Why Associations and Nonprofits Need IT at the Strategic Planning Table

The question comes up in board meetings, in leadership retreats, and in one-on-one conversations between CEOs and their finance leads: are we spending the right amount on technology, and are we spending it on the right things?

The honest answer, for most associations, is that they don’t have enough information to know. IT decisions and strategic decisions happen on separate tracks. Leadership doesn’t have a clear picture of what’s technically feasible or what the technology risks actually are.

This article is about what happens when IT is included in your strategy discussions. What follows is our honest take on the question: Why is IT crucial to an organization’s strategic plan?

What does it actually mean to treat IT as a support function?

In the support-function model, IT’s job is to keep things running. The helpdesk handles tickets. The infrastructure gets maintained. Software gets licensed and updated. When something breaks, IT fixes it. When nothing is visibly broken, IT is largely invisible.

The measure of success in this model is negative: the fewer problems that reach leadership, the better IT is doing. The less you hear from them, the better things are going.

This was a reasonable model when technology was genuinely peripheral to how associations operated. That is no longer the case. Technology now mediates almost every interaction an association has with its members, its staff, its vendors, and its advocates. Treating the function that manages all of that as a background service is a mismatch between the model and the reality.

Kevin Fassanella, designDATA’s Director of Security and Compliance, is blunt about it: technology “is not a support function anymore.” It’s 2026, and technology is embedded in how organizations operate, compete, and grow. Leave it out of strategic planning, or ignore it completely, and the fallout shows up fast — in customer experience, operational efficiency, and competitive positioning.

Why does keeping IT out of strategic planning create risk in 2026?

The risk is not abstract. When IT is absent from strategic planning, the same failures show up again and again:

• Leadership scopes technology projects without the people who will have to build them. They underestimate costs and timelines. Decisions that looked sensible from an operational perspective turn out to carry technical dependencies nobody accounted for.
• Budget decision-makers defer security investments because they don’t have a clear picture of what’s at stake. Technology adoption stalls, or proceeds unsafely, because the organization does not have the governance infrastructure to manage it.
• Staff start using tools without policy or training. The value is scattered and the risk is unmanaged.

That first one rarely survives contact with reality. Greg Starling, Head of Innovation and Growth at Doyon Technology Group, doesn’t have much patience for the phrase “cost center” at all. As he puts it, “there’s not a single organization on earth that has ever had their systems locked down with a crypto key that thinks that technology is a cost center.” The real cost center, in his view, is the day you can’t get into your own systems and you’re losing tens of thousands of dollars or more.

Is AI a technology decision, a security decision, or a strategy decision? 

It depends who you ask. Someone on staff is excited about AI. Someone else is worried about what it means for data and liability. IT gets stuck implementing whatever gets decided, usually after the fact. The honest answer is that it’s all three, at once, and splitting it into separate conversations is exactly what causes the problems associations run into.

A coherent AI strategy needs clean member data to work with, a policy for what staff can and can’t feed into an AI tool, and training so people actually use it correctly. Skip any one of those and the AI project stalls: the chatbot gives wrong answers because the membership database it’s pulling from is out of date, or a staffer pastes donor financial details into a public AI tool because nobody told them not to.

Cybersecurity and AI are tangled together for the same reason. Every new AI tool a staff member adopts is a new place organizational data lives, often outside anything IT has visibility into. A governance gap in one is a governance gap in the other.

Member experience comes down to something simpler: can a member renew, register for an event, or get a question answered without waiting on a staffer? Associations that have modernized those touchpoints keep more members. Associations that haven’t are losing them.

That’s the piece Greg pushes back on hardest. “If an organization is looking at technology as a cost center, they’re not thinking about technology in the right way,” he says. “Technology should in some way be generating revenue for every organization.”

What does the difference look like in practice when IT is at the table versus when it isn’t?

Without strategic IT involvement

Programs launch on platforms that were never designed for them. The membership team ends up running tools that don’t talk to each other, because nobody mapped the workflow before buying. A ransomware incident hits, and the backup systems that were supposed to save you haven’t been tested in two years. Membership renewals stop. Staff can’t access donor records. The association is down for a week, not a day. AI tools roll out without training, and six months later nobody’s using them.

Leadership spends time managing the IT relationship rather than benefiting from it. Every decision requires negotiation. There is no shared picture of where things are headed.

With strategic IT involvement

Technology decisions are made with a roadmap that connects investments to organizational priorities. Security posture is reviewed regularly and presented to leadership in plain language. AI projects are scoped with both the organization’s mission and the technical architecture in mind from the beginning.

Greg frames the alternative as a straightforward waste. IT is full of “the people whose job every day is to solve problems. Your best problem solvers, your best creative thinkers,” and leaving them out of the room means leaving a gap that didn’t need to exist.

Put those problem solvers at the table instead, and the role itself changes. IT shifts from managing problems to building toward something. That’s a different kind of relationship.

How does IT earn and keep its seat at the strategic table in a nonprofit or association?

Most IT relationships run on break-fix: you call when something’s broken, IT fixes it, and the less you hear from them the better things are assumed to be going. That model earns a seat at the strategic table by never asking for one.

The simplest test for whether your IT partner has moved past that: do they bring you a roadmap, or do they mostly show up when something needs fixing? A break-fix partner is responsive. A strategic partner is proactive, and it shows in what they bring to the table, not just how fast they answer the phone.

A strategic partner connects technology decisions to your outcomes and mission, not technical specs. They bring you a roadmap you can actually evaluate and act on, not a list of everything that’s outdated. They show up to planning conversations with a point of view on what your organization needs, not just an inventory of what it already has.

They should also be able to answer questions like these without scrambling:

• What are the three technology investments that would most meaningfully advance our goals over the next 18 months?

• Where are the security gaps that represent the most exposure?

• What does AI adoption need to look like for us, and what does it require?

If those conversations aren’t happening, the relationship may be covering the basics, but it isn’t delivering what it could.

Part of the confusion comes down to definition. Which responsibilities fall under IT? Those questions have to be settled before an organization can figure out who belongs in the room. And in 2026, IT covers a lot more ground than most people give it credit for: AI, cybersecurity, Microsoft 365 governance and adoption, ongoing training. If your organization still thinks of IT as “the people who keep the computers running,” you’re probably underfunding the parts of it that matter most.

Tech teams are often some of the most capable problem solvers in an organization. Leaving them out of strategic conversations is a missed resource.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do we make the case to our board that IT needs to be part of strategic planning?

Frame the conversation around outcomes the board already cares about: member experience, organizational reputation, financial risk, and operational capacity. Cybersecurity is the most direct entry point, because the downside scenarios are concrete. AI is the most visible opportunity. The connection between technology investment and those outcomes is not complicated to explain, but it usually needs to be made explicitly rather than assumed.

What if we don’t have a dedicated IT director?

A managed IT services partner can fill a meaningful part of this role, provided the relationship is structured to allow it. If your IT provider is operating in break-fix mode, you can ask them to expand the engagement to include roadmap planning and regular strategic check-ins. If they are not set up to provide that, it is worth evaluating whether the relationship is the right fit for where your organization is headed.

How often should IT be part of executive or board conversations?

At minimum, once per quarter for a substantive technology review: current posture, upcoming investments, security status, and any emerging opportunities or risks. For organizations actively building AI capabilities or undertaking significant technology transitions, more frequent touchpoints are worth the investment. The goal is for leadership to understand the technology landscape well enough to make informed decisions, not to become technical experts. 

Is this primarily relevant for larger associations?

Smaller associations are often more exposed to the risks of underinvesting in strategic IT, because they have less margin for error. A technology failure or security incident is proportionally more disruptive for a 30-person organization than for one with 200 staff. The scale of investment is different, but the strategic logic is the same.

What does a technology roadmap for an association typically include?

A useful technology roadmap addresses current state, near-term priorities, investment requirements, and the sequence in which changes should happen. It connects technology decisions to organizational goals, not just to what is technically outdated. And it gets updated regularly, because the technology landscape changes quickly and a static roadmap goes stale.

The Conversation That Changes Things

The gap between where most associations are and where they could be on technology strategy comes down to conversation, not resources.

For associations that have kept IT in the background, the shift feels bigger than it is. 
Most of it comes down to two changes: inviting IT into planning discussions earlier, and asking your IT partner to bring a roadmap instead of a problem list. No separate initiative. No new budget line.

If your next board meeting or budget conversation doesn’t include anyone from IT, change that before the next one.

Curious what that roadmap actually looks like once IT is in the room? Read: IT Assessment for Associations: What Do You Actually Get?

Want to see what strategic IT looks like for your organization?

When you work with designDATA, you get a technology plan that connects to what your association is actually trying to accomplish. Ready to have that conversation? Let’s start it. Book a strategy conversation today.