Nonprofits and technology often don’t mix. The nonprofit landscape is littered with abandoned grant-funded and poorly maintained tech projects. It isn’t because nonprofits are fundamentally inept with technology, however. Nonprofit tech projects have trouble getting off the ground because they rarely have the consistent funding needed to make the project the full time focus of an experienced developer team.

Technology projects in the nonprofit sector are simultaneously outrageously expensive and drastically underfunded. The process often involves bringing in outside consultants to scope the work, costing tens of thousands of dollars before even a single line of code is written. Sometimes, after all that work, the project goes no further.

Even when there is funding to build a tech solution, perhaps from a large foundation, there is rarely the long-term funding to maintain it, let alone improve it. And the nonprofit is left hanging, ten years later, with a tool that is full of bugs and issues, near unusable. Before long, you’ll have the development assistant searching Google for “technology grants.”

The nonprofit world’s approach to funding does not, and will not, work for the capital intensive, open source driven, risk-laden landscape of technology today. It costs millions to build a tech platform. Only technology companies (with some exceptions in the open-source world) do that well. Ultimately, tech platforms require too much time and care to be just a side-project for most nonprofits.

For that reason, most nonprofits turn to the for-profit world for solutions. Those solutions—those companies—see the nonprofit world as a “market,” and in our capitalist society, markets are meant to be exploited for profit.

Nonprofits need to find a way to share the costs of maintaining technology that works for them and that will work for them in the long term. Sustainability and resilience are key. How can we build something that is immune to the whims of the for-profit market?

Read the full article about nonprofit costs for technology by Nathan Hewitt, Tony Pickett, Mark Hager', Pia Mancini and Alanna Irvinglard at Nonprofit Quarterly.