Nonprofits and IT: Empowering Purpose with Technology

Luke Williamson is a leader in managed IT services and cybersecurity and the driving force behind Accurate Network Services. With a people-first approach to technology, Luke helps nonprofit and mission-driven organizations align IT strategy with purpose, security, and sustainable growth. He is known for fostering radical collaboration between leadership teams and technology partners—ensuring systems empower people, protect data, and strengthen impact. Luke is passionate about simplifying complex technology decisions so leaders can focus on what matters most: serving their communities and advancing their mission.

Episode Summary

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome, this is the Nonprofit Exchange and today I’m welcoming a really special guest, Luke Williamson. Well, you’re going to find out what he knows. We’re going to talk about nonprofits and IT, empowering purpose with technology. So he’s a leader in managed IT services and cybersecurity, things that are important today, as always, and the driving force behind accurate network services. Luke has built his organization around people-first technology, proactive security, and trusted advisory relationships. His approach centers on radical collaboration. We’re going to ask about that. Bringing people together. nonprofit leaders, and IT professionals to create secure, scalable, and mission-aligned systems that strengthen impact. Luke believes technology should empower people, reduce stress, and create clarity for growth. So Luke, welcome. So what are some of the, tell us, you know, why you’re here and what are some of the challenges that people face in the nonprofit sector with this thing called IT?

Luke Williamson

Well, Hugh, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate that and your very kind and generous introduction. Yeah, I mean, just to jump right into it, I mean, we, Acura Networks, my company, we love nonprofits. We love the fact that our mission as a company is to use the success of our business to better the lives of those we work with. And there is no better group of humans on this planet that we feel connected with that vision as our friends in a variety of nonprofits serving a variety of people and communities and constituents. So yeah, we just love working with nonprofits and seeing the impact of our work. I think your question was around challenges that we see. Of course, there are many, and some of them are not specific to just non-profits. Any organization, any group of people are going to have challenges and issues. But I think the regular list that your listeners can probably relate to, so inconsistent funding, not lack of funding, but the inconsistency of getting the funding. perhaps lack of talent and expertise in some key roles. And at least in my market space, I see a lot of fragmentation. So there’s a lot of non-profits doing really great work, and there are small teams delivering services to people in need. but it’s very fragmented. And so, you know, there’s oftentimes an opportunity for very similar nonprofits to come together, to share resources, to deliver services at perhaps a larger scale. From a technology standpoint, I can really summarize the main challenges as a huge divergence, and I know we’re gonna talk about this in a bit, divergence and maybe misalignment between technology and the actual mission of that nonprofit.

Hugh Ballou

Let’s go there. We have a lot of myths about technology, a lot of fears about technology. And you have this very calming presence about you. No, no, we can help with that. So you said people-centered. So we tend to think of technology as replacing. But in my work, relationship is the basis for leadership, for funding, for communications, for so many things. So talk about your perspective as people-oriented technology.

Luke Williamson

Absolutely, yeah. So to paint a picture of where technology does not work or serve the organization to the best that it could, it comes down to perhaps excitement or maybe an overzealous salesperson that comes in and dazzles and amazes with a particular piece of technology. Right now, of course, we’re just completely awash in all things AI. People want AI, AI, AI, and when I talk to them, whether they’re a nonprofit or not, I say, well, what do you want to do with it? They don’t know. They just know that they want AI, and they want it now, and they want a variety of different tools. So what we do to the best of our ability is walk it back and put the technology aside. Put the shiny ball that, you know, distracts over in the corner And let’s just start with understanding and gaining an empathetic view of the organization. Empathy at the very core of all of this. First of all, what is the mission of the nonprofit? Can we articulate what it is that we are trying to do? Describe who’s on the other end of our service delivery, right? Really understand who the recipient of that nonprofit service is. Who are the people that are delivering that service? What are the processes that those people are following to deliver the service? And finally, take a step back and say, where is the low-hanging fruit and opportunity to improve, tune, or better allow these groups of amazing people to do more. So it’s very much start with the organization, start with the people, and then find the right technology to serve and aid in the delivery of that service, rather than starting with the exciting technology first and trying to contort and conform the organization and their budgets to adopt something that may not be ultimately the biggest lever of value for them or who they serve.

Hugh Ballou

I want to highlight that. If you’re coming by on one of the social medias, you see us talking, this is the Nonprofit Exchange, and we’re talking to Luke Williamson about technology today, but Luke, what you just articulated so resonates with what Center Vision teaches and represents. Technology is a tool. So the basic what you just gave us was a basic leadership lesson, you know Why are you here? What is your mission? Who are your people? Who do you serve? That’s so Marketing principles haven’t changed. There’s technology Fundraising principles haven’t changed but we have better tools. So you’re highlighting the things we should be doing And so a conversation with you helps us figure out what are the basics we need so that technology can serve us. So there’s some misconceptions that technology is going to fix everything without us doing anything. So go back to that. Some of the fundamentals, highlight a few more of those. And why is it important to have those in place before you can really deliver maximum value to people?

Luke Williamson

Well, I make some assumptions here, too. You know, I mean, we’re at the point now where certain things I think are table stakes. So I’m not going to dig too much into what I would consider table stakes. But at a very high level, you know, most organizations are going to have something called a firewall. Most are going to have somewhere to store files. Most organizations are going to have some spam filtering on their email to, you know, prevent viruses and time wasters entering their inbox. Things of that nature. So these tend to be table stakes. Most organizations of any operational maturity level, when we come in, they have those things. It’s what comes next. Right? And it’s looking, as you say, at specific tools that aid in the delivery of service where we can kind of deliver maximum value and really move the needle for organizations. There is tons of low-hanging fruit. We see it all the time. But again, it’s very important to have the organization walk us through exactly how that organization operates, Where are their bottlenecks? Where are the little small things that tend to annoy, distract, or slow down the delivery of a service? And we zone in on those, and we want to curate the right technology to kind of grease the wheel, make it a little bit easier for people to do their jobs. So yeah, I mean, there’s tons of opportunities. Just to give you a few examples of things that we have recently brought in for some nonprofits. Scheduling assistance, right? So where we can replace paper and a pen with something that’s automated and can be done from a phone. Just from an errors and omissions standpoint, collection of information, making people’s life easier. Everyone holds a cell phone. They might’ve forgot their pen in the car. There is opportunity for some AI tools. We have been dabbling in some grant writing and assessment tools that, again, just save time. Does not replace the human, but certainly does a wonderful job of saving time and summarizing. And dictation and summary of meetings. So the fact that you can operate a board meeting or an internal meeting, and immediately capture to-dos and drive accountability in the organization rather than somebody just manually trying to scribe, again, is a needle mover for many organizations.

Hugh Ballou

And that is radical. Let’s use technology to do the things that are menial tasks that take our attention away from what’s important. And so I deal with lots of leaders who started up because they have really good skills, they have really good offerings for people, but they don’t have the knowledge of how to run an organization. And so we confuse an investment in a technology as an expense when really that’s going to help us connect and deliver our message to those people who are, I’m going to call supporters, people that support us with their time, their talent, and their money. So talk about the data sharing with our stakeholders and potential stakeholders that you can help people with.

Luke Williamson

So, I mean, data is at the center, obviously, of any organization. What’s the saying? You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So collection of data and being able to action that in a timely manner is critical. So again, starting with the, I’m going to be a bit of a broken record, but this is the theme of the talk is really starting with how does the organization serve customers? Who are the people doing that work? What are the existing tools they’re using? and where’s the low-hanging fruit to improve the delivery and basically make life better for the people that work in our organization and the people that we serve. Oftentimes, decisions and identifying where these problems lurk is a matter of actually collecting data versus anecdotes and making decisions on, you know, whether it be technology, staffing decisions, etc. So we have to make it convenient, easy, and actionable to get that data. So going back to my scheduling example and giving a team of frontline workers the ability to both get approval for overtime quickly, so removing some of the bureaucracy if they need to serve a customer and get that approval, or just make sure that shifts are load balanced appropriately across teams. In the old way, it was pen and paper that would go into a filing box of some sort. Somebody would come in on Monday. A decision would be made. An email would go out. Somebody may or may not receive that. Now that workflow is largely all done. just from a cell phone, essentially, with an automated workflow, and there’s data being captured on how much overtime on a weekly basis is being approved, and that will assist leadership in deciding, are we understaffed? That’s a decision that could relate to burnout on the front lines, a reduction of quality of service when you have tired people that are doing, you know, nine, ten hour days over and over and over again. But that overtime data would be more difficult to maybe extract if it was just contained in stacks of paper unless somebody looked at it. So we have a leadership scorecard, which this data now flows into. They’re tracking overtime as a KPI or a key performance indicator for their frontline staff. And they’re looking at it through the lens not only of cost, but of the quality of life of the people that work in their organization. and the quality of the service that’s being delivered on the other end.

Hugh Ballou

That’s all extremely valuable. And it takes those menial, repetitive chores and puts them into something that’s not going to drive you to overfunction and burn out. Another use, this wasn’t in my notes or our discussions, but you’re going to need data. Well, if you’re going to do a funding application for a grant, This is going to be helpful information. They want to see that you’re good stewards of the funds. But this is something that a lot of leaders don’t think of. OK, you get this grant award. You’ve got to track the progress of the grant. So what wisdom? And then if you’re going to get a corporate sponsorship, that’s marketing money. You need to track the eyeballs or whatever that company wants to see. So in both cases, those are data driven, aren’t they?

Luke Williamson

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s the short answer. Um, the, the next step of it is, so you’re collecting this data, who should be viewing it and how do you simplify and aggregate it? Uh, so again, we always start with the organization challenge first. And so through our discussions, we may arrive at, uh, you know, an interesting discussion point around, a leadership team having a weekly meeting, and they just don’t have the data to make decisions on whether they continue a marketing campaign or whatever that may be in their organization. A lot of it’s around staffing. Do we have too many or too few people? And trying to really understand and load balance the human component. So, you know, there are ways to take dozens of spreadsheets or wherever this data may be lurking to identify it and to pull it into a unified dashboard so that the leadership team can show up Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. They go through issues, they go through a scorecard, and they see near real-time data reflecting different areas of their organization. So it’s not enough to just have data. I mean, everybody collects data. I mean, there’s data all over the place. It’s a matter of simplifying, aggregating it, and then presenting it in a way that people can actually make decisions in a timely manner. And so again, dashboards would be from that menu of technology that we might pull from, but it starts with the nonprofit just telling us what their actual business or nonprofit related issue is. So put technology aside and just focus on where are the areas that make us better. And from there, your IT partner should be curating the solutions rather than starting with fancy dashboard and you kind of figure out where that’s going to necessarily fit, if that makes sense.

Hugh Ballou

It makes a lot of sense. And it’s data. We make data-driven decisions. So, there’s those people out there. Now, you and I talked before. I love technology. If it’s a problem, I like to figure it out. It’s second nature for me. I’m not a normal nonprofit guy. There are people listening to you that are terrified of technology. I talk to people about delegation and bringing people with complementary skills onto your team. So what advice do you have for a nonprofit leader that’s not really excited about technology, but they know they need it? In terms of how do they bring somebody on their team that could interface with somebody like you and could provide value to the nonprofit?

Luke Williamson

Well, I would say you don’t need to be, it’s not a prerequisite to be excited about technology, honestly. But you would assume that the leaders of these organizations are excited about outcomes. They’re excited about delivering a superior service, about changing the world, changing the community for the better, improving the lives of the people that are working at the non-profits. These are things that I think everybody can get excited about. The how we actually execute and improve may include technology, which is where your IT company, internal IT person, partner, consultant, whoever may be at the table that has the capability to curate and select from a very large menu of options and solutions. Your job as a leader in the organization is to simply know your organization, Know your people, know how to improve service delivery, and be aware of where the low-hanging fruit may be to improve. Every single problem in your organization is not going to be solved by technology. I wish it could, otherwise, I mean, my life as a business leader would be infinitely more easy. But, you know, when we’re talking about workflows and we’re talking about job aids and systems that, you know, again, kind of grease the wheel and make it easier for people to do their jobs, there are many, many options. But you really need to start with the problem first. And then again, we reverse engineer and work backwards, whether there are economical solutions that deliver value in that area. So don’t be excited about technology. That’s our job.

Hugh Ballou

That is extremely valuable advice. We need to worry about leadership and the people. And so actually having this component is so important. Now let’s talk a minute about cybersecurity. That’s something that you help with, and people are afraid of being invaded that way. So it sounds expensive. So talk about cybersecurity, and is it really expensive?

Luke Williamson

Well, I mean, expensive, of course, is somewhat relative to your total IT budget, the size of your organization, funding, and things like that. Again, my observation is from the nonprofits that we interact with that are kind of net new to accurate networks. The table stakes are often in place. And the table stakes would actually be similar to what you might have at home. You have some form of antivirus running on your computer. You have a firewall blocking bad stuff from coming into your network. You have wireless security. Most people even have what’s called two-factor authentication or multi-factor now turned on. The world has basically enforced that on our behalf widely. So the areas that are kind of value-add, they are slowly moving in our industry. We say from like a cell to a tell because they are becoming requirements. Would be things like cybersecurity training for your people. So there are inexpensive systems, a few dollars per individual per month, that will basically get them subscribed to a drip campaign, educating them in a range of common cyber threats. This could be identifying phishing emails, the insecurity of using public Wi-Fi access points, things of that nature. So you’re basically better informing and arming your front line to be a little bit more savvy. And the reason for that is most organizations do have the table stakes. And the technology is getting harder and harder to pierce through as a hacker. And so they have found a easier vector, which is hacking people. So it is easier to maybe trick you as a human being and your goodwill to maybe surrender information, click on a link, things of that nature, than it is to actually thwart your firewall and your antivirus. It is actually easier to hack you than your computer. So the rise of social engineering, where people are tricked in all sorts of different ways, ultimately with the intent of gaining access to an account and then data, can really be protected significantly by just enrolling and having people a part of these regular education platforms. The other piece is around the idea of not if, but when somebody will get into your stuff. Even if it doesn’t happen, we want to adopt this kind of dire mindset. And with that mindset, we talk about breach detection. So not breach prevention, but breach detection. So what happens when somebody does have your password, and they do get past your multi-factor authentication, and they are snooping through your mailbox and your data? They could have very sensitive information in it. We want to close the window if somebody gets through that front door within seconds or minutes. Because the longer time they have to kind of operate in there, the more data they can exfiltrate, the more they see, the more damage they can cause. So there are very inexpensive systems. We have them in place for all of our nonprofit and profit customers alike that detect any sort of suspicious activity within an Office 365 or Google environment. Kind of like a little laser tripwire where somebody kind of jiggles the lock and gets through. They take two steps in the door. You are not you, and the door closes. Bank vault closes in front of them. We lock the account down and we can take action. The third point would be cyber insurance. I’m not sure the parity between the Canadian cost and requirements versus the American cost and requirements, but cyber insurance fills a massive void in the event that somebody does breach, somebody does gestate or exist within an environment long enough to possibly have access to sensitive information. Your problem at that point as a non-profit is not purely a technical one, it’s a legal one. And so if you have somebody that has access to medical records or things that are actually quite common within a lot of the nonprofits that we work with, you actually require a legal, sometimes a public relations response that goes way outside the scope of maybe what your organization can provide or an IT company. So it’s very important that you have that insurance backstop, which tends to be fairly inexpensive to really hedge against those potential risks.

Hugh Ballou

This last section, I want to highlight this as others. You’ve given us many, many profound leadership paradigms here. This is a big one, our liabilities. So this one is bigger than we think. And we just, I think we’re working on borrowed time. And as somebody who’s had multiple websites hacked and malware put in, it’s a problem if they get in there. So Luke, where can people find you? I’m going to show your website, but in the meantime, what’s the link for people to find you?

Luke Williamson

Absolutely, yeah. So people can wander over to my company’s website, which you have up there, accuratenetworks.ca. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Just look up Luke Williamson. Happy to connect on any of these topics, but definitely not just from a business development standpoint. So if you had some ideas, some thoughts around anything that we’ve talked about, or maybe things we haven’t, feel free to connect with me. My email as well, luke at accuratenetworks.ca. Fire me an email, happy to be a part of the conversation outgoing.

Hugh Ballou

And if you’re listening on audio on the website, there’s a contact us button and there’s a phone number on your website. So it sounds like you are open for people to contact you. And there’s a lot of these things, if people would just talk to you or have an email, it could help them make calmer decisions. So I’m gonna end with a couple of questions. What advice would you give nonprofit leaders who feel overwhelmed by technology decisions?

Luke Williamson

Zoom out, zoom way out. What is the mission of the organization? Who do we serve? What is working well? Where’s the low-hanging fruit to make improvements? Collect feedback from your team. take all of that information and make issues less. Is this urgent and things we need to solve now are these longer term problems. And from there, bring that to your IT partner, consultant, internal IT team, and ask them to marry these problems with the best possible technology solutions. Again, starting with your organization, working backwards, rather than starting with an overwhelming buffet of technology and trying to pick what you think might be useful.

Hugh Ballou

and having an expert to help you with that. Nonprofits and IT must move beyond break and fix support into strategic collaborative partnerships. When leaders and IT professionals work together proactively, organizations become more secure, more efficient, and more mission-focused, as you talked about. Radical collaboration means aligning technology with purpose, protecting donor trust, which is a big deal, and building systems that support people rather than frustrate them. You’ve given me a lot of hope and a lot of new information. And I’ve been doing this a long time, Luke. So I’m so happy to see the emphasis on leadership within the context of IT. So Luke Williamson, thank you for being our guest today and providing such great wisdom for our guests on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Luke Williamson

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Hugh.

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