The Complete IT Lifecycle Guide for Fiscally Sponsored Projects

As a fiscal sponsor, when it comes to supporting your projects, the devil truly lies in the details. Your mission is to provide organizational support, but you also have to give each nonprofit you sponsor the operational flexibility they need to thrive. 

But your efforts need to strike a balance, especially when managing the IT lifecycle of your projects. You have to ensure your projects are secure, stable, and have the technical infrastructure they need. But you also can’t overburden your own IT teams—especially as your organization sponsors dozens if not hundreds of projects.  

You may find your organizations forced into a binary decision—either take on the entire burden of IT support for each project, or leave them to resolve their own technology needs. But when you account for the entire lifecycle of your project, you need a more nuanced approach to IT management to ensure both sides of the partnership are set up for success.

Understanding the IT lifecycle in fiscal sponsorship

The relationship with your sponsored projects typically encompasses three stages: 

1. Onboarding 
2. Ongoing support 
3. Spinoff (when necessary) 

What makes this relationship particularly complex from an IT standpoint is that each project comes to your organization at different points in their technological evolution.

Some projects come to you as just ideas and one or two people using their personal gmail addresses. Others may already have established systems in place spanning websites, email accounts, and shared drives. The IT support you provide must be equipped to accommodate these variations in a way that maintains security best practices and operational efficiency.

The decisions made during each stage ripple throughout the relationship. Understanding how the needs of each project evolves throughout the relationship is the first step toward managing it effectively.

Onboarding: How to set your projects up for success

The onboarding phase represents your greatest opportunity to establish a strong IT foundation for your projects. However, it’s also where you have the greatest potential for a misstep to create further complications down the road.

Some projects under your umbrella may begin their journey as one or two people using personal Gmail accounts and shared folders. If they stick with that process too long, your project will just accumulate more technical debt and make a transition to an organizational email more difficult.

Without proper guidance, a project in its early stages may also make expedient, but problematic, choices — like setting up hosting and email services through website builders such as Wix or GoDaddy. While these platforms offer convenience, they often create technical entanglements that are difficult to scale and become increasingly difficult to unravel. 

The value of establishing security best practices from the start

Any potential security breach at one of your sponsored projects also potentially places your organization at risk. Any new project coming on with your fiscal sponsor organization should document their systems, including email platforms, domains, and software accounts. 

From there, you can implement baseline security measures such as two-factor authentication (2FA) and other best practices outlined in the checklist linked above. These insights form the foundation of establishing their IT maturity.

The onboarding stage sets the trajectory for the entire IT relationship with your project. When you help projects make informed technology decisions from day one, you drastically reduce the future complications and potential for risk.

Ongoing technical support: Finding the right IT model

Once your projects are set up with the right IT infrastructure, how does your organization provide ongoing support? Along with keeping up with platform updates, security patches, and other maintenance requirements at the infrastructure level, you should offer guidance about hardware and software as well as evolving best practices.

Fiscal sponsors typically choose from three broad approaches:

1. The Centralized Approach: You provide and manage all IT infrastructure for your projects, treating them essentially as extensions of your own organization. Projects use your email domain, your file storage systems, and your software licenses.
2. The Decentralized Model: Projects maintain their own independent IT systems, following guidelines and best practices you establish but handling day-to-day management themselves.
3. The Partnership Approach: You collaborate with specialized IT partners who understand fiscal sponsorship to provide appropriate levels of support, balancing centralization and autonomy according to your organizational needs.

Each model comes with distinct advantages and challenges. The centralized approach offers the most control and consistency but places a significant burden on your administrative resources. The decentralized model provides flexibility to your projects, but it also increases security vulnerabilities. 

Working with an outside IT provider offers the best of both worlds, but many MSPs won’t understand the unique experiences and challenges you face as a fiscal sponsor. When you work with Personified, you gain a partner who can both speak your language while understanding and supporting your mission.

Spinoff: Managing complex IT transitions

A project may grow to a point where they’re encountering restrictions under your sponsorship and decide to pursue independent 501c3 status. Or a project may simply choose to work with a different fiscal sponsor — or vice versa. In any scenario, your IT planning should accommodate this possibility. 

The complexity of the transition out from under your sponsorship depends largely on how you’ve structured your IT management. If you’ve taken a centralized approach — where you own the domain, email systems, shared drives, and software accounts — the spinoff process becomes more complicated. 

For example, if your project has been onboarded onto your Google workspace, you’ll have to separate out those details in addition to shared files, domains, software accounts, and other details. Unfortunately, given the complexity involved, it’s nearly impossible to handle this kind of migration seamlessly.

However, when you work with a partner like Personified, you can minimize the disruption of spinning off a project. We can help set up the right planning and communication that explains how a project can prepare for the migration so they maintain access to critical information.

When managing a spinoff, transparency is crucial. Projects need to understand:

• What systems they will lose access to
• What data they can take with them
• What disruptions they should anticipate
• What responsibilities they will assume for their own IT management

Setting realistic expectations helps projects prepare adequately for the transition and reduces frustration on both sides.

Balance is key to delivering support to your projects

As a fiscal sponsor, your mission is to empower your projects to fulfill their missions. The right approach to IT management provides crucial support for this goal by providing secure, efficient systems without unnecessary restrictions. By understanding and planning for the entire IT lifecycle—from onboarding through potential spinoff—you create an environment where your organization and your projects can thrive.

When properly managed, your IT systems become an invisible foundation that supports the important work your projects do every day. If this sounds like an approach to IT support that resonates with your organization, we should talk.