London Regional ICT Champion

A report from the US non-profit, Dot Organize, finds that over half of the 400 organisations they surveyed, report being frustrated or really struggling with the complexity of the technology they use.

Watchers of voluntary sector ICT issues in the UK will no doubt be familiar with Dot Organize’s findings, since ICT problems tend to be fairly universal:

To grossly summarise, the report also finds that:

• Most organizations, whether three-person start-ups or 3 million-person coalitions, are struggling to keep their constituent databases in order, and as a result have difficulty embracing new and emerging technologies (such as, blogs, social networking, SMS/text messaging, GIS mapping, and wikis).

• 59% report being frustrated or really struggling with the complexity of technology.

• Many lack the capacity to use some of the most basic online organising techniques; 39% do not use email newsletters and 47% do not accept online donations.

• Regardless of the organisation’s size, money (57%), time (45%) and staff expertise (34%) prevent their organisation from fully exploiting databases and online tools.

• Inadequate data management emerged as a major impediment to effective organizing. More than half the respondents report using slips of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and personal address books to manage organizational data.

• Organisations across the budget spectrum experienced a similar lack of data integration in their systems. The ability to share data across platforms and between applications, such as contact databases and Web content management systems, reduces data duplication and errors, as well as time spent on manual data entry and manually synching data repositories. Only 7% of respondents reported that their current systems share data easily.

• Organisers also stress the significance of data integration in their daily operations. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 representing the importance of data integration to their work, nearly 70% of respondents chose ratings between 7-10, signifying that a vast majority consider integration to be both a key obstacle and solution.

As London ICT Champion, what I’m really interested in here is the similar struggle of the UK VCS (voluntary & community sector) to fully exploit existing technology and embrace new tools.

I’m seeing some early promoters of new technology – RuralNet’s I-See_T project which is exploring ICT for collaboration, and the Media Trust’s seminars on the benefits and ease of deploying a Blog or a Wiki to raise the profile of your charity – and the approach here is very much the ‘show and tell’ model I talked about in an earlier post. As ever, if you have a project looking into new technology, let me know as it’s good to share.

The Dot Organize report compiles insights from more than 400 US social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, examining the needs of organisers working to utilize new technologies, and offering recommendations for how to meet those needs more effectively.

You can download the report from here.