Nonprofits are struggling with technology during the pandemic in many of the same ways they were before the coronavirus forced them to shutter their doors and provide services remotely according to a May survey by Hopelab, a nonprofit that uses technology and design to improve the lives of young people. But now that digital technology is increasingly central to their ability to function, those gaps are more apparent and have larger impact on how groups serve their clients and meet their missions.
According to its Digital Strategy and Services Survey, only 26 percent of the 155 groups surveyed in May had a C-level leader responsible for technological development. Prior to the Covid crisis 72 percent of those surveyed did not have a digital strategy. About half of those groups have adopted one since March.
It is not easy for nonprofits to develop digital strategies, says Margaret Laws, CEO of HopeLab. “Bridgespan, they’re doing nonprofit strategy consulting,” she says. “There is no analog for nonprofit technology work.”
But it is increasingly important. So many of the individuals that groups provide services to are tech savvy and expect to get more things done through apps on their phones or on their computers.
“Going to work and going through your day to day life, most people are using technology. What’s been striking to us is the extent to which a lot of nonprofits are getting further and further away from the way that their consumers or users live their everyday lives because they’re not able to engage with them over the technology that they’re that they’re using,” says Laws. “It makes them less convenient, less relevant.”
Groups far away from technology hubs like Silicon Valley are at a disadvantage says Laws. “If you’re not staffed by people whose personal and professional networks include people in design and technology, there’s a good chance you just don’t even know about it,” says Laws. “I think there’s a knowledge gap.”
The minority of groups that did have a digital strategy and leadership have been at an advantage during the mad scramble to provide services remotely due to the pandemic, Laws says.
Fenway Heath, an LGBT health care, research and advocacy group in Boston has long integrated technology into its work. It adopted electronic health records in 1997 and a virtual patient portal in 2007.
“We’ve always seen the benefit of technology,” says Ellen LaPointe the group’s CEO. “One of my philosophies is: how can we use technology to provide better care, to free up clinicians to do the things that they need to do.”
And when Covid hit, that paid off. The group was able to have 95 percent of its patients using a telehealth system shortly after it halted in-person service this spring and sent hundreds of staff who had always worked on site home to work there.
The first priority for the group was the telehealth system to ensure that its staff could stay connected to clients. Because was not reimbursed by insurance until rules changed as a result of Covid, Fenway Health, like many other healthcare groups, did not have an active system for their clients. However, several years ago, Chris Grosso, the group’s associate vice president for health informatics and data services, formed a group to start working on the idea. It has several satellite offices that are focused on public health issues and it wanted to connect clients visiting those sites with physicians. The thinking about how to do such a system informed the telehealth system it uses now. It runs on a Zoom platform that is compliant with regulations governing the sharing of medical information. The group is reaching many more people than it expected, in part because telehealth is much more convenient than having travel to an office.
Originally Grosso thought that the Zoom platform would be a temporary stop gap until things went back to normal. But now that the group has been gathering data and understanding the benefits, Grosso is now leading a task force to determine how to strategically integrate the technology into the group’s work in the future.
“Even if Covid ends tomorrow, we will not abandon telehealth,” says LaPointe. “It is such an important and powerful tool for us that we want to not only continue it. We want to integrate it and improve and deepen how we use it.”
Technology and the expertise required to implement and maintain systems can be expensive, particularly for small groups. Even before the pandemic, the for-profit sector spent four times as much on technology as the social sector according to Technology Association of Grant makers.
Now the dire need for technologies driven by Covid is happening as organizations cope with stretched budgets and increased demand for services, Many are hardly in a place to be able to find additional money for new technological solutions.
Even Fenway Health, with its long commitment to digital strategy, was turned down for a grant that it applied for yeas ago for its telehealth system. It received funding for its current effort through Community Care Cooperative which received $5 million from foundations and individuals to fund telehealth initiatives in Massachusetts.
According to the survey a lack of funding for technology is a deep and wide spread problem for nonprofits. About 75 percent of the groups Hopelabs surveyed did not have funders who supported digital strategy or tools.
“A lot of philanthropy, even philanthropy, ironically, that is sponsored by business or tech interests, doesn’t actually take the funding for, and the expertise needed for technology in these organizations, seriously,” Laws says. “You have this this really perplexing situation where you have donors or philanthropists who’d never run their business without technology, who won’t fund the technology aspect of a nonprofit organization because it doesn’t feel like its direct service enough.”
The Rose Community Foundation in Denver is one that is moving to take technology into more account. It has already made grants for tablets and internet access for children in a local school district as a way of addressing technology gaps among young people who need the devices for school.
Nonprofits the group funds have also been clear that they need general operating support says Belinda Samuels, the group’s vice president of programs. And she expected that groups will use at least some of that general operations funding to improve their technology.
Grant makers may have been so resistant to funding technology because the funding decision-makers have little expertise with technology. The internal technology staff are not involved in making grants or giving strategy says Chantal Forster, executive director or the Technology Association of Grantmakers. But now that the Covid crisis has forced program officers and executives to rely on technology, they may be beginning to see the value of it in the groups they fund she says.
In a report the group is releasing on October 23, it found that 22 percent of the grant makers it surveyed were providing the groups they fund with digital tools such as Zoom and Slack licenses and 28 percent were providing technical assistance including for security measures such as two factor authentication that allows employees to work from home securely.
“That is a new horizon for funders,” Forster says. “Covid has made everybody realize their deep dependency on technology to support the mission, and that realization is what has provided this window of opportunity for funders to accelerate initiatives.”
For many groups the Covid crisis forced them to make fast technology decisions with the thought that they were just creating quick, temporary fixes. But as the pandemic has dragged on, those fixes are taking on more permanence and are exposing some of the problems that can arise when organizations make these decisions without having a digital strategy and clear leadership says Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN.
For example, when people started working remotely all at once, if they were not on compatible devices and systems, they could have trouble sharing documents. Cybersecuruty is crucial and many groups lack a cybersecurity plan.
Including clients or those in the community that is being served in technology decisions that affect them is crucial for success, she says. That is what worked for Nurse Family Partnership, a group that arranges home visits between nurses and young first-time mothers.
It worked with Hopelab to develop an app for nurses and the young mothers they work with to communicate and track their activity. The nurses were the ones requesting the app. The group worked with Hopelab through an extensive development process. Nurses and clients were consulted often to determine what they wanted and to try out early versions of the app. When mothers complained that the log in process was cumbersome, for example, it was redesigned.
When designing and implementing new technologies it is important to have an ongoing feedback process between those using the application and the technology staff designing and managing it says Fred Dillon, Hopelab’s senior director of strategy and design.
One problem the group ran into was that about 10 percent of the group’s client base did not have smartphones. Through Verizon and another partner, it was able to get 3,800 iphones and paid data plans to new mothers in 39 states. The phones have also helped young mothers with distance learning and contact with employers.
The app has become crucial during the Covid crisis. Though it is not a replacement for in person or even telehealth visits, it has been an effective way to bolster the mother-nurse relationship without additional contact says Frank Diadone, Nurse Family Partnership’s CEO. Sometimes women are more forthcoming about problems through the app than they have been in person, and they stay in more regular contact with nurses—something Hopelab has found with other health-related apps it developed. The group also added information for new mothers about how to stay safe during the pandemic.
The group plans to continue using the app regardless of the path the pandemic and recovery takes. “Telehealth is going to be here to stay to some degree,” says Diadone. “It is a way to maintain that connection on an ongoing basis.”
The pandemic has changed the way everyone thinks about and prioritizes technology. It’s a shift that is likely to have an impact on groups for a long time says NTEN’s Ward. “No one can be working at home without a computer that they could take from the office, and folks need to use various tools to connect to and run their programs,” she says. “Covid has essentially proven the case for technology costs.”