-day support cannot replace an internal owner who understands your budget, strategy, and mission.
Resources Mentioned:
- Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) - https://www.tagtech.org/
- Nonprofit IT Management Reddit Community - https://www.reddit.com/r/nonprofitITmanagement
Listen for part two in your podcast feed.
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Start a conversation :)
- 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
- on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
- on the Community IT website
Thanks for listening.
Thank you for joining Community IT for this podcast, part one. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a rating to help others find this leadership resource for nonprofits. Listen for part two in your podcast feed.
Carolyn WoodardWelcome to the Community IT Innovators webinar on growing IT management capacity at nonprofits with Johan Hammerstrom, the CEO of Community IT.
Carolyn WoodardThis is a topic that's a real passion of mine. I wrote a white paper about it, which is going to be published by TAG, the Technology Association of Grant makers, next year. Johan has over 25 years of experience with nonprofits and their IT. And I'm really looking forward to this presentation and conversation about how IT leaders can leverage IT management capacity to accomplish their missions.
Carolyn WoodardMy name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the outreach director for Community IT, and I'm the moderator today. And I'm very happy to hear from our expert, Johan.
Carolyn WoodardBut first I want to go over our learning objectives. Today we're going to focus on these themes. So what does it mean for someone to own IT? And who can that be at your nonprofit? What does well-managed IT require? And how can you check where your organization stands? Why does building IT management capacity matter more for nonprofit resilience than buying more tools, devices, and licenses? And what can nonprofit leaders and funders do next to start closing this gap?
Carolyn WoodardAnd now I'd like to let Johan introduce himself.
Johan HammerstromThank you so much, Carolyn. Thanks to everyone who's joining us today for the webinar. And if you happen to be watching the recording after the fact, we're glad that you're joining us that way as well. As Carolyn said, my name is Johan Hammerstrom. I'm the CEO at Community IT. I've been working here for over 25 years. And I've been working with a lot of nonprofit organizations in that time.
Johan HammerstromAnd I think this session, this webinar really represents our longstanding belief that for IT to really be effective at nonprofit organizations, it has to be managed well. And however much expertise I have in this topic, Carolyn brings an equal or greater amount of expertise, having managed IT at more than one nonprofit organization during her career. So we're very excited to welcome her. We're going to be sort of co-hosts and co-guests today, and really looking forward to hearing her insights as well into this theme.
Carolyn WoodardThank you, Johan. Before we begin, if you're not familiar with Community IT, I want to share a little bit more about us. We're a 100% employee-owned managed services provider. We provide outsourced IT support and we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations. Our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of technology. We're big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your nonprofit. We serve nonprofits across the United States. We've been doing this for 25 years.
Carolyn WoodardWe are technology experts and are consistently given an MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor we received again in 2026. And we believe we're the only MSP on the list serving nonprofits exclusively. So
Carolyn WoodardI want to remind everyone that for these presentations, Community IT is vendor agnostic. So we only make recommendations to our clients and only based on their specific business needs. We try never to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or a benefit from that. We don't get benefits from that.
Carolyn WoodardBut we do consider ourselves a best of breed IT provider. So it's our job to know the landscape, the tools that are available, reputable, and widely used. And we make our recommendations on the basis of that for our clients based on their business needs, priorities, and budget.
Carolyn WoodardAnd a little bit more about us. As I said, our mission is to create value for the nonprofit sector through well-managed IT. We also identify four key values as employee owners that define our company: trust, knowledge, service, and balance. We seek always to treat people with respect and fairness, to empower our staff, clients, and the sector to understand and use technology effectively, to be helpful with our talents, and we recognize that the health of our communities is vital to our well-being and that work is only a part of our lives. All right.
Carolyn WoodardSo now I'm going to start our first poll. And Johan, can you see that?
Johan HammerstromYes, I can. I know, I know. This is great. That's so good to see.
Carolyn WoodardUh so what is the answer?
Johan HammerstromOh, oh, I'm uh it's 100% nonprofits.
Carolyn WoodardUh-huh. So welcome.
Johan HammerstromWelcome, everyone. Welcome.
Carolyn WoodardI just don't think we've ever had 100% before.
Johan HammerstromNo, I don't think so either. I don't think so either.
Carolyn WoodardAll right. I'm going to move on to our second question, uh, second poll of the day, which is does someone own IT at your organization? So not just someone who fixes it, but plans, budgets, and makes the case for it. So it's thinking about this strategically. Does someone own IT at your organization? And I'll say at the outside, I usually say this in our polls, but there's no shame involved here. So if you do not have someone at your organization who owns IT, that is, you know, go ahead and tell us. It's not this part of the
Carolyn WoodardThat's mostly why we're here today is to talk about this function and how you know we can make a case for this function is really important to a nonprofit being able to utilize the IT to achieve your mission. Johan, can you see that?
Johan HammerstromYeah, it's um just under half uh say that yes, someone does own IT at the organization. About a third um say it's me, but I'm not sure I count. And then there's a handful of uh respondents for no or not sure. So the slight, but mostly yes, uh just under 50%, and then a mix of no, not sure, and it's me, and I'm not sure I count.
Carolyn WoodardYeah, no, that's amazing. So thank you again, everyone who um contributed to that. Um, that's super helpful um to us as we you know go ahead with this um with the presentation. Um so we're gonna jump in now. Um,
Carolyn WoodardJohan, you have seen a lot of nonprofit IT, both successfully and less successfully managed at nonprofits. So could you talk a little bit about what makes well-managed IT?
Johan HammerstromYeah, thanks for thanks for asking. Um, I think well-managed IT is a core concept for us at Community IT. We really think that, as I kind of alluded to earlier, in order for IT to be successful, it really needs to be well-managed. So we thought it would be helpful to just describe some of the characteristics of well-managed IT. And that'll help you to think about whether or not the IT at your organization is being well managed or it could be managed better.
Johan HammerstromAnd oftentimes when we talk to nonprofit organizations that are experiencing frustration with their IT, you can often trace it back to uh an absence of one of these characteristics or the absence of well-managed IT overall.
Johan HammerstromAnd if there's kind of one theme that ties all these together, it might be proactive. And there's this real divide in IT, in the world of IT, in your experience of IT between proactive and reactive. Is IT always responding to things that are happening to the organization? Is it responding at the last minute to the needs that the organization has, or is it proactively anticipating what the organization needs and preparing and providing the IT services in a way that meets that anticipated need?
Johan HammerstromSo some of the characteristics of well-managed IT are defined service levels. These include things like uh when IT service and support is available. Is it does the organization operate on a nine to five schedule Monday through Friday? Does the organization have staff that travel regularly and are in different time zones where they need to get to support? Um, or is the organization expected to work over the weekend?
Johan HammerstromSo defining service hours when service is available is important. Defining response times and resolution times to IT issues and communicating those with uh the staff in the organization is also really critical to a well-managed IT infrastructure. So defining service levels so that the expectations are clear, both for the staff in the organization, the leadership and management of the organization, as well as whoever is responsible for um fixing IT problems when they occur, uh, providing IT services, make sure that everybody is on the same page.
Johan HammerstromThose can be very complicated for larger organizations, and they can be very simple for smaller organizations. So it's not the complexity that that is important there. It's the fact that it's defined, that it's written down somewhere, and that that expectation is public and shared.
Johan HammerstromPredictive management is an important part of well-managed IT. And that includes uh ongoing monitoring of all the um equipment and information systems that the organization uses. It uh ensures that if there's uh a breach in the organization or an or a cybersecurity incident, that that is being identified early and addressed right away and not being allowed to linger. So um
Johan HammerstromHaving the tools in place for proactively and predictively managing the IT infrastructure is an important part of well-managed IT. And it can include things like having an inventory of devices in the organization, knowing the age of those devices and when they need to be replaced, and so that that can be included in the budget, not waiting until equipment breaks down.
Johan HammerstromAnother characteristic or hallmark of well-managed IT is that the IT is being driven by the overall organizational strategy as well as the policies that the organization has, rather than the other way around. So, one good example of that is for organizations who have staff that travel, what sorts of policies are in place for those staff in terms of how they access the internet, how they access organizational information.
Johan HammerstromToo often, organizations that don't have IT as well managed as they would like will find themselves in situations where staff are asking for at levels of access that maybe aren't appropriate, but if there's no policy in place for defining that, um, it creates a lot of uncertainty and can potentially lead to you know dangerous or insecure situations. So that's that's important.
Johan HammerstromAutomation, where appropriate, is another hallmark of well-managed IT. And this kind of ties in a little bit with the last one, meeting business needs. Automation is really helpful if you have well-defined business processes or workflows that are being repeated regularly by staff in the organization, and you can set those up in an automated way in your IT systems. Being able to do that effectively requires understanding what those business processes or workflows are, and then having a dialogue between uh the business owner of the process and whoever in IT is setting that process up.
Carolyn WoodardYou know, I said this was going to be a webinar that wasn't about AI.
Johan HammerstromI we promised we weren't gonna use those two letters together.
Carolyn WoodardI know. But um, I just wanted to ask you quickly about, you know, there's this kind of narrative or like framework right now that like um AI is so easy to implement and then it can just like fix a lot of your IT problems because you have AI. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about our experience with that myth?
Johan HammerstromWell, I mean, I think, you know, the it reminds me a little this sort of thing actually, if you've been in IT for a while, sort of repeats itself every 10 or 15 years where there's sort of a new capability for building things that gets unlocked.
Johan HammerstromWhether it's, you know, five or six years ago, there was this whole no-code or low code movement uh among the big IT companies, Microsoft and others. And the idea was you can build your own software, not having to know uh any sort of coding language. You know, we have the tools now, these no-code, low-code tools that enable you to build your own software.
Johan HammerstromI remember, you know, 20, 25 years ago, Microsoft had a program called Microsoft Access. And they were like, this is great. You can now build your own database. You don't need to be an expert in databases. And what happened was a lot of organizations would get an intern who was really proficient in Microsoft Access. They'd build a database for the organization, and then when their internship was over, they were gone. And the organization had started using these access databases to track cases or constituent information, and then inevitably the database would break or the business uh would evolve and they'd need to make changes to the database, and they couldn't because the person who built it was gone.
Johan HammerstromAnd there's sort of a similar risk now with AI. If you entrust all of your information systems to these tools, um, yes, they might be easy uh and convenient for building the system initially, but who what's the long-term plan for maintaining that system? Uh, who's gonna model who's gonna maintain it, you know, if the system breaks?
Johan HammerstromSo I'm glad you raised that point, Carolyn, because automation is very powerful and it can be very convenient, but just setting up the automation, this is kind of an overarching theme for well-managed IT. Just deploying the tool or the solution isn't enough. You really need to have a long-term plan for maintaining it and for managing it.
Carolyn WoodardYeah, you need to manage it. And I think that's something that's so deceptive about AI is like it's so easy. You just ask it a question, it's a chatbot, it'll answer, it'll tell you what you need to know. And there's so much change management, and there's so much research and um understanding the security involved and just owning AI as you deploy it at your nonprofit.
Carolyn WoodardSo I think I just wanted to call attention to that as well. It's like if you're not managing IT now, you're not gonna be able to manage AI very well either. Um, and I think that's something you know that we're seeing going forward. Um, so what does it mean to own IT?
Johan HammerstromYeah, so this is a question I wanted to ask you, Carolyn. Um, in order for IT to be well managed, it really needs to be owned by somebody in the organization. And you have some experience with that in uh one of your previous positions as the IT director for a pretty large uh international nonprofit organization. Could you talk a little bit about what, from your experience and what you've seen at other nonprofits, uh, what does it mean to own IT?
Carolyn WoodardYeah, this is um, you're taking me back. And I still have friends who tease me about this because, as you know, and I'm gonna tell everyone on this webinar right now, I am not a technical person. Like I don't know how to code, I don't have a background in um, you know, computer anything, basically. Computers are tools that I have used throughout my career. Um,
Carolyn WoodardBut I think I'm also not afraid to try to understand what I need and to see the opportunities and um not to just rest if something technical doesn't work. You're like, oh well, there's nothing we can do about it.
Carolyn WoodardSo I think owning IT for me is that it's um, you know, it's a function. It's uh you are a manager, and I had management experience or I grew management experience at the different nonprofits I had worked at before I landed at this uh international NGO.
Carolyn WoodardAnd um, you know, they had different systems that um they had the right idea of they were trying to consolidate management of these very different systems in one department and then in one person, um, but it was very disparate.
Carolyn WoodardSo there was the uh CRM that they used, which was at the time Raiser's Edge. Uh, they had an internal intranet. I don't know if anybody on the call remembers those days, but they had built, they had a vendor had built this very fancy, uh very, very complicated uh internal kind of messaging board that very few people were using. And uh of course we had email, we had devices, we had an inventory, we had um, you know, things that we had to do. Uh staff, there were, I think there were nearly a hundred staff. So people had to be provisioned with that, you know, when we hired someone, they had to have their device and you know, their email, their login, everything that they needed to be able to do. So we also had a vendor for that, the IT people.
Carolyn WoodardAnd then there was me at the top, like making sure all of these pieces worked. And um, a little bit every day I would go crazy because something would happen over here, and I was trying to spend time uh understanding and managing something over there. And um, so there was a lot of that firefighting and reactive. Uh, I came into a situation where the person before me had been very reactive. Um, and we also,
Carolyn WoodardI think through that experience, I also learned and began to understand two things. Uh, one, as I said, we had a vendor was an MSP, not Community IT, uh, an MSP that had been with the organization for a while. And so they were relatively on top of the inventory, the devices, the um the uh acceptable use policy. And um, they were our help desk. So when something didn't go right, we had them, uh they were on site.
Carolyn WoodardBut they were very limited in their ability, like they knew all about the IT and they knew about that technology level. They could not do anything around budgeting, strategic planning, um, managing expectations, uh, implementation of you know, like different um systems that were on top of our IT systems, like the CRM. They knew nothing about Raiser's Edge and they didn't want to know anything about it, Raiser's Edge.
Carolyn WoodardSo that that person, that um vendor was not capable of playing a strategic role at that nonprofit. That was me. Like I had to understand, you know, like I had them doing the IT, but I had to do the strategy and the thinking and the budgeting and the um understanding policies and communicating with them and helping them communicate with our staff.
Carolyn WoodardAnd then on the other side, up from me, I also came into this experience of our executive team really, they wanted IT to work and they were very uh entrepreneurial about wanting, you know, like a bright, shiny new system or a solution that was going to do some new thing that like the CRM wasn't doing or the internet wasn't able to do. Should we just get a new one?
Carolyn WoodardBut they were very um, it was very difficult. I had to work a lot on translating what they wanted to the level of IT because they were very hands-off on the actual IT. They didn't really, they had the kind of mindset of like, I'm the you know, CFO or the C O O. Um, I am not the IT person. So I'm gonna describe for you this like kind of pie in the sky magical unicorn of what I want the solution, the IT solution to do. I'm gonna nickel and dime you on all of the like what you need in the budget to actually support it and the staff that you might need to actually support my idea of what I want to have happen.
Carolyn WoodardAnd so I was constantly translating, telling the executives like the good news and the bad news about what they wanted to be able to do and how much it was gonna cost and what kind of staff support was gonna need.
Carolyn WoodardAnd then also translating down from the executives to the other staff that I worked with and my team about, you know, well, we have this marching order, we want to do this, or we want to, you know, enable this kind of um a mailing, uh fundraising mailing to happen. Like, can we do that? You know, and usually it was like next week. And I would be like, you know, the system is just not set up to be able to, you know, turn that around like that.
Carolyn WoodardAnd then the last thing I'll say about that, um, you know, kind of describing these uh issues is that um, yeah, we kind of constantly, because we were constantly um fighting fires and unable to do like the more strategic thinking, um, we really had a lot of legacy solutions that weren't really working for the business needs that we had, um, but that were really, really hard to get out of because we had invested so much in them.
Carolyn WoodardSo even though it seemed like every couple of months there'd be some new bright idea of like, oh, we'll just replace this system, it really was not integrated into the way strategic decisions were made. And so that was a real liability at that at that executive level, is that it was very difficult to incorporate strategic thinking around IT and the planning and change management that would go into it into making those things happen.
Carolyn WoodardSo I guess to pull it back to uh what does it mean to own IT? Um, you do need to have someone, you know, it might be someone like me. I was in this kind of middle management area, um, who has the primary responsibility for it, who has the oversight over if you have these different IT tools, um, the basic IT, the MSP level IT, someone who has that strategic oversight and governance, being able to have policies and take action when those policies are broken, make sure that everyone on staff knows what the policies are.
Carolyn WoodardThis was one that I struggled with was that decision-making authority. So I could go to the executive team and tell them what I needed, but I did not myself have the ability to say, here's what we're gonna do and here's how we're gonna do it. Um, so that and that is common at lots of different businesses, not just nonprofits.
Carolyn WoodardAnd then yes, I was responsible for outsourcing vendors. Um, we did not have a fractional CIO, although when I left that organization, that was one of the things that I put in place was to uh advocate for and hire someone who was at a CIO level who could solve some of that problem of the decision making that I was running into.
Carolyn WoodardSo that was a little bit long-winded, but I hope that shows, you know, like what everything about owning IT. So on the good side of that, um, I did own IT. Um, there were some struggles that I had and some uh inadequacies there. Um, but that's what a person who and it shows that I did not have a technology background, but I managed the vendors, I managed the teams, and I managed up to the executive team that was above me that I reported to.
Community IT IntroThank you for joining Community IT for this podcast, part one. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a rating to help others find this leadership resource for nonprofits. Listen for part two in your podcast feed.