January 10, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
More than 80 percent of executives at human-service organizations say that information technology has changed their organizations’ daily operations over the past five years, with 87 percent calling information technology either important or essential, according to a new survey.
The study also found, however, that the degree to which organizations have embraced and adopted information technology varies depending on the size of the organization. What’s more, some charities have reservations about technology’s potential to help them fulfill their missions, and they worry that it may even keep them from their work.
The report, “Wired, Willing and Ready: Nonprofit Human Service Organizations’ Adoption of Information Technology,” is based on a telephone survey of 203 executives at human-service organizations. Conducted in February 2001, the survey was commissioned by Independent Sector, a coalition of more than 700 nonprofit organizations, foundations, and corporate-giving programs, and Cisco Systems, a San Jose, Calif., computer-networking company. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, in New Jersey.
The organizations in the survey were divided into three categories: small organizations, with annual budgets of less than $100,000; medium-size organizations, with annual budgets from $100,000 to $999,999; and large organizations, with annual budgets of $1-million or more. The number of organizations in each category is proportional to the number of groups of that size in the field of human services.
Of the executives surveyed, 76 percent say that information technology plays either a major or a minor role in their organizations’ programs and missions. Only 12 percent of executives at large organizations say that technology plays no role at all in their organizations’ programs and missions, while 35 percent of executives at small organizations say that it plays no role.
Almost 80 percent of the charities whose executives were surveyed use e-mail and the Internet. At 52 percent of the groups computers are linked on a network, and 49 percent have organizational Web sites.
More than half of the organizations that do not have those technologies say they don’t really need them. Of the organizations that do not have a network, 71 percent say they don’t need one, as say 65 percent of the organizations that don’t have e-mail, 51 percent of those that don’t have Internet access, and 55 percent of those that don’t have a Web site. Other reasons given for not using the technologies include inability to pay for them, precedence of other priorities, and lack of trained staff members.
For more information: Go to http://www.independentsector.org.
