Flickr Photo: RobjtakThe leadership gap: wherever I go in the nonprofit world these days, the leadership gap comes up in conversation. Lots of research by lots of smart people points in one direction -- nonprofit leaders are leaving the sector at an increasing rate, and their staff don't feel ready or aren't interested in replacing them. (Get the specifics from Bridgespan's "Leadership Deficit" report and "Ready to Lead" from the Meyer Foundation, Idealist and Compasspoint.)

At the same time, I've heard rumbling in the NTEN universe from those of you who play another role in your organizations: technology leadership. CIOs and CTOs -- and those who do the work without the official title -- are all talking about a vacuum of technology leadership at their organizations. But if you go, who will follow?

If that's how you've been feeling, you're not imagining things.

Flickr Photo: Forty PhotographsYou know the drill. You need a new website gizmo or database doodad. You do your best to define the requirements, the stages you will go through during development, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. But somewhere during actual implementation, everything goes sideways, and nothing goes as planned.

We all know this happens, but no one can ever explain why. Well, now we have a nice graph to support gut feeling. The folks at Flightpath bring us this great post about planning for software projects and raising toddlers.

Having done both, let me just say this: True that, Flightpath. True that.

As the year winds down, the NTEN Affinity Groups remain charged with discussions ranging from whether or not attendees should bring their kids to the 2008 NTC to how the future of IT staff is changing -- provoked by the new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas G. Carr. (For a review and excerpt of the book go here.)

Robert Weiner poses the question:

"Do you agree? Will IT departments have "little left to do once the bulk of ... computing shifts out of private data centers and into "the cloud."?

And Peter Cambell responds:

Flickr Photo: jisc_infonetIn your leadership role, have you ever had to:

• Convince your board or leadership to invest in staff or training?
• Try to figure out how much to pay technology staff?
• Determine if your technology spending compares to other organizations like yours?

NTEN and The Nonprofit Times are making it easy for you to fill the gap between expensive benchmarking services costing thousands of dollars, and going it alone. We’re surveying thousands of staff at nonprofits big and small to find out what it takes to make technology work for them and what qualified staff they need. In turn, we want to give you the hard numbers you need to invest in technology.

> Take the Online Survey

Do you send out an HTML newsletter? How many times have you (quite literally) pulled your hair out trying to get it to look the same (or even decent) in different email clients? It's usually a giant guessing game to try and figure out what elements work in what clients.

Guess no more! The folks at Campaign Monitor, makers of an e-newsletter tool, have done the research and provided a nice, comprehensive guide to what you can and

CIO Insight just published a piece called "The Accidental Techie" and they think your job is lonely and thankless. I got a little depressed reading this article, visions of accidental techies hunched over computers held together with duct tape, and mean spirited CFOs wagging their fingers at them lingering in my head. And while I take issue with the gloom and doom nature of the article (all the research I can get my hands on leads me to believe that small FOR profits face many of the same challenges, but nobody is writing articles about THEIR lonliness), I do think the article raises one incredibly important point of order:

"Yet regardless of size, nearly all

It's January, which means we're all thinking about New Year's Resolutions, and starting the year off on the right foot. A little housekeeping is usually in order. Why not start with your email lists?

We see lots of questions in the NTEN Affinity Groups about email delivery - the problems we are all having making sure that our email ends up where it's supposed to. Adam Bernstein from Electric Embers will be leading a fabulous session on this topic at the 2007 NTC, but if you're looking for a few pointers in advance, we've got them for you.

Sparklist

You may remember us talking about the information technology staffing survey we conducted a few months ago. The results are in with some interesting findings.

• On average nonprofits have one staff member with some IT responsibility for every five organizational staff members.
• A digital divide exists between large and small nonprofits in technology spending and investment. A whopping 20 percent of the small nonprofits surveyed said they had no IT budget at all.
• Most nonprofits feel understaffed when it comes to IT.

We surveyed more than 1,000 people from nonprofits across the country and asked them about information technology at their organization - specifically about staffing, salaries, and investments.

Our results are both

Want hard numbers that show what technology investment does for nonprofits? Want to compare your IT staff to teams at other organizations? Take this survey and help us find out how much nonprofits should spend on IT and what the pay off is. We'll release our findings on November 15.

Take the survey.

Do you make the IT decisions at your nonprofit? Then you know that technology has the potential to change the way your nonprofit works and make the world a better place.

You also know that smart IT requires smart management and staff. We want to know what this really means, and we want you to tell us.

Take the NTEN Nonprofit IT Staffing Survey and help us find out. We'll ask you questions like:

• How many people does it take to run nonprofit IT?
• What do they do?
• How do you find good people?
• What are the salary ranges for your IT staff?

The survey only takes ten minutes to complete randomly selected participants will be given an Amazon.com or iTunes gift card.