 Like most non-profit organizations, you probably have a long list of technology needs. It's easy to get caught in the trap of wishing you had more time and money to tackle them. Meanwhile, the list gets longer and more daunting. You can only move forward by picking a first step and starting there. If you haven't done much with technology, start small. If you're ready to be more ambitious, define what project you're moving forward with and how to get underway. The secret to taking that first step is prioritizing your projects. Think of your technology needs as a pyramid. You start with basic office infrastructure, such as up-to-date computers, a shared file server and backup system, and effective email and calendaring software. Then, you move on to your case management system, making sure it is flexible enough to evolve with your organization. And once you have a solid foundation in place, you're ready to turn your attention to legal aid-specific technology that delivers a strong return on investment. Then, you're ready to start creating innovative ways to deliver legal services. Once you have a solid foundation for your pyramid, deciding what to do next can be tricky. What technologies will give you the best return on investment? How do you quantify the costs and benefits? One way to get started is to look at return on investment. Fundamentally, you'll never get to an exact return on investment figure. You won't be able to say that one project will bring in the equivalent of $54,200 after costs. Real life is more complex than that. Many of the costs and benefits are hard to estimate. You know that they're important, but any number you derive to support your view will be an approximation. The idea is to estimate a plausible number, maybe a high and a low, for costs and benefits, to see whether it's likely that you'll get a strong return on investment. So how do you do it? We'll go through a set of costs and benefits one by one, but to consider any of them, you need to gather data. Has your organization taken on a project like this before? Have other similar organizations? What measurable results can you see? How is your project similar and how is it different from those past examples? Next, start thinking about your goals and how to link them to things you can measure. Are you seeking to serve more clients or shorten the amount of time attorneys spend on routine tasks? To track your progress against each of these goals, you will need metrics that quantify them. This might not always be direct. For example, you can estimate the amount of time an attorney currently spends with each client by tracking it for a week and calculating an average. Or you could use client satisfaction reports as a proxy for the successful outcome of the case. Don't feel you need to have one definitive number in any particular category. The idea isn't to have perfect measures, just ones that are useful. Once you have tracking metrics in place, you need to assign plausible values. For example, if saving attorney time is valuable to your organization, then you need to define how much time you could plausibly save. For instance, maybe you could save at least two minutes per client on average, but there's no way you're going to save more than 10 minutes per client. If you then multiply each end of the range by a plausible hourly rate for an attorney and multiply the number of clients the attorney might see, you have a high and a low value for the plausible cost savings. It's important to stress that this is not science. The values are estimates and are being derived as units of comparison only. In the example we just looked at, the organization did not actually save 2,133 real dollars. What we can learn is that another project that costs twice as much, but could save four times more attorney hours, plausibly offers a better return on investment. A good way to get started calculating return on investment is by looking at the costs and benefits of your project. Here are the big picture costs and benefits. We'll walk through each of these to help you frame them for your own organization. Let's start with the benefits. There are likely line items in your budget that you wish you could cut down or eliminate completely. For example, attorneys in large states often have to travel great distances to see clients and occasionally have to stay overnight. Implementing technology that allows clients to speak with an attorney remotely could save hundreds of dollars per client. Many service delivery technologies promise huge time savings. For example, a document assembly system could significantly reduce the amount of time an attorney spends helping clients fill out routine paperwork. To determine how big your time savings will be, first estimate how much time each paperwork task takes you and how often your organization completes that task. Then think through how much time it would take with a document assembly system. The difference is your time savings. Central to every legal aid organization's mission is the belief that every litigant deserves fair representation. Unfortunately, limited time and funding are barriers to that goal. Client numbers are relatively easy to track. Any case management system will help you do this. But you'll need to also think about self-help clients and how to count them. For example, you might use web analytics or a system that requires online users to create a profile to capture this information. Kiosks, mobile apps, and other mobile outreach efforts should also include ways to count the number of people reached. Sometimes, organizations struggle just to provide minimal services and can never fully provide what they know their clients really want or need. For example, combined triage and intake systems can help applicants get more information and go more quickly to where they can get the most help. For people who would otherwise be turned away because they don't qualify for legal aid, document assembly and expert systems provide them with more in-depth help than they would get doing a Google search or trying to fill out the forms alone at their kitchen table. Figuring out how to measure the value of additional clients served or an improvement in the quality of services can be tricky. One way might be to consider how much the client him or herself would pay to get the services or increase the quality of those services. Another way is to calculate how much taxpayers might save if more people receive your services or get a higher level of service from your organization. Now that we've looked at some of the benefits of service delivery technologies for legal aid organizations, let's talk about costs. Not just the immediate obvious costs, but what you'll have to spend throughout the entire project. Hardware and software are the most obvious costs of any technology project. You may be able to get a good estimate of these costs online. If not, call a few vendors. Most will give you a ballpark price. It's important to remember that much of this cost is absorbed in the first year. To get a good sense of the true cost of your project, a five-year view makes the most sense. This multi-year perspective allows you to account for lower equipment or licensing costs in the years after implementation. New systems often mean carrying out familiar processes in a new way. You'll need rules in place to make sure people are using the technology properly, and you'll need to assign someone to be responsible for maintenance. But most importantly, you'll need to spend time training people on your new system. It doesn't matter how big a step forward your project is for the organization, if no one knows how to use the technology. What about a consultant? Should you hire one? The more complicated the project is, the more likely your answer is yes. Organizations use consultants for many different reasons. For instance, if you're not very familiar with the technology you're implementing, someone who has a lot of expertise in the area and is familiar with the options can help you make smart choices to help you get up and running. And someone who knows what's worked for other organizations can help your project team build on best practices. A consultant can also help keep a project moving forward. They typically bring project management skills to help gather everyone's input, help you make decisions, and generally keep all the trains running on time. This may well be a pretty low priority project to the staff involved, so hiring a consultant for whom it's a top priority can keep your own team accountable to the schedule you've defined. If you think there's going to be a lot of dissent and different opinions, a skilled consultant can also bring a useful outside perspective. Just having someone with no personal interest in one result over another can be helpful in mediating between different factions of your organization. If you choose to hire a consultant, you'll need to define an approximate cost. It's probably easiest to think of it as a range of hours and then an hourly wage. Most consultants will be happy to talk to you and give you a ballpark estimate of how much you might need to budget, likely with the hope of being on your list when you're looking to hire. You can also talk to other organizations that have hired consultants for similar projects to get a sense of how long it took and how much they charged. Even if you hire someone to do most of the work, there will still be staff time required. To talk about goals, define requirements, make decisions, define processes, get trained, and more. List out the steps for your project and take a crack at estimating the people who will be involved and the number of hours for each. If you feel you have no idea how much time it might take, consider asking a consultant to help you come up with a rough estimate. Also, keep in mind that your project has two halves. When estimating costs, make sure you account not only for the cash going to software or hardware, but also the staff time and consultant dollars that go into planning, designing, and completing your project. And don't forget to factor in the ongoing costs of maintaining your project in year two and beyond. It's unlikely that you'll be able to simply launch your technology into the world and then stop investing any time or money. Services such as document assembly or online learning tools will need to be updated with new content as laws change, so make sure you budget enough and have a plan for keeping it running long term. Also, make sure to calculate in the cost of diverting time and attention from other work. Your attorneys may need to spend less time with clients during your technology project. Will the resulting technology help you make up that lost time? Is the long term benefit big enough to justify any short term losses? Once you have your benefits and costs added up, you're ready to calculate your ROI. If you can assign dollar values to most of your benefits and subtract most of your costs, then divide that number by your costs and you'll get a plausible return on investment. If you've been tracking low estimates and high estimates, you can determine a minimum ROI and a maximum. Again, this isn't a science, but a framework to compare different projects. Of course, there may be things, especially benefits, that you can't really calculate. Those are your intangibles. However, just because you can't come up with a number for your intangibles, doesn't mean that they can't factor into your equation. The best way to use your intangibles is as a tiebreaker. If two projects calculate to a similar return, but you think that one project's intangibles actually offer a considerably higher return, then you have a clear choice. Similarly, if you calculate a negative return on investment, can your intangibles cover the difference? For example, if debating whether to go ahead with a $100,000 project that calculates a negative 10% ROI, are you comfortable saying that the intangibles are worth at least 10% of the cost? Now that you understand how to compare different technology projects, how do you get started? First, you need a plan to implement your project. Define who's going to take responsibility for implementing the plan, who's going to champion your key project, get the funding, if necessary, and work toward buy-in from staff. Who's going to make sure that your organization keeps the ball rolling? You also need to consider when is the right time to get started. Make sure you factor in what else is going on at your organization. If certain times of year are busier than others, schedule big changes or intensive work periods around those. Even with careful planning, you probably didn't have a lot of people on staff with nothing to do, so you're likely to need some people to drop one part of their job to make time for your new technology project. One way around this is to build capacity by hiring just for this project. This is also one of many ways a consultant can help. If it's a bigger project, people might care a lot about it. Make sure you communicate about it to the right people in an effective way, making people feel as though they're in the loop can go a long way towards getting buy-in. If you need help or knowledge, there are a lot of people who can provide up-to-date information and perspectives. For instance, your peers at other organizations may be thinking about many of the same issues. Forming a peer support group could be very useful. There are also a number of organizations out there to support you with technology information. These organizations offer free resources, and many also offer free or low-cost trainings, which is another way to dive more in-depth into a particular topic or stay on top of new possibilities. The Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project has a vast library of resources, including training videos, articles, webinars, blog posts, and technology case studies. The Connecting Justice Communities blog also contains many valuable resources, and you can read about new technology projects and get information about technology innovation grant winners at the Legal Services Corporation website. Many individual legal aid organizations also blog about their experiences with technology. For somewhat more advanced resources, N10 is a membership association for people interested in nonprofit technology. It offers a huge number of free posts and resources to help you learn and connect with others. It also has a very active calendar of low-cost webinars and a great national conference every year. And last but not least, Idealware. Idealware's core mission is to provide exactly the type of information that will keep you up to date on your options. It publishes two to three free articles a month on all sorts of different topics and about six free major reports a year, each one taking on key areas in great detail. It also offers workbooks, guides, and a blog, as well as a lot more great training like this one. If you haven't already, sign up for our email list to hear about what's new. This video series was made possible by a grant from the Legal Services Corporation. To learn more about the use of technology at Legal Aid Organizations, visit lsntap.org.