Why Your Nonprofit Board Needs a Tech Person

If your nonprofit board talks about finance and legal every meeting but never touches technology, you're only governing half the organization.

The nonprofit sector is the second most attacked industry for cyberattacks. Save the Children got hacked. Blackbaud's 2022 breach hit more than 10,000 nonprofits, and most of those boards had no incident response plan.

AI is rewriting what "back office" means. And the data shows nonprofits are four times more likely to achieve their missions when they're tech savvy, but they spend a fraction of what a similarly sized for-profit spends on technology. That gap starts in the boardroom.

Alethea Hannemann is co-founder and CEO of Board.Dev, where she helps build tech-fluent nonprofit boards by training existing members and placing disruption-skilled tech leaders where they can drive transformation. On this podcast, Alethea sits down with Hiline's Matt Gardner to explain the three tech-leader archetypes every board should understand, the AI conversation that opens the door to better governance, and why tech and finance are two sides of the same coin at the nonprofit board level.

What you'll learn

• Why tech is now table stakes at the board level alongside finance and legal
• The three tech-leader archetypes to recruit
• Why AI is the door-opener conversation that nonprofit boards can't duck in 2025, and how to follow it with the harder data-risk conversations
• Why broken tech becomes broken financials and how to fix it
• Easy steps to get started making your board more tech saavy

Ready to give your nonprofit board the systems it needs?

Governance starts with timely, trustworthy financials. Our nonprofit finance team replaces the three-to-ten-system Frankenstein stack most organizations limp along with. Talk one of our NPO experts about the financial infrastructure your tech-savvy board is about to ask you for.

Resources mentioned in this video

• Board.Dev's Tech 28 – The 28-question starter list for getting tech onto a nonprofit board agenda

About the guest

Alethea Hannemann is co-founder and CEO of Board.Dev, where she's built a community of 5,000-plus nonprofit leaders and tech executives in the year and a half since launch. Before Board.Dev she ran operations for a large New York food insecurity nonprofit serving 10,000 people a week across the five boroughs, and spent her career in nonprofit consulting and capacity building. She founded Board.Dev after a personal experience with a Morgan Stanley board member who coached her through her own organization's tech strategy.