The Resilient Nonprofit: A Technology Roadmap for Navigating Uncertainty
2025 has come roaring in with a wave of uncertainty for nonprofits. While nonprofits were already struggling in a climate of decreasing donors and increasing donor churn, funding freezes from the federal government have created a host of challenges.
Similarly, five years ago this month nonprofits faced a surge of uncertainty amid lockdowns and global pandemic that put many traditional fundraising strategies on ice.
The nonprofits that survived and even grew out of covid often had one thing in common, digital maturity that enabled them to quickly evolve. Moving galas, food drives and more online. As a result they removed the cost of producing in person events, were able to reach more people at a low cost per contact and had higher margins from their events flow to their programs.
What’s clear is that a nonprofit’s resilience requires regular evaluation of its technology stack, the cost of letting antiquated systems linger is too great in the midst of a turbulent macro and micro environment. But how should a nonprofit approach evaluating their technology? My mantra has always been that technology isn’t your strategy, it empowers it. The following is a roadmap for evaluating your technology and determining if your organization has a stack that will drive long term sustainability whether facing pandemics or funding crisis.
I. Understanding Technology Resilience in the Nonprofit Context
As I mentioned, technology in and of itself is not a strategy. The best marketers in the world work for SaaS companies convincing you that the solution to any business problem exists in the procurement of their technology. But after a decade of tech consulting, I’ve seen hundreds of organizations over buy technology with no plan in place to utilize it.
Nonprofits, in particular, don’t have the luxury of carrying technology bloat. Every dollar counts. Creating resilience through technology is also more than “having the latest tools.” If you’re chasing the latest and greatest you’ll drive yourself mad. Just explore a few of the LUMAscapes to see how quickly you can drive off a cliff pursuing “tools.”
Instead, your focus needs to be on consolidation, adoption, activation, removing friction, and regular review.
For example, Pinky Swear Foundation a nonprofit in Minneapolis/St. Paul, who provides financial grants to families battling childhood cancer, completed a digital transformation project that consolidated nearly a half a dozen marketing and fundraising tools into 2 platforms, HubSpot and Fundraise Up. The results were increased inbound giving and removing friction from the donation process for offline events like radiothon, raising nearly $500k in 2024, 40% of which came through digital channels.
II. Consolidating Technology Spend: Doing More With Less
Marketing technology started out innocent enough. A colleague remarks, “I need to send an email for this webinar.”
So an enterprising employee signs up for a freemium tool.
Across the hall, marketing is onboarding a marketing automation platform. It has email, too.
Over in sales, the team is discussing CRM. They think it needs email as well.
Two of the three systems also generate landing pages. All three store contact information in different places. No one talked to the other about syncing all the prospect and customer data across platforms.
It started innocently enough. A staff member needed to send an email for an upcoming fundraising event, so someone signed up for a free tool. Meanwhile, the development team was implementing a donor management system (which also had email capabilities), and the corporate partnerships team was discussing a CRM (which they also thought needed email). Two of the three systems could generate donation pages, and all three stored contact information in different locations. No one considered syncing data across the platforms.
What you end up with is fragmented and redundant technology with data spread all over.
Not only does this fragmentation create internal operational issues, it inserts unnecessary friction in the experience your donors and supporters have.
Nonprofits are particularly susceptible to this because as a market segment, for too long there’s been a perception that you need built for nonprofit point solutions. Nonprofit CRMs, nonprofit marketing platforms, nonprofit fundraising widgets, nonprofit event registrations etc. etc.
The challenge with nonprofit (insert point solution here) is that it’s software that’s developed by a company’s version of how your nonprofit operates. Nonprofits aren’t monolithic entities that all behave in one singular fashion. Yes there are similarities, but as software has matured from solving point solutions to being flexible platform focused development, nonprofits have an opportunity. Consolidate spend and create a unified experience for donors, your team and a singular view of your constituent stakeholder. Industry agnostic platforms like HubSpot can be deployed for nonprofits running the gamut from a little to a lot of customization based on how your organization operates, but as a unified platform that handles marketing, development, gift tracking and more.
III. Prioritizing Ease of Use: Empowering Your Team
One of the key outcomes nonprofits can gain from regular technology evaluation is replacing antiquated hard to use software with newer, easier to use software. Ease of use in and of itself isn’t a golden ticket to adoption though. To really build a resilient organization that can get the most from the lift a modern tech stack can provide you need an empowered team that buys into how the technology enables your mission.
User adoption of your stack is the true measure of success, without it you’ll never see an ROI. Involve stakeholders from across functions in the decision making. Don’t let the technology choice live in a silo.
Another key component is focus. Build a requirements list and assign weights to the things your technology needs to be able to do, but be open to discussions around “X can be solved by Y instead of Z”. Often, we get tunnel vision based on the technology we’re used to using and think a process can only be supported in one way, when there might be a more efficient way to solve the problem.
Lastly, the requirements document will help you not get distracted by advanced features that can crowd out usability. Take AI for example. Every platform is cramming some version of AI into their feature set. Does it add or distract?
IV. Harnessing Actionable Data: From Information to Impact
One of the biggest challenges with technology is the piles of data that gets generated. There’s a key distinction that’s worth pointing out – data collection isn’t the same as actionable insights.
Just because you’re collecting data doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I’ve seen more CRMs than I care to mention with a mess of data that is impossible to act on. Missing contact info, duplicates, clearly misplaced data in the wrong property.
It’s cliche but true, garbage in garbage out. Nonprofits struggle with this because often times the person in charge of managing the database changes out several times over the years and there is no governance.
When it comes to making decisions from data, less is more. Keep what you collect simple and easily understandable by anyone coming into the organization.
Focus on actionable data that drives real impact: error-free contact information, complete giving history, and immediate associations – the people and organizations directly connected to your donor. Don’t overcomplicate this; think of immediate family and primary work relationships – information you can actually leverage in your communications.
The connection between data quality and resilience is simple but powerful. In a crisis, if you need to raise funds or pivot your fundraising strategy, you need to be able to segment and reach the most relevant people in your database – quickly. Let’s say you have a funding gap in a region of the US where your programming is short. It would make sense to reach out to donors in that region first with your specific ask to help close the gap. With clean, well-structured data, this targeted outreach can happen immediately; with messy data, the opportunity might be lost.
If you have to come up with special “coding” it’s probably not a great idea and you might want to revisit how the data is being collected.
Once you get comfortable with a data framework, what really matters, you can advance your organizational culture to being a data driven one.
Instead of speculating about what moves the needle and influences your stakeholders, you’ll change language internally from “I think” to “based on our Q4 results, when we share X about our impact we see a 20% increase in donation size.”
V. Removing Friction from the Donor Experience
What’s your online giving experience like? Is it as simple as buying something from Amazon? It needs to be.
Things like opening the donation check out in a new tab, results in about a 10% loss of donors, transferring them to another domain overall can scare them off because it looks like a phishing attempt.
What about modern transaction options? PayPal, Apple/Google Pay, digital wallet?
What’s the experience like post donation? Are you hand mailing a thank you 8 – 10 weeks later?
Having a unified stack like HubSpot for Nonprofits, allows you to orchestrate multichannel engagement with your donors, immediately and modern giving platforms like FundraiseUp make it possible to deploy a frictionless online giving experience that plugs into your unified tech stack seamlessly, in minutes.
If donors are telling us they want more personalized experiences, ask yourself if your current technology will help you deliver that at scale?
VI. Developing Your Technology Evaluation Framework
So how does a nonprofit go about evaluating their technology? The answer to that is in two parts. First the people. Put together a cross-functional technology committee that is responsible throughout the year to make sure you have the tooling you need to stay ahead of the game.
With this group implement a review cycle, biannually to make sure you aren’t over spending on tech bloat where people sign up for things to try it out and then forget. Annually to see if your overall stack still aligns with supporting your mission and keeping your organization resilient. Is the technology easy to use, adopted by the team, removing friction from stakeholder processes, enabling your organization to be nimble (think covid, could you quickly pivot and do something different with this stack if push comes to shove, i.e. host virtual events, or launch a new revenue stream like ecommerce)
Once you have the people component in place, it’s all about process, how do you evaluate your situation. We offer a free scorecard on our website, but you can also create something similar. Outline key areas of assessment: consolidation and integration in your organization, use and adoption, data access, etc. Put together a series of questions to assess on a scale of 1-3 or 1-5 how strong your team feels your technology is in each category.
Once you have gaps, outline what the challenge is with the gap, what your desired outcome is and start documenting possible solutions and have your committee work through the action plan.
Conclusion
Technology can feel overwhelming. Like eating an elephant. Take it a bite at a time and you’ll quickly be in a position where you have a strong foundation that ensures your organization can weather the storms that come by allowing your team to react and be resilient from changing how you engage stakeholders to how you generate revenue.
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