We are delighted to announce that the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators has published Z/Yen’s “Information Technology Governance in the Not-for-Profit Sector” as a Best Practice Guide. Z/Yen also carried a “Voluntary Sector Information Technology Benchmarking Survey”, sponsored by Poptel in association with ICSA. The Best Practice Guide is a handy manual for voluntary organisations starting to set out IT policies.

The survey showed that while 95% of organizations now have internet access and 83% have a website, only 36% of voluntary organisations have an IT strategy. Although 90% of those who do have an IT strategy believe that the strategy led to better management of IT. Interestingly, only 4% of respondents have a website tested by the RNIB for readability by the visually impaired. Only 10% of respondents with websites provide a “plain vanilla” version of their site to enable older machines to access the site effectively or designed to work well with text-only browsers such as Lynx, which is popular with the visually or orally impaired.

The benchmarking survey provides information about IT usage, attitudes and a high-level breakdown of annual expenditure. Copies of the survey results are freely available as a Word document from www.zyen.com.