Accurate and timely information is the new wealth, empowering decision-making and enabling action across the full range of society. In the nonprofit sector, the ability to collect, store, analyze and distribute information is a key component of building and maintaining civil society.
Technology has enormous power to advance nonprofit missions.
However, we believe that the majority of both nonprofit leaders and grantmakers have yet to embrace this fact and act on it. Our goals in this position paper are to help grantmakers understand that shift in attitude and to provide tools they can use to evaluate the information management portion of funding requests. We make a strong case for the inclusion of an information technology component in foundation guidelines and in any requests for funding. Further, we propose the development of a common terminology and of a common set of standards that will contribute to a systematic evaluation protocol for technology requests. Likewise, we encourage grantseekers to be active participants in this process and to contribute to the dialogue.