Peter Campbell, TechCafeteria.com

I’ve spent more than 20 years in the sometimes maddening, sometimes wonderful, world of nonprofit IT management. Along the way I’ve worked under a variety of CEOs with very diverse styles, and I’ve developed, deployd and maintained ambitious technology platforms. In order to survive, I put together three basic tenets to live by.

Tenets to live by:

1. Management is 360 degrees: managing your superiors and peers is a bigger challenge than managing your staff.

2. To say anything effectively in an organization, you have to say it at least three times in three different media.

3. Follow Fidonet’s basic social guideline, “Do not be excessively annoying and do not become excessively annoyed.”

Ali Levine, NTEN Special Projects Fellow

I have spent almost every Thursday night for the past two years in classes, learning, thinking and talking about nonprofit management. I’ve also worked for more than ten years working at various nonprofit organizations. I’ve seen, and studied different types of management, and frequently hit up against the ever-popular question of ‘should nonprofits be run like businesses?’ In fact, it was a raging discussion just recently on a nonprofit tech list. I’ve always felt that this question misses the point. But it does offer an interesting look at the intersection between day-to-day management and the larger trends at work in the nonprofit sector.

In my Thursday night pursuits of my Master’s in Nonprofit Administration, I studied those trends– the rapid growth and professionalization of nonprofits, the ‘culture of scarcity’ that permeates the sector and the growing pressures of accountability, to name a few. I also studied the various management functions of a nonprofit – finance, fundraising, and technology. What is abundantly clear, to the point of being a bit boring at times, was that regardless of the function, every project has a set of strategic steps that are strikingly similar.