Forthcoming
A Field Guide for Nonprofit IT
Decades of running technology for advocacy organisations — from the servers to the studio to the satellite truck — distilled into a working reference for the people actually doing the job.
TL;DR: this is the nonprofit-IT reference I went looking for twenty years ago, never found, and eventually got tired of waiting for someone else to write.
Most technology writing assumes a budget, a team and a roadmap. Nonprofit IT has none of those, ever. It has one person, a board that needs the donation form working by Thursday, and a press conference at ten tomorrow morning that is not moving for anybody.
So this is the reference I wanted two decades ago and never found: what actually breaks, what it costs, what to buy versus what to build yourself, and how to keep a national platform running when the entire technology department is, in fact, just you.
What it covers
Web and CMS architecture for organisations sitting on a decade of filings that still need to be findable. Email deliverability, which is quietly the single most common silent failure in the whole sector. Telecom — yes, still, because a press office is a phone system whether anyone budgeted for that or not. Live production and broadcast integration. Donor data and where the CRM boundary actually sits. Security posture on effectively no budget. And the operational discipline that lets one person hold all of it without dropping something important.
Who it's actually for
The accidental sysadmin at a nonprofit who never applied for that job title. The communications director who inherited a website nobody documented. The one technical person on staff expected to be all of the above at once, and the executive director trying to work out what on earth to hire for.
Status, honestly
Chapters are in progress. The title is a working one and might not survive contact with an editor. If you want to know the moment it ships, just say so and I'll tell you — no list, no drip sequence, just one email when there's an actual book to buy.
