Tech Atlas

If there's a single piece of advice TechSoup could give all nonprofits, it would be to tell them to make a technology plan.

A technology plan will help you make the most out of technology in your organization. It will help you minimize technology-related crises, use staff time efficiently, and avoid wasting money on equipment that won't help your organization. It will help you think through your priorities so that you can use technology in a way that directly furthers your mission. It will help you budget for technology and make cost-effective purchases. You can even use a technology plan as a key tool to advocate for technology funding.

But no matter how many times we tell organizations this, and no matter how many articles on Technology Planning we write, writing an effective technology plan can be challenging for small nonprofits with little or no technology budget or experience with technology.

That's where tools such as TechAtlas come in. TechAtlas, powered by NPower and developed in collaboration with TechRocks, is a free Web-based tool designed to assist nonprofit organizations with their technology planning needs.

While using TechAtlas isn't a substitute for working with an experienced technical assistance provider (some technical assistance providers even use their own customized versions of TechAtlas to work with their nonprofit clients), it can help many organization start thinking more strategically about technology and learn about some best practices in the field. TechAtlas provides diagnostic tools, a centralized place to manage the planning process, and a framework for evaluating technology needs.

Using TechAtlas

TechAtlas provides a Web-based tool that collects information about an organization, its vision, and its current state of technology. TechAtlas then generates reports that include specific recommendations based upon your entries. These recommendations can be organized and prioritized in order to tailor the results to your specific needs.

Many of the questions assume a base level of knowledge about technology in general and the specific technology the organization has implemented. For example, the person taking the surveys would need to know if the organization has a firewall, if the computers are networked, and whether the system is backed up regularly.

While using TechAtlas is easy, you could spend a great deal of time detailing all your systems, hardware, and software. The tool allows you to enter a tremendous amount of information. In fact, the more time you spend with TechAtlas, the better your results are likely to be.

TechAtlas is separated into a series of Web-based forms to collect data. It also provides a series of reports. You can start and stop at any point, filling in areas of information that you know, and returning to areas that need more time.

TechAtlas presents the planning process as a simple series of steps:

Getting Started

To use TechAtlas, you must first sign up for an account. Be prepared to give your contact information. You'll have the opportunity to provide other details if you wish, such as your organization's EIN (Employer Identification Number) and annual budget. If you are simply curious about the system, you'll also find a link on this page to log in as a guest so that you can see what the service has to offer.

Step 1

Envision: This section asks you to describe your organization's mission and how you envision the role of technology in that mission. It also asks you to determine who you consider to be on your technology team. Entries in this area are used verbatim when producing the final report.

Step 2

Assess: This section of TechAtlas provides a comprehensive means to collect information about the state of your organization's technology and skills. Assessment surveys are broken down into the different areas of questions. This section was designed so that technical assistance providers and other could modify the questions to suit their needs, but some sample sections are as follows:

• Basic Assessment: Surveys basic network and workstation management practices, and assesses practices related to risk management such as your organization virus protection and back-up systems.
• Database Assessment: This survey assesses your organization's database capabilities and related data management issues.
• Technology Training Assessment: This survey assesses an organization's level of staff training.

Recommendations

These assessments are used to generate automated technology recommendations. Depending on the configuration and size of your organization, the automated recommendations may be useful as is, or they can be changed using the "prioritize" step. The recommendations are based strictly on the questions asked in the various surveys so they do not consider any practices or needs that your organization has outside of the scope of these questions. Therefore, the recommendations should be considered a starting point to assist in a comprehensive plan. You may choose to consult with a technology assistance provider to evaluate these recommendations in light of the circumstances of your particular organization.

Step 3

Prioritize: This section of TechAtlas provides a way for users to tailor the recommendations made in the previous step. Recommendations can be removed, edited, or ranked so that an organization can produce a prioritized technology plan. If you find that the recommendations are useful and wish to generate a technology plan directly from TechAtlas, you may find this section especially helpful for customizing the boilerplate text with wording that better matches your mission and organization.

Step 4

Act: This section of TechAtlas provides information, tools, and worksheets to help you to act on the budgeting, staffing, fundraising, and implementation needs identified by TechAtlas. Even if you do not complete the other TechAtlas sections, this section can provide some useful management tools such as a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership ) calculator, budgeting worksheets, and funding sources.

Reports

TechAtlas offers many reports, and most of them can be customized. One of the most useful reports is the Action Plan. This report is especially helpful for the accidental techie who doesn't know where to start or needs some guidance understanding how to accomplish a recommendation. The Action Plan is a task-level view of each recommendation that includes estimated time requirements. Using the Action Plan, you can create a detailed time and cost budget for any given recommendation. Reports can also be downloaded as Microsoft Excel worksheets so that data can be manipulated easily and stored locally.

Summary

For nonprofits new to technology planning, TechAtlas offers a great way to get their technology resources organized and under control, and it's useful for getting them to think about best practices they aren't using; it's a helpful tool for getting started with the planning process. For example, the tool provides organizations with basic information about the costs and time involved in implementing its recommendations -- useful if you already feel like you're in over your head. TechAtlas is still only one component in the process of creating a complete technology plan, which may include other steps such as organizational decision-making, defining a technology team, and evaluating your budget.

Since TechAtlas offers generalized recommendations that are designed to be appropriate for a large variety of nonprofits, organizations need to plan to spend time tailoring the recommendations and adding specific information to the system -- such as model numbers, cost, and vendors.

While TechAtlas may not be appropriate for huge organizations with hundreds of computers, a large technology team, and a well-established technology planning process, it could be a huge help to rural organizations or cash-poor organizations that don't have access to a technology assistance provider, or to other organizations that just want to do some thinking and organizing before they contact an assistance provider.