Nonprofits Go Remote

The California Immigrant Policy Center’s annual Immigrant Day of Action lobbying event usually brings more than 1,000 people to Sacramento to walk the halls of the statehouse. They start arriving around 7 a.m. by bus, van, and plane and spend the day meeting with legislators to discuss issues important to immigrants, like extending workplace protections to domestic workers.

The coronavirus pandemic meant a large in-person event wasn’t possible this year, so the organization regrouped. With just a month to plan, the center produced an entirely digital event, setting up a series of Zoom calls with legislators. It wasn’t easy. The group had to tie together 40 Zoom channels for the 1,000 people who joined in. The lieutenant governor even addressed the gathering. Participants had 100 legislative visits throughout the day.

Cynthia Buiza, the group’s executive director, was worried that people wouldn’t show, that legislators might not be interested, or that there would be technical glitches. But it worked out better than she had hoped.

“I was surprised at how engaged legislators were,” says Buiza. “We’ll probably do a combination of physical and virtual events next year so that we can scale up participation and hopefully prove that virtual and on-the-ground organizing can both work.”

Covid-19 has — for the time being, at least — transformed the nonprofit world’s relationship with technology. Almost overnight, organizations had to make the move to remote work and take as many programs online as they could.

There have been early successes. Nonprofits are finding tech solutions to connect with clients, provide critical services, engage with lawmakers, and more. Some organizations have discovered that working remotely has increased collaboration across departments. But in the rush to action, online security hasn’t gotten the attention it should. And there are very real limits on what nonprofit work can be done virtually.

“You cannot give somebody a sandwich over a Zoom call,” says Lucy Bernholz, director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Nimble Collaboration

The decisions that charities are making now have the potential to significantly alter how they operate, raise money, and provide services — both now and in the future. But for the most part, nonprofits are making decisions about technology on the fly. There wasn’t time to appoint committees to figure out solutions; groups had to hustle.

“One of the approaches that we took early on was to just try out a lot of new things,” says J.D. Crouch, CEO of the United Service Organizations, better known as the USO. “We’ve learned a lot from that.”

Best known for its shows with musicians and comedians that entertain troops around the world, the USO moved quickly to refashion in-person events so they would work online.

Many of its programs focus on families, particularly spouses, who may feel isolated on base. Instead of holding cookie-making events on bases, the group teamed up with Martha Stewart to stream a baking class on Facebook Live — 18,000 people joined. And baby showers moved online.

When families were locked down in northern Italy, the USO distributed activity boxes with supplies to create a piece of art, for example. Families logged into Zoom to do the activities together online. “There’s a physical component to it, but at a safe distance,” Crouch says. “It also has a virtual component to it so that people could feel like they were part of a bigger event.”

The USO also hosts events with bands and celebrities where service members can log on and talk with them and ask questions. It did a recent one with the band the Chainsmokers. And it is creating gaming tournaments where soldiers can compete with others in lockdown on other bases.

Crouch says that working remotely has helped the USO to be more nimble. Using online collaboration software, departments have worked together in ways they typically hadn’t in the past, and the organization has been able to slash bureaucracy because it has put a premium on moving quickly to try new things. Crouch doesn’t want to work virtually forever, but there are elements of remote work that he wants to maintain.

“The trick for us and for me, the leader, is, how do I sustain and grow that pattern of activity?” he asks. “Crosscutting teams, solving problems, innovating, working faster — that’s all an important part of it.”

A Major Systems Upgrade

Since the middle of March, the American Heart Association’s call center has been run from employees’ home offices, kitchen tables, and back porches. It’s a lot easier to do the work with a large screen instead of a laptop, so the call center’s 120 workers lined up like customers at a fast-food drive-through. Members of the I.T. staff carefully loaded the screens, bundled up in Bubble Wrap, into their cars.

That was the easy part.

The order to work from home came as the call center was in the final stretch of a major technology upgrade. The association was going to replace its five-year-old call software with a cloud-based system.

There are always challenges with a new technology system, but the Heart Association had more than its fair share, says Chip Sugrue, vice president for customer strategies. At the same time it was preparing for the migration, it had to coach call-center workers on how to answer coronavirus-related health questions. Then leaders had to figure out how to train workers on the new system remotely.

The switch was scheduled for May 4, the day before GivingTuesdayNow, a nationwide fundraising drive that would lead to a surge of memorial and tribute donations. Working remotely would tax the new system even more because calls were routed from the cloud to the call center to the staff members who were at home.

Ultimately, Sugrue decided to go ahead with the move. “There were no hiccups,” he says.

But while some nonprofits are thriving in the digital world, others are struggling.

Catchafire sees that struggle; it is a company that connects skilled volunteers with charities that need professional help. Volunteers generally work with groups that have 20 or fewer employees to do things like optimize an organization’s website or databases, set up Google Analytics, or deepen project- or financial-management skills.

In mid-March, Catchafire sent out a survey to thousands of groups it has worked with asking what new needs they had because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It quickly heard back that groups were in dire need of help adapting to remote work, fundraising in this new environment, and connecting with other leaders.

Between mid-March and mid-May the group connected volunteers and groups on over 2,300 projects, about 70 percent more than any previous two-month period.

Some projects focus on the basics. One volunteer, for example, helped employees at the Bucks County Housing Group, which provides services to homeless people outside of Philadelphia, get comfortable working remotely. He offered recommendations for working effectively at home — things like trying to separate your work space from your living space and creating time to connect with staff. Then, over a Zoom call, the volunteer demonstrated how to use Zoom and SharePoint collaboration software.

Tech’s Downsides

Mastering videoconferencing hasn’t been a problem for the Trust for Public Land. The question instead is whether the tool makes sense for community organizing.

“It’s great to hop on a Zoom meeting with a colleague that I’ve been working with for years where we can have a somewhat transactional conversation,” says Owen Franklin, the group’s state director for Pennsylvania. “But when you’re trying to connect with people who have a whole host of lived experiences, a Zoom meeting isn’t going to work.”

When the pandemic hit, the trust was in the early phases of developing a project called “Heat Capture,” which will use public art to explore the threat climate change presents to poor, urban neighborhoods without easy access to parks. Too often, climate-change discussions involve long time horizons and stories about ice caps melting and don’t consider poor residents of dense urban neighborhoods who, Franklin says, are on the front lines of global warming.

Franklin and his staff began organizing Zoom meetings of residents and an advisory committee to discuss which artists might be involved and how the project might eventually take shape. It became clear that videoconferencing wasn’t up to the job. Some participants didn’t have an appetite for the medium and preferred a follow-up phone call. Providing translation services for the several languages spoken by residents is difficult in the physical world. On Zoom, it was a nonstarter.

Franklin says the organization may have to invest in new technology, train staff members or people in the neighborhoods they serve, or hire people with technology expertise. Being part of a nationwide organization is helpful, he says, because employees share ideas with each other regularly. Still, it’s difficult to spend a lot of money, especially when it isn’t clear how long the public-health crisis will last.

One thing is clear to Franklin: Building connections with people in high-poverty neighborhoods is critical to the project’s success.

“We need to be able to have authentic engagement in whatever environment we’re in, and this is the environment we’re in,” he says. “We are here to deliver on our mission so we will make the investment.”

Security To-Do Lists

Taking steps to make sure technology systems are secure and resilient has long been on nonprofit leaders’ to-do lists, says Marnie Webb, chief community-impact officer at TechSoup, a nonprofit technology group. But most never had the time or, in some cases, the money to implement safeguards like ensuring their group’s files, accounting information, and client-management database were securely in the cloud instead of on a hard drive or a server in their office.

Webb says that when the pandemic hit, organizations quickly started to address those issues and others. But she thinks nonprofits will soon begin to realize they probably need to put more thought into whether they have a secure-enough setup to support their staff using virtual private networks and ensure they are not transmitting data in an unsecured environment — and if they’re making the best use of their software.

“We had this rush to working at home, and now we have to step back and ask how do we make these systems secure,” Webb says. “We’ve had a lot of questions about this sort of thing and how to go from just using a video call on Zoom to actually using features like breakout rooms and being able to facilitate meaningful planning sessions with boards or constituencies.”

No matter how good the software is, some of the most important things that nonprofits do can’t move online.

When the pandemic started, Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse, a San Mateo, Calif., domestic-violence charity, acted quickly to move administrative staff to remote work and change how it serves clients who were already experiencing trauma and now face additional danger as they shelter in place with their abusers.

“They’ve seen large-scale job loss, and some tell us their domestic partner is weaponizing the virus against them and intentionally exposing them to it as a method of control and abuse,” says Jennifer Dow Rowell, the development director.

The group posts tips on social media about how to find a safe place from which to call its emergency hotline. It now provides telehealth counseling services and case management by videoconference.

But housing is a real-life, in-person endeavor. While the organization has kept its shelters up and running, it has reduced the numbers of people housed there to cut down the risk of transmitting the coronavirus and turned to motels to bridge the housing gap. That has meant significant additional costs. Before the pandemic, Rowell says, her group would place clients in a motel for two or three days while working to get them somewhere safe.

“Now we’re having to put people in motels for weeks on end,” Rowell says. She estimates the extra costs will total at least $50,000, and more as the outbreak drags on.

Seeing What Sticks

The question going forward is which of the changes charities have instituted since the Covid-19 outbreak started are temporary and which will be woven into the fabric of the nonprofit world.

When it became clear that the coronavirus wasn’t going to end anytime soon, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater pivoted to a digital strategy for all of its program areas.

Ailey, like many other performing-arts groups, has taken its programming online to reach audiences. The dance company launched Ailey All Access on its website, where people can stream a set of recorded performances, classes, and other content free.

While these offerings are no substitute for live performances, the dance company has had some success in keeping its audiences engaged and attracting newcomers from around the globe, at least for now. The group will continue to provide that content for some time.

Online offerings like these are stopgap efforts, says Bernholz of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “Whether any of that sticks, I don’t know,” she says. “In some cases, they have been useful raising money, but I think that’s the kind of thing that’s useful for a very short period of time.”

Bennett Rink, Ailey’s executive director, says the company’s online offerings and its “Still, We Dance” online fundraising campaign have brought in a lot of first-time donors but acknowledges those gains could be temporary.

What he believes will endure well beyond this period of sheltering in place is the online educational offerings the organization has created for both professional and junior-division students in the Ailey School. That content includes dance classes, dance-history courses, wellness instruction, and other offerings.

The school had never offered online courses, but Rink says one of its long-term goals was to provide distance-learning programs.

“We always wanted to be able to reach more people globally through our classes; we had just not gotten around to it,” he says. “We’ve been able to move those strategic objectives forward very quickly, and I think that will have a long-term benefit for us.”