“I’ve lived through 25 years of technology shift in the nonprofit sector and here is what I think it means for AI adoption.”

In September 2000, I founded a software company called Engaging Networks and began selling a hosted engagement platform to nonprofit organizations. In those early days many nonprofits expressed very real concern about hosting their data in the cloud. This sounds like a silly objection today as virtually everything runs in the cloud. Over the next twenty years, with every single significant shift in technology, we had to address objections fueled by the ‘newness’ of the technology. Today, as AI radically changes the connection between people and technology, we face new objections that slow or block adoption.

This paper argues that the nonprofit sector’s relationship with new technology follows a repeating, measurable cycle. The sector does not adopt new technology when it is proven; it adopts new technology when mass consumer behavior makes non-adoption untenable.