Our board has to approve spending. Will you present to them?

Nonprofit boards approve IT spending without having any particular reason to understand IT, which puts your executive director in the position of defending a proposal they did not write. We would rather be in the room.

What we bring to a board conversation:

• The decision framed as risk and consequence, not specification. Not that the firewall is out of support. That if it fails, the office cannot work for two to three days, replacement costs a certain range, and there is currently no way to work around it. Boards make that decision quickly. They cannot make the first one at all.
• Options with tradeoffs, including doing nothing. Boards are rightly suspicious of a single recommendation presented as inevitable. Two or three paths with honest costs and honest consequences, including the option of waiting a year and what that risks, gets a better decision and more trust.
• What it means for the mission. A board approves things that protect programs and donors. Donor data, the ability to run programs during an outage, the grant obligations you have signed up to. That is the frame that matters to them, and it happens to be true.
• Straight answers under questioning, including when the answer is that we do not know. There is usually one board member with a technology background, and they will ask something specific. Getting that answer right matters more to your credibility than the slides.

We will come to an evening board meeting, and we do not charge for it as a separate line for clients on agreement. We will also write the one page summary that goes in the board packet, which is frequently what people actually need.

One suggestion worth more than any presentation. If you are building a multi-year technology plan, get it in front of the board once as a plan, so that individual purchases in later years are executing something already approved rather than a fresh surprise each time. Boards respond very differently to an anticipated expense than to an unexpected one, even when it is the same amount of money.