How Nonprofits Can Persuade Their Boards to Fund New Tech Programs

CDW Offers Insights for Persuading Execs to Invest in New Tech

So, how can an IT leader encountering so many hurdles convince executive leadership to devote money and support to innovative tech? At Cisco Live! in June, CDW’s Joe Markwith, chief MOAT (mastering operational AI transformation) strategist, explained, “The biggest challenge that companies are facing today is really understanding what the business outcome is that they're looking for.”

Most commonly, Markwith said, customers are exploring emerging technologies they hope will “operationalize their IT and automate that and get the value out of it, because those are originally our point-of-entry customers. But beyond that, when we really talk to them, when we get into that business conversation, the outcome that they're looking for is, ‘Oh, wait a second, how do we make money? And what is the impact of this new generation of AI on the business outcomes?’”

When it comes to emerging technology, the questions are often the same whether your organization is a multinational enterprise or a smaller nonprofit. CDW CTO Sanjay Sood spoke with BizTech at the company’s Executive SummIT in April, placing the conversation in a broader business context. “From an IT perspective, almost everybody in the industry has more requests to do work than they have either budget or capacity or resources.”

“When we think about prioritization, it's really about how are you selecting the right balance of strategic investments, sustainment investments, enhancement investments that help drive the business forward,” Sood explained. “And then ultimately, once you have that distributed portfolio of capabilities, how do you tell the story about the value you're driving to the business to really make sure that you become a strategic partner with the business as opposed to just a cost center?”

LEARN MORE: Why should business outcomes drive IT decisions on emerging technology?

Finding Executive-Level Support for Nonprofit IT Initiatives

For nonprofit expert Christopher Smith, IT director at The Museum of Flight, communication and collaboration are keys to getting executive buy-in.

The process also involves working with a member of your finance team to vet a business use case for the technology. The more use cases a piece of technology covers, the better the ROI and the easier it is to convince leadership of its value proposition.

And last, it’s important to prioritize the importance of each project so executives can focus on which one is most time-sensitive to staying competitive in the market.

Sood again broadened the conversation when considering the need to communicate with C-suite leaders on their terms. “I think with going to finance and asking for additional incremental spending, it's always good to have a business case that you vetted with somebody from finance. So making sure that they are setting the expectations of what are good business case needs, what are the projections in terms of revenue, in terms of efficiency, in terms of outcomes.”

WATCH: Speak the same language as C-suite decision-makers.

Support for Cybersecurity Initiatives Can Be Particularly Elusive

Smith noted that, of all of the IT needs a nonprofit organization faces, security can be frequently overlooked or undervalued: “One of the things I've noticed, at least in the nonprofit world, is cybersecurity is not a high focus point for a lot of folks. So, I've had to heighten the conversation to the board level about cybersecurity and really craft a story for them around, ‘If this goes, we lose a valuable reputable aspect to our environment.’ So, it's really elevating that conversation.”

Buck Bell, executive vice president at CDW, concurred. Speaking with BizTech at RSA in May, he said, “When you're trying to get buy-in from executives for security initiatives, they have a lot on their plate. They're thinking through a lot of different things, and ultimately the biggest challenge often is a financial challenge.”

“Where do they allocate funds, and do they have confidence that those funds are going to deliver the outputs that they're seeking? Will there be measured risk reduction? Will there be an increase in X — whatever X is — that they'll see measurably in the business? Are they going to have some kind of cost savings somewhere?” Bell asked. “So, the biggest hurdle tends to be more of a language barrier and trying to make sure that you're positioning the needs that the security teams have in the language that the business can understand.”

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Bell summed up the need for communication and collaboration when pushing executive leadership to support cybersecurity and resilience investments. “Cyber risk is definitely business risk, and it's best viewed through that lens. If you think about it, you could reduce your risk profile to almost nothing by taking crazy measures. You could hire 10,000 people to review every access request in real time and go down two or three different checklists and say, ‘We know this is going to be secure.’ But ultimately, people don't have that kind of spend available.”

Bell said it’s essential to explain risk to an executive board in terms they will understand. Whether it’s cyber risk, regulatory risk, loss of assets or reputational risk, they’re all forms of business risk. “When you think about what's important to the business, you're trying to articulate that message to executives. You want to position that risk in a way that business leaders can understand.”