Just Because It's Useful Doesn't Mean You Should Do It

In my opinion, technology people too often equate the phrase “this tool could be useful for your organization” with “your organization should be using this tool.” Could an organization find Pinterest useful? Yes, there could well be value. What about Twitter? Yes, certainly some organizations are finding Twitter useful. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all nonprofits should start using these tools right away.

Nonprofit staff are generally not sitting around trying to find useful things to do with their time. Instead, they have a list of hundreds of things that might be valuable, and they need to prioritize them. So the question is not: “Could this new tool potentially be useful to me?” but rather, “How useful is it likely to be compared to all the rest of the things that I’m doing?"  

Or, for most nonprofits, "compared to all the other things that I'm not doing because I don't have time to do them?”

I think this is really important in choosing technology tools. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed and dispirited thinking about all the great new tools you “should” be using.  But really the question is whether those tools are so valuable that they should displace something else that you're already doing, or should be the first one or two new task items on your priority list.