A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with my buddy Ramsey Tantawi, who is the IT manager of The Food Project, a wonderful nonprofit here in Massachusetts. We discussed the huge difference it makes for someone in his position to have an executive director who is curious and even enthusiastic about what technology can do for a nonprofit organization, even if he or she is not an expert in the field. 

The talk naturally turned to Pat Gray, who recently stepped down as executive director of The Food Project in order to move on to new challenges.  She is definitely in the honorable ranks of Executive Directors Who Get It about technology.  Now that Susan MacDougall has been installed as the interim executive director, Pat hopes to use some of her free time to immerse herself in all the innovations in information technology that she's been hearing about, and to explore what those technologies can do for nonprofit organizations.  She and I had a  chat about this last month, and I was delighted to recommend some tools and web sites for her to explore.

This led me to think about another tech-friendly executive director who is in transition:  Deborah Strauss, who heads up the I.T. Resource Center in Chicago, but is now seeking a successor, so that she can explore new vistas.  Debby is an example of an E.D. who runs an NTAP as a leader rather than as a hardcore geek. She's not a coder or a network administrator or a webmaster, but she gets it. She has years of experience in bridging the divide between nonprofits and technology, in making the case for technology funding to donors, and (perhaps most importantly) in all the tactical and strategic challenges that any nonprofit E.D. faces.

When I think about the wisdom of Debby and Pat, I envision them as members of a league of super-hero E.D.s who get it (about good technology and good management), barnstorming the world to provide just-in-time coaching to the rising cohort of nonprofit leaders.  A lot of management fads come and go, but I think that a league of tech-friendly nonprofit E.D. coaches would be a keeper.