Now more than ever, technology plays a vital role in creating a sustainable and vibrant nonprofit, from the most advanced artificial-intelligence tools to the simplest of Excel spread sheets. Several experts joined the Chronicle in an online forum to discuss how charities of all sizes can stay strategic about technological change.
“In March of 2020, we all collectively slammed into a wall of digital transformation,” said Rachel Kimber, vice president of grants management at Smile Train, a charity that provides corrective surgery for children with cleft lips and palates.
“We’re coming out of that global pandemic, and we have the opportunity to review and reflect on how we’ve been operating and how we might want to do things differently,” she said.
Kimber was joined on the panel by Deborah Backus, chief design officer at Worldreader; Hugo Castro, director of operations at the Technology Association of Grantmakers; and Tara Schnaible, principal technology analyst at the Nature Conservancy. The session, Digitally Transformed Nonprofits, was hosted by Drew Lindsay, senior editor of special projects at the Chronicle.
Read on for highlights, or watch the video to get all the insights.
Design technology with people in mind.
As a global literacy nonprofit, Worldreader has always relied on technology to advance its mission, using a digital application to bring ebooks to children in more than 100 countries.
“We were founded on the belief that tech could solve a problem that other things were not solving,” said Backus, in reference to her nonprofit’s digital-first model.
Yet she recommends that nonprofits take care to engage real people, like staff, beneficiaries, board members, or partners, to guide their thinking about new technologies or tools.
In other words, “create a narrative of the person that you’re trying to impact with your solution,” said Backus. By grounding yourself in that person’s motivations, behaviors, and challenges, she says, it becomes possible to imagine how different technological solutions might make their lives better.
User testing then becomes a natural extension of that kind of person-centered approach, says Backus. For example, in January, she gathered a group of Kenyan parents for a conversation over tea about a new Worldreader app that encourages family reading time, which they plan to roll out at the end of the year.
Continuing to test is important because “technology is iterative — it’s always changing,” said Backus. “You have to keep seeing if what you’re using and building resonates” with users.
New technology can be alienating for staff and beneficiaries alike if you present them with the “solutions that you’re building” without fully understanding what their challenges are, said Schneider.
“User experience is critical for every project,” she said, and without it, transitioning to new technologies “is going to be a massive struggle.”
At many of the Nature Conservancy’s 79 country programs, for example, staff used to waste time struggling to find internal documents and follow processes, said Schneider, an inefficiency that amounted to a “million-hour problem every year” for such a large organization.
With that challenge in mind, a small team of about five people began working on creating a knowledge management system that “isn’t just findable but also usable” in various languages and with various accessibility requirements.
As their project has expanded, they’ve pulled in more teams in a way they hope to “change the culture of how we share” information, she said, while saving a lot of time in the process.
Maintain your digital values.
Technology is “often shifting and changing,” said Kimber. “But what doesn’t change is the social sector’s emphasis on values.”
Nonprofits should take care to instill their organization’s values when developing their digital strategy, said Kimber, which for Smile Train includes policies that are mindful of transparency, collaboration, equity, and accessibility.
One way the nonprofit has tried to practice its values in its digital strategy is by rethinking the ways it collects data from its grantees. Smile Train provides grants to partners working in 75 countries.
“The status quo practice right now with data collection is taking data from grantees or learning from grantee partners and not necessarily sharing that information back,” she said.
Nowadays, the organization tries to share data back with its partners, to nurture a more collaborative and less transactional relationship.
“As we’re coming out of digital transformation and starting to focus on digital strategy, we have a real opportunity to lean in to creating a roadmap and making sure that it’s infused with the values that we all show up with,” she said.
Foundations may be more willing to support technology-related goals.
Even as nonprofits increasingly turn to technology to streamline their processes and expand their reach, finding funding for tech projects remains a challenge, especially for small organizations.
At the Technology Association of Grantmakers, Castro often encourages foundations to look “beyond the programmatic” needs of their grantees and focus on the technology those organizations need as well.
“Otherwise, you’ll have that nonprofit starvation cycle where nonprofits are not getting the resources they needed to really scale programs” or upgrade their software, he said.
Still, there are reasons for optimism around new opportunities for technology-related philanthropy. Castro highlighted a growing trend among grant makers to shift their focus from the “why” of funding to the “how” of funding technology, signaling their willingness to work with nonprofits to achieve their technology-related goals.
Beyond philanthropy, Castro recommends that organizations also look to resources like TechSoup, which offers discounted software to nonprofits, including tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
