Nonprofits looking to get the most out of technology can have a hard time breaking out of old habits. They often invest upfront in new systems but never improve them. Or they decide to build everything from scratch. And they regard technology as separate from their core work.
Kevin Barenblat, a software entrepreneur who founded the nonprofit technology incubator Fast Forward, sees a better way.
The nonprofits he works with put technology at the center of their operations, treating it like a distinct product or service. These groups — of which Fast Forward maintains a directory — share what Mr. Barenblat views as the hallmarks of a technologically strong organization. They have all taken the following five steps to strengthen their technological capabilities, and you can too.
1. Hire people with technical talent and empower them.
Among organizations that adopt a product-management model for their technology, this makes all the difference.
Ted Gonder, chief executive at financial-education nonprofit Moneythink, was initially hesitant to hire technical staff instead of working with contractors. Vendors might cost more on an hourly basis than salaried employees, but they involved considerably less commitment, he says.
But he changed his mind as Moneythink’s first app became more central to its mission and needed rapid development. The nonprofit hired two full-time engineers, a product manager, and a user-experience expert.
The in-house team has tripled the speed at which Moneythink builds and improves its apps and other products aimed at helping low-income students boost their financial literacy, Mr. Gonder says. It’s improved quality, too.
“It’s skin in the game,” he says. “It completely changes your DNA when you have people on staff whose entire role is to think aggressively and creatively about how you are going to rapidly build and scale high-impact technology.”
2. Think of technology as the program.
Fast Forward is focused on finding ways for nonprofits to use technology to change the world. Mr. Barenblat points to organizations like Wikipedia and the online-education nonprofit Khan Academy as examples.
That ability to achieve a grander scale is why digital projects are at the center of programs for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says Paul Rieckhoff, the organization’s chief executive.
The group aims to serve more than 3 million recent veterans and their families with on-demand support from social workers, a connected online community, and information about educational opportunities through the GI Bill — a mission that calls for a lot of technological resources. Everyone at the organization has to think about how to use technology first, not to let it sit off to the side of the group’s day-to-day operations.
“For me, as CEO, it was really important that we didn’t create a ‘kids table’ for digital,” Mr. Rieckhoff says.
3. Think of technology as a long-term investment.
You can’t build a project and then walk away from it. It requires constant care and tweaking to be effective. As Mr. Barenblat puts it, “Tech products are not one-and-done.”
Rey Faustino, founder and chief executive of the San Francisco nonprofit social-services directory One Degree, echoes that view. Tech investment for charities used to mean buying a copy of Microsoft Office and installing it, he says. Now nonprofits have to think and act differently, continually improving both internal systems and public-facing products.
Technology “provides for you,” Mr. Faustino says. “You provide for it.”
“The minute you stop investing your time and your money and your focus, [technology] starts to die,” agrees Sam Dorman, a technology consultant who runs the Product Team Approach website to spread product-management practices among nonprofits. “It hampers your ability to have the kind of impact you’re trying to have.”
4. Get feedback and make improvements frequently.
Good nonprofit technology is more “adaptive” than “predictive,” Mr. Barenblat says. He sees a major problem in spending a long time planning a technology project, trying to anticipate every possibility for how it will be used, only to build it, release it, and ignore it.
The best path, he says, starts with a bare-bones “minimum viable product” — a simple first effort that can generate immediate feedback from users, whether they are the nonprofit’s staff or its clients. That feedback can help an organization adapt and add important features they may have overlooked.
Moneythink, for example, adjusts rapidly when it gets feedback from the students who use its app. A small feature — the ability to take a picture of a potential purchase and share it with other students — quickly became the main attraction when users showed great interest in the photo function. One of those students who first described the app as “an Instagram for money” helped the nonprofit market itself, says Mr. Gonder.
5. Don’t start from zero — use existing tools.
“There are so many existing components to stitch together to solve social problems that it’s very rare that you need to build something from scratch,” Mr. Barenblat says.
Mr. Faustino agrees. One Degree is using Google Translate, a free service, to make sure its site is available in all of the languages common in the area it serves. Down the road, the organization would like to build its own solution and offer other languages, but for now using a free and established program meets the need.
For most technical solutions, Mr. Faustino says, nonprofits should first look for partners that have software or apps they can use instead of building it themselves.
“It’s so frustrating to see people literally throw money away to try to do it on their own when there are viable solutions out there,” he says.
