Funders are increasingly focused on measurable results, and technology initiatives are not exempt from this expectation. To prove an investment is worthwhile, nonprofits must show that the net gain will be more than the cost. But in our attempts to calculate return on investment, nonprofit leaders ...

In a previous blog post I asserted that, for grantmakers, understanding technology well enough to make good funding decisions is important—and there are resources available to help.

  Image courtesy of Waiting for the Elevator. Can your nonprofit even measure its return on investments (ROI)? Putting together an ROI report can be time consuming, but can also lead to great data and help you find ways to trim costs without shirking quality.

Is there a word more often used in the world of nonprofit technology? Maybe "the cloud". Potentially "ROI". But "SEO" is a strong contender for most used buzz word. The term gets thrown around a lot, but most people are unfamiliar with the word's origin. From what started as just an idea that ...

Editor's note: This article was originally published in NTEN: Change (http://www.nten.org/change-quarterly/), June 2015, CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

By Karen Graham, June, 2015

Most nonprofits seems to associate a look at Return on Investment with measuring the success of a project after the fact--sort of like outcomes measurement, but with money involved. But in my experience in the corporate sphere--where I spent about five years doing technology consulting with ...