Old Ways, New Tech World

Today, Americans live large swaths of their lives online, swapping metal baskets for online shopping carts, tabloids for TikTok influencers, and cramped cubicles for Zoom calls made from remote workspaces.

Indeed, thousands of digital tools are actively reshaping how Americans live, work, communicate, and give. Those changes have profound implications for the ways nonprofits do their work and talk to donors. To better understand what this means for charities, the Chronicle of Philanthropy commissioned an exclusive survey, conducted by Clarion Research, to ask nonprofit leaders about their organizations’ approaches to technology, the challenges they face implementing it, and the promise they see it holding. More than 350 nonprofit leaders responded, painting a picture of a sector that recognizes technology is critical to achieving missions yet frequently struggles to get the funding or specialized experts to fully leverage it.

Many nonprofit organizations continue to operate with minimal technology investment — often less than 3 percent of their budgets, according to the Chronicle’s new survey, with only 13 percent investing more than 5 percent on tech. In contrast, for-profit companies spent an average of 5.85 percent on technology in 2024, Deloitte estimated, with such spending increasing steadily every year.

Most nonprofit leaders recognize that up-to-date tech is essential, with a full 64 percent of them saying improved use of technology is among the top three priorities for their organization. But nonprofits often struggle to secure the funding and expertise they need to upgrade their computers, let alone embrace new tools like AI. That’s in part because funders may discourage or outright prohibit the use of grant dollars to cover general operating costs like software licenses or cybersecurity services.

The stakes are high. In more than a dozen interviews with the Chronicle, digital experts and nonprofit leaders issued the same stark warning: The gap between digitally savvy nonprofits and those struggling to adapt threatens to reshape which organizations survive and which communities are served.

Matthew Laznicka for The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Julie Reiskin is constantly vexed by technology deficits. As co-executive director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, she’s seen staff waste countless hours on simple tasks like trying to pull credit-card statements for an auditor or frantically searching for emails or documents that should be readily available.

“I know there’s technology out there that could really help us be more effective, but we just don’t have access to it as a small, pretty lean organization,” she says. “It feels like there’s so much time and energy spent trying to do workarounds or figure stuff out that it really detracts from just doing our work.”

Like 67 percent of those surveyed by the Chronicle, Reiskin believes such tech struggles hamper her organization’s growth.

The team once tried out a free trial of the messaging platform Slack Pro that “really helped keep people engaged” and in conversation with one another about complex legislative processes. But when the trial ended, “the monthly cost was just beyond what we could afford,” Reiskin says. This vital software went away, just like the Zoom licenses that the group cut back on after the company raised its prices.

The majority of Reiskin’s staff have disabilities and require technology that’s broadly accessible, such as screen-reader compatibility and text enlargement. Such needs often limit procurement options and further increases costs. She’s open and curious about the capabilities of new tools — say, an AI system that could help target their outreach to potential members — but what she’d really love is an IT volunteer with the expertise to assess what her team really needs and the patience to help her staff members take advantage of the software they already have.

“How do we get someone that really gets it to help us decide which of these products is really worth it?” she asks. Reiskin says the group invested in software to help manage advocacy work, but “even though it’s supposed to give us all this data, it doesn’t really help” because her staff doesn’t have the training or capacity to input the underlying data properly.

“Some of our people would really need someone to sit with them, one on one, and explain several times,” she says. The problem when it comes to IT volunteers is that “we don’t know who those people are” and “especially in poor communities like ours — we don’t really have access to those worlds.”

She worries that organizations like hers — led by and serving people with direct lived experience with, say, homelessness or disabilities — may be losing out on funds to more tech-savvy groups that can produce slick presentations and data visualizations with minimal effort. She’s already seeing a contraction in available funding for organizations focused on disability rights, many of which previously received federal grants and are now “increasing the pressure on the very, very few entities that fund us” with new requests for support.

“The organizations that are really led by impacted people are the ones that fall behind,” she says. “A lot of these more-well-funded programs — that can do everything and have all the fancy stuff — aren’t led by impacted people.”

Behind the Curve

It’s not resistance to change that holds back organizations like Reiskin’s, tech consultants say. Instead, it’s the impossible math of taking on yet another responsibility with dwindling resources, stigma around operational expenses like software, and no dedicated tech support.

“What really ends up happening is that technology, instead of becoming helpful, becomes an obstacle because so many people are spending time fighting against it,” says Becky Kates, a nonprofit consultant and database specialist who advises dozens of small nonprofits across New Hampshire.

Kates was recently baffled by an organization that still exclusively accepts donations via paper check — now commonly used in only 3 percent of transactions nationwide — because “they don’t want to pay the credit-card charges,” let alone experiment with Apple Pay or Venmo.

“I was like, ‘You do know it’s 2025? I just wanted to check. It’s not 1924,’” she says, emphasizing that in a challenging funding climate, “they are 100 percent hurting themselves because so many nonprofits are going to go under and the need is going to go up for the ones that stay.”

Matthew Laznicka for The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Another group she advises did receive online donations through Network for Good, but instead of automating the process, the staff printed out the email notifications and then manually entered them into the organization’s database.

“I just looked at them like, ‘You know computers talk to each other, right?’” she says.

Such technical inefficiencies abound in the nonprofit world, especially at smaller organizations, where poor tech integration often stems less from lack of trying and more from a lack of funds.

Nearly nine in 10 nonprofit professionals in the Chronicle’s survey cited budget constraints as a primary barrier to their organization adopting technology, and 64 percent cited a lack of in-house staffing or technical expertise.

“Many funders don’t fund tech, period,” says Alethea Hannemann, CEO of Board.Dev, which connects tech leaders with nonprofit boards. “Those that do really want to fund the innovative stuff, and so some nonprofits are feeling pressured to experiment with AI when their foundational tech” — like cybersecurity or basic software training — “isn’t strong yet.”

The Outliers

While nonprofits often find themselves at a loss for even modest grants that could help them get started, resources abound — relatively speaking — for the most tech-savvy outliers.

mRelief

They are organizations like mRelief, founded in 2014 by a former Google employee and a recent college graduate who sat together in a coding bootcamp and quickly bonded over an interest in building simple software to help people navigate public benefits like SNAP.

“Being a caseworker is one of the hardest jobs in the world,” says Rose Afriyie, one of mRelief’s co-founders, who emphasizes that the group sees its software as a complement to older approaches to navigating benefits — say, call centers or one-on-one counseling — rather than as a replacement.

Over the past decade, the group has grown rapidly, attracting attention from Silicon Valley funders like the renowned start-up accelerator Y Combinator as well as local governments and private philanthropy. Recently, mRelief began piloting generative AI models to help people determine their eligibility and apply for public benefits, and it expanded its work to other government programs, such as Women, Infants & Children.

mRelief

Are mRelief leaders worried about the Trump administration’s plans for public benefits? Yes and no.

“In a time of what feels like fear, worry, and uncertainty, we’re also now in this time of unprecedented innovation and capabilities in AI,” Afriyie says. “It’s a really inspiring time to be in nonprofit organizations, thinking about how we can build first-rate technology right for people at the margins of society.”

Crisis Meets Opportunity

For some small nonprofits, a single tech champion can make all the difference. Plenty of software companies offer free or relatively cheap versions of their tools, and for many organizations, just a free Canva account for tweaking social-media visuals or modestly upgraded donor-management software can go a long way.

In Kansas, Beth Schafers brings that boldness to her role as director of development and community engagement at Family Promise of Greater Wichita, a local branch of the homelessness organization.

Family Promise of Greater Wichita

“Often in the corporate world, technology strides are seen as an investment in that growth as a company,” she says. “In the nonprofit world, we’re often looking at it as how can we just get by with the very basics?”

As a “one-person development department” handling fundraising, community engagement, and communications, Schafers says “being able to use tools like ChatGPT has really been helpful in streamlining my workflows and processes. It’s given me a ton of my time back.”

When asked to onboard a new gala chairperson — something that would typically consume hours of her limited time — she prompted ChatGPT to create a comprehensive road map and timeline. “Within five minutes, I had the document,” she says.

Family Promise of Greater Wichita doesn’t have a technology person — Schafers essentially wears that hat, too. The organization recently upgraded to a new CRM (customer-relationship management) platform to better connect with volunteers and donors, an investment that Schafers sees as essential despite the costs.

Technology “can be a really vital investment in the future of your mission in a really uncertain time,” she says. “We need to be a little more proactive and a little less reactive. We can’t wait for the bottom to fall out.”

For Jane Bodmer, communications director at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), the pandemic sparked a digital transformation that landed her organization squarely between tech innovators like mRelief and the analog struggles of groups like the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition.

mRelief

“Before the pandemic, we offered six online support groups — so very small. We were mainly in person,” Bodmer explains. Today, nearly half of DBSA’s estimated 20,000 to 40,000 annual support-group meetings take place online. The organization recently implemented automation tools that eliminated 10 to 15 hours of weekly administrative work, she says. “That time is now free for more strategic work.”

The Chronicle’s survey found that 77 percent of nonprofits expect to use AI within three to five years, despite only 46 percent using it currently. At DBSA, Bodmer uses AI to analyze survey data — information that might otherwise go unexamined, given the group’s staff size of 15 to 20 employees.

“At a small organization, everyone wears multiple hats,” she says. “AI helps me balance the workload. Without it, we’d be sacrificing what we could learn from the data.” She doesn’t see the technology as replacing staff but as “giving them a bit more capacity” amid increasing demands.

Tech Chasm Widens

As funding pressures intensify, the technology gap also threatens to deepen along familiar fault lines: large versus small, urban versus rural, well-resourced versus underfunded.

Matthew Laznicka for The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Five years ago, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic caused many groups like Bodmer’s to modernize their operations at warp speed, pivoting key programs online and training staff on new digital tools. Just as the pandemic forced rapid adaptation, leaders say today’s political and economic pressures may compel another wave of organizational transformation.

“People who didn’t pivot during the pandemic went out of business,” says Hannemann of Board.Dev, who cautions that today’s challenges could usher in yet another “phase of extinction” for nonprofits unable to adapt.

Yet today’s funding environment presents an even more complex challenge. Unlike the pandemic, when emergency funding flowed and donors rallied around struggling organizations, the current moment offers little certainty or relief.

Gone are the days when companies like Microsoft, HootSuite, and Mailchimp proudly made their software free for nonprofits on the front lines.

At this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, an annual gathering for the nonprofit technology sector, the vendors that typically dominated the main ballroom with colorful booths and swag were notably absent. Instead, the tech companies were relegated to a side room with modest displays, a decision that NTEN’s president, Amy Sample Ward, says was made because it felt “insensitive given the moment we’re in” to prominently feature vendors selling expensive software solutions while so many organizations were making painful budget cuts.

This time, leaders say they feel they’re taking on the crisis alone.

“Covid really forced us to step up and learn technology in ways that I don’t think we would have otherwise,” says Melissa Lukin, executive director of Rebuilding Together Peninsula, which repairs homes for extremely low-income residents in Northern California. During the pandemic, the group became “fully Zoom dependent” to maintain communications when in-person meetings were impossible.

Today the group faces new challenges as it relies heavily on Community Development Block Grants — federal funding passed through local governments — to support its year-round program. With proposed cuts to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Lukin fears these crucial grants could disappear entirely, and she’s building out a worst-case-scenario budget to prepare for it.

Rebuilding Together Peninsula

She’s not sure yet where technology will play a role in that budget. And even though her organization is based in Silicon Valley, she finds herself at a loss for the tech expertise and resources she needs to move her organization forward.

“We just want to know what we don’t know — tell us what we need and make it affordable,” she says. “It’s this endless cycle of being considered inefficient but then not being able to access the skills that would make us more efficient.”

Byte-Size Budgets

In recent months, the funding and operating landscape for nonprofits has transformed from competitive to what Janeen Simon calls an “existential crisis.” As executive director of Sustainable Harvest International, a nonprofit focused on regenerative agriculture, Simon recently witnessed a longtime foundation cut the group’s annual $20,000 grant to $15,000, citing the need to spread resources among more organizations.

She fears that is just the first of many cuts to come. The Trump administration’s drastic swipes at federal spending and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development have left many international nonprofits teetering on the verge of collapse, forced to lay off thousands of employees or slash vital programs.

Simon’s organization — which recently brought on two board members with experience in technology — is taking “baby steps” toward integrating more advanced monitoring tools. “If we came up with a solution to really show the impact of our regenerative-agriculture activities, that is going to make us stand out” in a difficult funding climate, she says.

Yet for nonprofits that have always seen technology as more of a barrier than a benefit, especially those serving marginalized communities, the pressure to transform digitally feels particularly perilous.

Every morning at the United Way of Southern Illinois, Antoinette “Toni” Hayden sits down at her desk and prints out hundreds of unread emails.

“It’s a little backwards,” she admitted — and it takes hours for her to sift through them all when she gets home — but it works for her. Her office, brimming with furniture and filing cabinets accumulated over 25 years, feels hollowed out from its pre-pandemic days, where five full-time staff once managed workplace giving campaigns across 14 counties. Now Hayden and one other employee remain, both working part-time.

“I’m old enough and old-fashioned, and you know, technology scares me sometimes,” she says. After a near standstill in fundraising during the pandemic, she fears that her organization’s struggles to adapt to an increasingly digital philanthropic landscape could help determine whether it survives at all.

“It wasn’t long ago that we were making over $500,000 a year,” Hayden says, her voice tightening. “Now we’re down to $125,000.”

Hayden, who’s 57, feels intimidated by software that “just keeps on changing,” making it hard for her and her sole colleague, an administrative associate in her late 70s, to keep up.

The group stopped pursuing federal employee workplace giving campaigns years ago when the application process migrated online and became too complex to navigate. While she maintains the organization’s Facebook page, Hayden says that with such a small team, the idea of expanding to even more platforms, like X or TikTok, feels untenable.

Together, she and her colleague have over half a century of experience serving rural communities in southern Illinois, yet they find themselves sidelined in a world where donations, grant applications, and donor communications have all moved online.

“We either need to increase our funding or we are going to go away,” she says. “The competition for funds in southern Illinois is high. There are so many nonprofits down here, but there is so much need, and the same people are getting asked first every year. They’re getting tired of it.”

The Double-Edged Sword

While some nonprofits race to embrace cutting-edge technology and others struggle to keep pace, some experts caution that technology itself is not a cure-all — and can sometimes exacerbate the problems it aims to solve.

“I’m often the only Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur that any nonprofit leaders actually ever met,” says Jim Fruchterman, founder of Tech Matters and a 40-year veteran of AI technology. “I joke that I’m the father confessor for their tech sins. I’m an anti-consultant — I’m trying to talk them out of a bad idea.”

He’s heard a lot of those bad ideas lately from cash-strapped organizations turning to technology — especially AI — as a Band-Aid for every malady.

Forced to lay off your communications team? Why not use ChatGPT to saturate your blog with the world’s most predictable posts. Struggling to scale? Maybe it’s time to try “inflicting AI” on the low-income farmers you serve.

Such experiments rarely go well, especially when they come from a place of desperation rather than intention, Fruchterman says.

“Don’t leap to the leading edge of tech. Just work your way up. Start with the cheap, generally accessible tech first,” he says. “Walk before you try to drive a Ferrari.”

Jumping in too quickly can also be dangerous, especially if groups fail to implement proper data-security practices and fail to understand that new digital tools often come with hidden costs that can create legal vulnerabilities.

“We need a solution yesterday, but we also need a solution that doesn’t put people at risk,” says Kim Selig, technology director at Organized Power in Numbers, which helps advocacy groups leverage digital tools.

“As of right now, there is no perfect solution that is both secure and accessible,” Selig says, especially for organizations serving vulnerable populations, such as immigrants facing potential deportation, for whom “keeping track of that data in a CRM is not safe, in my opinion, in this country anymore.” Her organization has developed custom fields and code words to protect sensitive client information.

Tania Roa

Mira Kohl

Back in rural Illinois, Hayden often gets marketing emails from companies promising catch-all solutions, but she says she approaches these pitches with a healthy skepticism. Her board president recently sent a link about a consulting firm that could help with technology strategy, but Hayden wasn’t convinced.

“This is a company that all they want to do is make money off the United Way,” she told him.

Despite her wariness of quick technological fixes, she and her colleague continue their work across 14 counties. “We’re still here,” she says, organizing transportation voucher programs and triaging 211 calls for local residents seeking social services.

If her organization were to close, other semi-local United Ways might eventually absorb her branch’s work, but Hayden says that a crucial and deep understanding of her community would be lost. As funding continues to tighten and the digital transformation of philanthropy accelerates, she is clear about what would truly help United Way of Southern Illinois navigate an uncertain future.

It’s not a software license or a silver bullet, but human expertise. “I need people that know how to use the technology,” she says. “I just wish I had the funding for staff.”