I’m just back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), an annual gathering put on by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), held this year in Baltimore. This was my first time at this the conference, so didn’t know quite what to expect. I found it to be a challenging-but-generative space, partially because of the current moment when nonprofits feel very much under attack (a constant theme throughout the conference) and in part because it felt like stepping into a foreign technology landscape. It was, as a result, easier to see the points of dissonance, but I also found that attention to translation and focusing on potential points of relevance yielded some useful insights.
NTC is easily one of the largest conferences I’ve attended, with registration typically running between 1500 and 2000 people. Because of its size, it was held in the Baltimore Convention Center which, despite excellent signage and conference layout, was still overwhelming due to of the sheer scale of spaces and distances between them. I should also say that there is clearly a lot of intentionality and attention to detail that goes into NTC, no small feat for a conference of this size, so a huge tip of the cap to everyone at NTEN for creating a physical and virtual space that evidenced those intentions in many ways.
Based on my (very unscientific) analysis, the conference seemed to be about a 50/50 mix of people who work for nonprofits and technology consultants who support the nonprofit sector. As an outsider, these two groups often seemed indistinguishable; most folks working for a vendor seemed to have worked at a nonprofit at some point in their careers. Because of this mix of attendees, many of the sessions felt like promotions of products or services masquerading as case studies. This is a very different kind of technology landscape than we’ve built at the RAC, and in some ways exactly the kind of outsourcing we have tried really hard to avoid. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this aspect of the conference, more on that below.
Related, I found NTC to be a very solutions-oriented conference. Almost all the sessions I attended were grounded in implementation of specific products or platforms. This meant a lot of case studies, and relatively few sessions which centered methodology or attempted to synthesize learnings across multiple case organizations or tools. Sometimes these case studies were useful, such as a case study from CARE which described how they transformed their organizational structure to build a team explicitly responsible for bridging the gap between technical staff and end users. More often, though I found the sessions which analyzed themes and trends across the sector to be the most provocative, such as a session titled “Nonprofit software: How is it funded, and is that good?” which broke down the nonprofit systems landscape based on how systems are funded, and the implications for a given system’s stability, support, innovation, culture, pricing control and risk of disruption.
NTC felt like a conference where people come to find technological solutions or meet people who can help them find those solutions, which makes sense for a conference that positions itself as the conference about nonprofit technology. Still, leading with technology is not always the best approach. For example, I attended a session on “Combating Decades of Digital Hoarding” in which the presenter described the technological approaches they had taken to help a research-based nonprofit reduce the amount of data they stored. However, as some of the other attendees pointed out, implementing a technical solution without data governance and a records management policy in place to drive that process felt like approaching the problem backwards.
I often felt like I was in a room with folks who both were and were not my people: despite the fact that many of these folks work in mission-driven organizations (which would very much make them my people) in large part the technology strategy of the organizations feels very opposed to both the values and methods that we’ve used at the RAC. On the one hand, it feels like there is less adversity to technology change (and perhaps change in general) in the nonprofit world than in archives; on the other, the level of staff turnover (which may have something to do with being less change-adverse) also has very real impacts on the ability of these organizations to build technical capacity that they own. With some notable exceptions, organizations seem happy to outsource the planning and execution of technology projects, to be used operationally by staff. In other words, although it’s clear that organizations understand technology as a mission-enabling force (the sheer size of NTC is a testament to that), they don’t appear to have the desire or ability to fully own it or strategically direct it.
Will I go to NTC again? Probably! It’s always useful to be in a context that’s adjacent to, but distinct from, one that feels completely comfortable. New insights and perspectives are often opened up that way, and I certainly feel like that was the case for me this year.