Ultimately would like a recent survey of IT spending in the not for
profit sector (e.g. IT budget as a % of total budget) preferably in
Canada but US/European numbers are good too. Also nice to see how this
compares to the For Profit sector but this is not critical

Dominiccko –

Thank you for the interesting question.  I've long been familiar with
the spread of IT spending among commercial firms but this sent me
searching for non-profit organizations.

Non-profit groups are varied.  There are 175,000 non-profit groups in
Canada; 77,000 of them are charities.  This also includes governments,
hospitals and schools – which may explain why there seems to be no
aggregate number for non-profits.  Unfortunately, a search yields no
OVERALL non-profit numbers for Canada or the U.S. (though there's a
very interesting study of Internet spending by Canadian non-profits).

Modern Healthcare puts overall hospital spending at 3.5% of revenues,
according to Tufts Managed Care Institute, "Quality and Clinical
Decision Support Systems" (May-June, 2002):
http://www.tmci.org/downloads/topic5&6_02.pdf

Recently Metricnet, which is a subsidiary of IT research company Meta
Group, did a 2002 analysis of government (federal, state, local)
spending.  I include it because there's some excellent detail – and
because a government's a non-profit organization too:
Metricnet
"2002 IT Key Metrics Analysis" (October, 2002):
http://128.121.222.187/data_access/ITSpend/GVT1.pdf

In the government comparison, 21 agencies were examined having an
average employee size of 625.  Median spending was 3.95%; average
spending was 7.63%; the upper quartile was 8.5%.  Spending was split
almost evenly, with 52% of budgets going to operational expense and
48% to capital acquisitions.  There are further splits by types of
technology and how much of the budget are going to staffing, if you're
interested.

Metricnet has long tracked IT spending in a number of ways.  Though
they don't give non-profit figures, they provide a good baseline for
IT spending.

Overall, private corporations spend 3.61% of revenue.  At the low end
are construction/engineering; hospitality and travel; and retail firms
which spend between 1.43% and 1.63%.  At the high end are
telecommunications (6.4%) and financial services (6.64%) companies.

Though you're interested in the broad category of IT spending, Levurus
Associates has published (and is currently updating) a report on
Internet spending by Canadian non-profit organizations.
"Leveraging the Net: Association Internet Benchmark Spending"
(December, 2001)
http://www.leverus.com/associationresourcecenter/Leverus_survey2001.PDF


Google search strategy:
"non-profit" + "IT spending" + Canada


Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

Thanks. This helps - clearly there is a durth of such info.