Group Helps Other Charities Speed Up Their Success, Silicon Valley Style

Diana Zapata/Bluespark Photography

One evening last fall, Ronnie Washington pitched his start-up, Onward Financial, to investors gathered in Google’s offices in downtown San Francisco. Getting the backing of Google is a dream of many Bay Area entrepreneurs.

Washington, 29, developed Onward Financial while studying for an MBA at Stanford, the birthplace of countless companies. Unlike most start-ups, Onward is a nonprofit aimed at serving the working poor by providing employers with software that encourages low-wage workers to save money that will help them weather financial shocks.

Workers who put away a few dollars from each paycheck generate savings and become eligible for emergency loans. “It’s a 401(k) for the rest of us,” explains Washington, dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the Onward logo.

Fast Forward

His pitch hit home. Washington raised $12,000 for Onward, which Google matched. His was one of eight startups nurtured by a San Francisco nonprofit called Fast Forward, which sponsored the event, called Demo Day. Fast Forward has a big mission: to bring technology solutions to the world’s biggest social problems, from health care to education to human rights.

But how? Fast Forward, which calls itself an accelerator, provides training, mentors, networking opportunities, visibility, and, yes, cash to charities that deploy technology to attack social or environmental problems. Each charity selected for its program gets a $25,000 grant, intensive two-day training sessions for 13 weeks, and connections to about 100 mentors.

Using Tech to Transform Nonprofit Work

Kevin Barenblat and Shannon Farley started Fast Forward in 2014.

A Stanford-educated engineer, Barenblat, 44, co-founded two companies and then advised and invested in early-stage startups.

Farley, 39, who has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, started and led SparkSF, a network of young philanthropists. Their summer program, which culminates on Demo Day, is modeled in part on Y Combinator, the celebrated Silicon Valley accelerator that has helped launch more than 1,400 companies, including Airbnb and Dropbox, as well as about 25 nonprofits.

“Tech accelerates impact,” Barenblat likes to say. What he means is that software, once created, can enable charities to grow faster and bigger at a lower cost than nonprofits that rely on the human touch.

Fast Forward

Speaking the lingo of Silicon Valley, Farley says: “We are seeing tech disrupt the social sector in every vertical. We have teams that have worked in education, health, human rights, civic engagement.”

Although accelerators were created to help start-up companies grow, they are spreading to charities as well. In Denver, Uncharted runs programs to promote projects focused on issues like early-childhood development and food access, as well as boot camps for entrepreneurs in more than two dozen countries. In New York, Praxis Labs runs a global, nonresidential program for a dozen founders of nonprofits each year, connecting them to mentors, donors, and one another. And in Washington, Halcyon, which calls itself an incubator, says it provides change makers in art and social enterprise with “a safe haven for their bold ideas to take flight.”

Details of the programs vary, but they share a similar goal: To help small organizations get big.

Affecting 35 Million People

So far, Fast Forward has backed 31 charities. (It calls them portfolio companies, as a venture- capital firm would.) Fast Forward estimates those nonprofits have improved 35 million lives. What’s more, it says the organizations saw their median revenues grow by 33 percent in 2017.

Among last year’s graduating startups:

• Raheem.ai is a Facebook messenger chatbot — that is, a computer program designed to simulate interaction with humans — that people can use to share their interactions with police officers. The goal is to build a national database of police performance that’s open to the public. Brandon Anderson, an African-American veteran of the U.S. Army, developed the chatbot after his partner, an African-American man, was beaten during a routine traffic stop and died.
• Liz Lee quit her job at Morgan Stanley to start OnlineSOS after experiencing harassment online and in real life. It’s “the first and only organization in the U.S. providing professional support for victims of online harassment,” she told potential donors during her pitch. Software documents what happened and, in some cases, refers victims to mental-health professionals.
• With a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, visitors to the IssueVoter website express their opinions on an array of political issues and then have them sent to their representative in Congress. Founder Maria Yuan worked on Wall Street and on a state legislative campaign in Iowa when she decided to find a way to connect voters with elected officials year-round. “It’s politics made simple,” she says.

Charities leave Fast Forward with big dreams and bigger bank accounts: They have collectively raised $56 million in follow-up funding from a variety of sources.

Fast Forward itself has been supported by Google.org, the Omidyar Network, and BlackRock, among others. Google.org’s backing has been key: It has awarded $950,000 to Fast Forward, another $950,000 to its selected charities, and an unspecified amount of follow-up grants to nonprofits that received Fast Forward assistance: Nexleaf Analytics, TalkingPoints, Callisto, OneDegree, and We the Protesters.

Jacquelline Fuller, president of Google.org, and Rob Veres, a venture partner at Omidyar Network, say that Fast Forward has the potential to create an entire ecosystem of tech-based nonprofits. Veres says, “It’s wonderful if you can leverage technology because it tends to be scalable and capital efficient.”

The key for charities, they say, is to think carefully about what problem they want technology to solve. “If you’re talking about making your team work and your office work better, there’s a nice offering of base technologies that are available,” Fuller says. Google, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft are among the many tech companies that offer free or reduced-cost software to qualified nonprofits.

Difficulties arise when charities rush headlong into the latest new thing. Few nonprofits, for example, need their own mobile apps, Veres cautions. “With the proliferation of mobile devices after the introduction of the iPhone, everybody started saying we must have an app,” he recalls. With some fanfare, charities including VolunteerMatch, the American Hiking Society, the Central Texas Food Bank, and One Day’s Wages unveiled their own mobile apps; all have since been shuttered.

‘All Sorts of Crazy Things’

It’s too soon to know whether software can transform how charities work — and, more important, improve their performance — in the way that companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Expedia have made it easy and convenient to buy books, watch movies, and book travel. Although some tech-centric charities like Kiva and DonorsChoose.org have flourished, others, like One Laptop Per Child, a grand plan to deliver $100 computers to poor children, have stumbled.

Barenblat and Farley like to spotlight thriving tech nonprofits such as Wikipedia and Khan Academy, as well as a handful of Fast Forward charities that are enjoying rapid growth. Foremost among them is CommonLit, which provides free reading materials — news articles, short stories, poems, and historical documents — to teachers in grades 3 through 12.

Medic Mobile Photo Archives

Medic Mobile, which graduated from the accelerator program in 2014, its first year, makes free, open-source software for community health workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. About 21,000 community health workers have been trained and equipped with the software, and they in turn serve 12 million people.

Josh Nesbit, Medic Mobile’s co-founder and executive director, says Fast Forward connected him to Bay Area technology executives who helped refine his strategy. Medic Mobile had begun by building customized software for hospitals and nonprofits that deploy community health workers but shifted to focus on a single platform and toolkits that adapt constantly and can be used on a variety of devices.

“Our product evolves every two weeks,” Nesbit says. “We’ve done all sorts of crazy things, even with $10 phones.”

Speed-Dating Style

Career Village, a Redwood, City, Calif., charity founded by Jared Chung, a former McKinsey & Company consultant, is also enjoying robust growth. The charity, which aims “to do for career information what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge,” has been used by about 2 million people, most of them high-school students, who post questions about higher education and career choices to about 10,000 volunteers, according to Chung. “We’re on the upswing right now,” he says.

Washington of Onward Financial hopes the connections he made at Fast Forward can take his start-up beyond the pilot phase. He met with up to 10 experts a day for 25 minutes each in a speed-dating format, getting advice about fundraising and connecting with companies that will offer his online site to its workers. “It was just amazing who I was able to get in front of and the support that I got,” Washington says. His start-up won a $25,000 grant after making a presentation to BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company.

Google.org is Fast Forward’s biggest supporter. It matched the donations raised by all eight nonprofits on last fall’s Demo Day. Fast Forward’s other grants come from Open Society Foundations, AT&T, and Comcast NBC Universal. Its budget is expected to be about $2 million this year.

Although the accelerator program is the centerpiece of Fast Forward, the organization also has built a directory of tech nonprofits and a job board that lists paid positions as well as opportunities to volunteer or join boards. In addition, it holds an annual summit of tech nonprofits in San Francisco.

Barenblat and Farley estimate that there are about 400 tech-centric nonprofits, and they say there will soon be many more. “Technology cannot solve all problems, but it can improve the way we solve problems,” Farley says.

Nesbit of Medic Mobile says more nonprofits should invest in technology to improve their programs. “Why isn’t it normal that nonprofits are building their own technology?” he asks. “If we’re only repurposing what’s built for the private sector, we’re not doing our job.”