Invest in Technology for All Staff

At this point in the development of our technical world and organizational realities, every person in an organization uses technology. Technology is not solely used by those with “IT” or “technology” in their job title, nor is tech exclusively the database or the phone system. Technology is the tools and systems as well as the ways we put them to work. And if technology is being used by every staff person, it should be acknowledged in their job description, in how they are evaluated, in how they are trained, and in the professional development they have access to.

First is the consideration for how technology is included in job postings. Unfortunately, many organizations often do this by listing requirements or expectations for candidates having experience using the exact suite of systems and applications currently in use in the organization. Requiring applicants to have specific technology experiences realistically means only individuals with the privilege to have already had access to the same technologies at previous jobs, with the added privilege of having those jobs in organizations that adequately supported staff training. Instead of further maintaining inequitable access to positions in social impact organizations, requirements for applicants should be about eagerness to use technology and experience learning new things.

Once an applicant is hired, the practice of naming technology in their job description informs how and where they make decisions about technology as well as what support and training they will need. Including this clarity around technology management in every staff person's job description requires that managers and technology‐responsible staff acknowledge the roles, responsibilities, and authority around the technology decisions and use that are granted to each member of the team, something that will determine the organization's culture around technology. This is not to say that every job description should include the same parameters for technology, but that whatever those parameters are should be clearly articulated for each position. As such, every new hire's orientation and training can be guided by the technology‐related responsibilities in their job description, which ensures a closer alignment to needs and practical application than a general systems overview or, worse yet but undoubtedly common, no training at all.

Plus, training for technology shouldn't end with the orientation provided to new personnel. Every employee or volunteer using the organization's technology systems must also have regular opportunities for training, as well as ongoing space for learning and testing tools. Valuable organization‐wide training topics include security tests, specific system or software upgrades, and strategy or decision making about the organization's commitments to technology. In addition, position‐specific training might include building custom reports and dashboards, managing program‐related platforms, or content management and creation.

Also, training for technology shouldn't involve only those who operate it. When technology is a critical element to how an organization operates—or, indeed, is critical to whether an organization can operate at all—it is a leadership component. Every executive director or CEO needs to be part of technology training with the rest of the organization—and needs to reinforce a culture that acknowledges technology as a strategic part of the mission.

What changes in an organization when technology training is understood as leadership development? What shifts in the way training is prioritized when social impact organizations understand themselves to be technology‐training centers for staff and community? Technology leadership includes the way technology is budgeted and planned for, and how inclusive processes are facilitated around technology adoption.

Central to technology leadership is the work to align tech to the organization's mission and community needs. In 2020, NTEN published data from Tech Accelerate, a free online technology adoption and effectiveness assessment tool, which showed that over 70% of organizations reported they never or only sometimes educated their employees about how the organization's data and IT systems benefit the organization and its mission.¹ That means that most organizations did not actualize the benefit or strategic alignment of data and technology systems and tools. This is a significant loss.

The benefit to training all employees in the ways the organization's technology tools support the mission and align with the organization's strategic goals is twofold: it supports them in being successful in their jobs, and it enables them to better identify improvements related to their jobs that could have potentially far‐reaching positive outcomes. In brief, communicating the broader goals for technology invites all personnel to be part of the ongoing process to improve the ways technology supports the organization.

Center the Community in Your Tech

In addition to technology being integral to every staff member's job, the tools, platforms, and systems an organization uses to collect and store participant data, distribute programs, track service delivery, and communicate all clearly have an impact on the external community as well. As such, including a diversity of internal and external community members in technology planning, prioritization, and decision making is key to successful plans and processes.

Unfortunately, in many social impact organizations, technology projects often receive the least‐inclusive planning and processes, sometimes because decisions seem to be set by funders or in grants, or because there are assumptions that only those on the IT team are necessary for participation. Prioritizing the organization's predetermined goals or assumptions about the community's needs in technology planning is not a replacement for or equivalent to directly including community members as participants in technology projects. Social impact organizations can honor the lived experience and expertise of the community in a multitude of ways, and centering the community over funders or other institutions can happen in many situations.

Including community members or program participants in tech projects and committees—whether ongoing or for a finite project or process like strategic planning or redesigning the website—is a valuable way of fostering community–organization engagement. Given their wide range of experience in the programs or services that the organization provides, community members can offer relevant perspective and feedback, suggest new and better options, and highlight challenges that those not participating would not necessarily see or anticipate.

Centering the community also requires organizations to prioritize the needs, objectives, and expectations of current and prospective program participants or service beneficiaries, even when those needs or goals are different from what the organization's strategic plan may have previously said or what a funder has deemed most important. It's not likely that any organization's 2020 planning anticipated a global pandemic, for example. The needs in communities can change rapidly—whether because of something as large as a pandemic or something local like an election or new law. Staying focused on the community's real needs builds trust with the organization or program and that trust equates to power, which the organization needs to use in pushing funders or organizational leaders to realign regularly where the funding or operational goals focus.

Self‐determination in a social impact organization's programs and services rightly creates opportunities for participants to set the goals, priorities, or desired outcomes for their participation, whether these be learning objectives or health outcomes or even personal well‐being. How do an organization's technology systems enable self‐determination? Another way to center the community in technology planning is to implement tools that allow participants to input their own goals, track progress, or provide personal reports on their status or achievements. This might be done during event registration processes, through an individual's profile, or even during in‐person service intake appointments.

In addition to the options an organization provides within the technology systems for participants, the selection of software and social media platforms that an organization uses to engage with community members needs to be considered through a careful process with a priority on harm reduction. If the platforms or providers are actively contributing to the issues that social impact organizations are trying to address, investing in those same providers' technologies is in conflict with the organization's mission. Many tools that could fit this description, however, are difficult to avoid as many of these technology giants are nearly ubiquitous in certain fields or business uses. For example, many organizations don't feel they could do the same word‐of‐mouth marketing and information sharing to those they serve without using Facebook, despite the numerous reports and studies spotlighting cases of Facebook encouraging, allowing, or otherwise incentivizing data misuse, misinformation, harassment, or other material harms for users, especially users of color, LGBTQIA+ users, or those with other identities or needs that make them vulnerable to abuse.

Dee Baskin, the Executive Director of Loan Repayment Assistance Program of Minnesota, has felt this mix of wanting to engage where the community is online along with the worry about what investing in those platforms means. “My nonprofit offers support services to legal aid organizations—helping low‐income people access food, housing, disability services, and other basic needs. We have been on Facebook for about ten years. While social media has been a prominent way to engage folks who share our values, Facebook can also act in ways that are antithetical to those values. Even with the benefits, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a company profiting from the vast amounts of data of the marginalized people we are working to help.”

There are many factors to consider when making decisions about which technologies and social media platforms to use, and while the decisions will be different for different organizations and communities, it is necessary that social impact organizations make these decisions with the best interests of the community at heart and engage with them about what the decisions are and why. Ultimately, decision making in collaboration with the community will invite better interaction and intentional plans, even if those plans evolve over time as the organization's and community's understanding or needs change.

Build for Inclusion

Honoring the lived experience of community members as valuable expertise also means hiring from the community—which can benefit everyone involved: the organization, those who are hired, and those to whom they provide service. When individuals who have personally experienced the programs or services of the organization deliver those same programs and services to others, their broad perspectives can help them to identify where changes are necessary, especially regarding where participants' needs are unmet.

Note, however, that the benefits of hiring from the community do not replicate the benefit of continued feedback from active participants. NTEN's 2020 Tech Accelerate report highlighted the importance of closely evaluating the way technology supports the organization and community engagement, because roughly 70% of research participants indicated that their organization never or only sometimes reviews how technology affects interactions between staff and clients.

This kind of review is improved when feedback loops and evaluation are frequent and discrete. When feedback is requested often it is usually more comprehensive, and when feedback is requested in relation to specific interactions, events, or programs, that feedback is usually more specific, and thus more constructive. It certainly isn't a new concept to offer a survey to participants after a training event or webinar, but how many of those surveys ask about the accessibility of the program and the technology used, the registration systems, or the personal profile management options that a participant experienced when signing up and joining that event? Asking the right questions is critical to eliciting better feedback—and staff on the team who have experience from the participant perspective likely know the best questions to ask.

Inclusive teams don't happen by accident; inclusive staff teams and technology project teams must be built intentionally. It's therefore important when hiring to prioritize both experience with the organization and lived experience in the community served, especially for the technology teams.

Jason Shim, the Director of Digital Strategy and Transformation at Pathways to Education Canada, has seen firsthand the value of hiring from the community.

It's one of the best ways to embody the mission and it is a celebration of what we all work towards—when working in an organization that seeks to help students in low‐income communities graduate from high school and reach their full potential, hiring graduates from the communities we serve is walking the walk. There's that quotation by William Gibson, “The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.” When it comes to tech teams in nonprofits, I think that hiring folks from the communities you serve is a way to make a dent in the universe by more evenly distributing the future that is increasingly technical—and I'll take it one step farther, it's a way to empower folks with the skills to shape that desired future.

There's a genuine energy and enthusiasm for the mission that is deeply rooted in their experiences. When we've shared as a team our motivations for joining the organization, I hear community members on the tech team articulate that their work is a way to give back.

The perspective and lived experience that is brought to the team also help us build better solutions because the team members already have a deep familiarity with our mission and the community.

For example, we had a community member who is a graduate of our program who joined the tech team as a Product Lead. In this role, he helped to build a platform that offered multiple communication options with students including video conferencing and bulk text messaging.

As a Product Lead, he played a key role in the research and design—when interviewing high school students, it's important to establish rapport and it helped that he was also a graduate of the program who was relatable. For folks on tech teams, it's a thrill when you build something that people find useful; there's an additional joy for community members on tech teams when the community finds a product useful.

The smaller the organization, the smaller the technology team. And so, even with the most intentional hiring, there are only so many positions to hire for—and thus only so many perspectives available. Salesforce's 2nd Edition Nonprofit Trends Report found that 93% of nonprofit respondents reported that a lack of IT or technical staff is a challenge to their organization's adoption of new technologies.² Just as members of the community can inject real experience into technology committees, technology managers from outside the organization can be consulted for their expertise.

This approach worked well for Cara Collective, a nonprofit that engages job seekers, employers, and other organizations nationwide to break the cycle of poverty through the power and purpose of employment. Steve Heye, former Manager of Technology for the nonprofit, shares: “At Cara Collective we had a team of three people in our IT team, which limited our network, experiences, and expertise. We often relied on bringing in volunteer tech experts as part of a technology advisory committee. These experts offered connections to vendors, new ideas on strategy, ways to cut costs and, occasionally, insight on how to solve the real problem instead of the symptom.” Though technology volunteers like this don't necessarily have the context or perspective to take part more deeply in decision‐making or planning processes, engaging them in advisory roles is a great option for adding more technical expertise and connections to a team.

Intentionally building teams inside the organization is similar to building a network of peers outside the organization. Regardless of the size of the technology team, hearing and learning from others doing similar work can spark new ideas, lay the groundwork for potential collaborations, and continue to break down traditional silos. Steve Heye credits this kind of sharing and learning as a valuable resource. “Working at a nonprofit with a small IT team is challenging because you may not have peers within your organization who have technical expertise. It can feel isolating, like it's all on you to figure it out, and you are expected to know everything about technology. But technology is so vast that it's impossible to know it all. I have always relied on being in a community with other nonprofit technology staff to learn from each other. Other nonprofits have faced the same challenges as you; connecting to a community of peers allows you to learn from their experiences.”

Unfortunately, many technology managers in social impact organizations don't regularly connect with and learn from peers outside their organization. The 2020 Tech Accelerate data showed roughly 75% of organizations report that their technology management staff never or only sometimes shares their experience with other organizations.

Living the values outlined in chapter 2 requires social impact organizations to be intentional about the diversity and inclusion of both staff and project teams. The more intentional organizations can be about identifying where they do not have internal knowledge or experience, and about inviting people in, the richer the feedback and ideas the organization can receive to fuel improvements and outcomes.

Be Intentional in Your Decision Making

Another clear trend revealed from NTEN's years of research is that organizations are more likely to be effective with technology when the staff who manage technology are part of strategic planning. Put simply, the strategic contributions and perspective of technology‐responsible staff are invaluable, regardless of their specific job title or position in the organizational chart.

Most organizations address planning every one to five years, creating a strategic plan that mixes visionary direction with more practical annual goals. NTEN has seen that organizations are consistently more effective at actualizing those expectations when these plans include technology, and staff are able to articulate the relationship technology has to the goals and intended outcomes for the community. Salesforce's 2nd Edition Nonprofit Trends Report found that “only 23% [of organizations] have a long‐term vision of how to use technology within their organization.”³ Consider the substantial role that technology plays in operations, whether that technology is a volunteer management platform or data management system, impact evaluation dashboard or new program delivery application. If that tech is not included in a strategic plan, all staff who use technology—which is everyone—are left on their own to try to understand the bridge between their systems and the larger direction of the organization. This approach creates confusion, unrealistic expectations, and unrealized long‐term goals.

Community members also benefit by seeing technology investments, systems, or data priorities clearly articulated in strategic plans, just as staff do. Sharing the strategic plan on the website or otherwise making it accessible to the community creates an opportunity for accountability, enabling community members to identify where stated goals or outcomes do not meet the community's needs, or that the systems listed are challenging or even harmful to their participation. As new strategic plans are often a number of years apart, the most frequent communication about them may actually be in annual reports or impact statements. These materials shouldn't only focus on program outcomes, but should report on the progress toward technology‐related investments and changes so that community members can track when changes may have an impact on the systems they use or even the way they may access their data.

Whether with staff, community members, board members, or other committees, one of the most common ways technology shows up in decision making is by the use of data. Note, however, that though data is a key part of many decision‐making processes, not all data sets or sources are applicable or ideal in every situation. So then, what is the appropriate role for data in decision making and evaluation? Regardless of the scope of the data or the decision, the right role for data is where it can illuminate opportunities for further discussion and direct community feedback.

Looking at program evaluation data as an example, many organizations have limited data that is often exclusively transactional, such as which events a participant attended or what benefits they received. Analyzing this kind of transactional data across an organization's programs could surface interesting trends between certain groupings of programs or services. Further, it would be valuable to disaggregate those analyses—by race, gender, age, disability, and even income bracket—to see if there are clear patterns of certain groups receiving different benefits or engaging with the organization in different ways. Note, though, that reviewing transactional data like this is insufficient for strategic decision making. The patterns that emerge from this data are only useful in pointing to areas where greater evaluation is needed, through direct communication and collaboration with community members to bring their experience into context. Subsequent conversations with those members can identify what came of those benefits, whether experiences and outcomes differed among individuals, and what challenges the participants faced in relation to either receiving the benefits or putting them to use. As you can see, none of this valuable detail can be gleaned from simply tracking that certain people received certain benefits.

One point is central to an organization's ability to analyze data and include staff and community members in evaluation and decision making: the data needs to be accessible. In many organizations, only select staff have access to data. Though there are valid reasons for protecting or limiting access to sensitive data about participants and service recipients, there's no reason to limit most staff from having access to nonsensitive data that could help them better serve the mission. And yet, NTEN's 2020 Data Empowerment Report revealed that 75% of responding organizations regularly restricted access to data.⁴ Bringing all of the right people and data together allows for decisions to be based on facts, not assumptions.

Intentional decision making calls for purpose‐built teams, inclusive engagement with the community, and tactical expansion of information access. Collaboration like this enables planning that builds trust and prioritizes the people served by the mission.

Focus on How Money Is Spent

What considerations should technology‐responsible staff use for budgeting and planning technology investments? Rather than focusing on the total amount that could be spent, focus on how that money is spent.

Organizations often struggle to make the most of their budget because there is no road map or technology strategy to guide decision making over time. Similarly, many social impact organizations do not regularly evaluate whether the technology they have in place is working—which can perennially frustrate the staff using that tech, and lead to hasty purchasing decisions when it breaks down. The 2020 Tech Accelerate report showed that over 72% of organizations never or only sometimes have a clear process for prioritizing technology needs, selection, and implementation.

Edima Elinegwinga is the Chief Technology Officer at ZERO TO THREE, a nonprofit organization with the mission to ensure that all babies and toddlers have a strong start in life. They provide numerous programs to train and support professionals who support children and their families, as well as policymakers and service providers. Their technology projects include everything from enabling online professional development events for caregivers to data tracking and evaluation to fuel advocacy and policy work.

ZERO TO THREE conducts an annual survey of the entire organization to gather feedback about the way technology is used by different staff and teams, and to identify challenges or needs. Edima notes that these surveys have “really helped give us feedback in areas of opportunities and challenges that we may not have surfaced otherwise.” After collecting responses in the survey, Edima and her team analyze the feedback and present it to the organization to review. This intake and reflection process reveals patterns and clear areas of need that affect many people; it also initiates a cycle of aligning priorities and expectations with the entire organization.

Before any spending happens, the whole organization considers where needs are arising and together determines which items they will address in the coming year. Of particular note is the fact that this evaluation process regularly surfaces areas of need that can be remedied through training, rather than more expensive solutions like new tools and products. Edima says, “Before we used this process, people only had assumptions about what was needed and where to spend, because they didn't have data to better understand needs across the organization.”

In addition, ZERO TO THREE has found budget savings by annually evaluating where there is overspending on licenses. For example, if a staff person wants access to reports and data but rarely logs in to directly review that data, reports can be set up to be automatically sent to them as often as they like—reducing the need to pay for that staffer's administrative license. Repeat this scenario dozens of times, and the savings can really add up.

When Edima joined ZERO TO THREE, she introduced an agile methodology practice of chunking up technology projects into three‐week “sprints.” At the start of a project sprint, all related subject matter experts and key stakeholders are tasked with identifying needs, gathering requirements, pinpointing process or user flow expectations, and prioritizing action steps. This group of diverse community members—who hail from both inside and outside the organization—agrees together on the requirements and priorities before the development begins. “Then,” Edima explains, “instead of building something for six months or however long a full project may take, every three weeks the group of stakeholders are re‐engaged to demo or review what's been built and identify together if things are not aligned with needs or expectations. This really helps ensure we don't have surprises as we build different tools for our work.”

Importantly, working in this way enables ZERO TO THREE to make the most of their technology budget because projects regularly pause for review, avoiding overspending or errant development. This saves on both human impact and budget impact, while also building trust and better products. Edima says:

Sometimes when we demo a project after a 3‐week sprint, the feedback is just cosmetic and users don't like how something looks. But sometimes, we completely missed the actual process—even though we all talked about it at the start, once they can see it on the screen they can better describe what is needed or how what was built isn't right. But the good thing is, we've only spent three weeks on this so it is easy to go back and change, then check in again before we move on to the next phase. This has been received so well because the entire organization knows what the IT department is focusing on and can see that every department has time and projects included throughout the year.⁵

Evaluation and interaction create a process for investing in technology that brings needs to the fore and generates regular opportunities for cost savings and intentional budgeting.

Focus on Accessibility

There are many ways that accessibility is considered—or not considered—in organizations. From physical entrances to internet service to language interpretation to digital functionality, accessibility is a very big topic that requires care, attention, and commitment. As with many areas of technology use and investment, focusing on accessibility from the start avoids having to spend time, energy, money, and heartache redoing decisions, designs, and workflows.

According to Pew Research Center data from a US survey in 2021, “62% of adults with a disability say they own a desktop or laptop computer, compared with 81% of those without a disability.” In addition, the report states, “Americans with disabilities are three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online (15% vs. 5%).”⁶ Unless organizations take time to be intentional about engaging with community members with disabilities, the probability that those members are learning about the organization's programs and services on its website is much lower than for other groups. Remember that what works best for one group does not always work for another—but thoughtful and strategic technology planning and implementation can enable users to access an organization's information and programs.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, provides a global standard for online accessibility;⁷ unfortunately, many organizations don't ensure that their websites or other digital tools, events, and programs meet those standards. WebAIM⁸ and other similar tools help identify which portions of a website are not accessible by the WCAG standards. For many organizations, accessibility improvements are needed in areas that can be easily addressed, such as adding alt text for images and ensuring that styling structures are used consistently so that screen readers can parse the text. Even if the organization doesn't have technical control of a system or tool—say, for example, a program team relies on a third‐party tool like Google Hangout or Zoom for virtual events—accessibility issues can be addressed within those tools, including options for how folks can dial in by phone or computer, and additional services for translation and captioning.

Of course, staff accessibility is important too. Diverse applications exist for addressing how staff are trained, supported, and able to use technology. Of primary concern in this realm is the fact that organizational policies that expect staff to provide their own computers—often called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies—disadvantage staff based on income, personal experience and knowledge, and more. BYOD policies are neither equitable nor accessible. Employees have different levels of expertise with which to select and maintain tech products, as well as different financial resources with which to buy them. Organizations need to provide all the technology tools—hardware and software—that are required for success at the organization, as well as the training and accommodations or assistive technologies and supports to enable staff to use technology in their work.

Note that accessibility to websites, technology tools, and even programs or services is not a discrete investment “just” for people with a specified disability. “Disability” is a wide‐ranging term, and many accommodations or customizations to tools and programs help community members both with and without various disabilities. Cognitive differences, chronic health issues, and even the realities of changing schedules and caretaking all affect how a community member or staff person may need to, say, call into a meeting instead of joining on video—or follow a transcript of an event, or require live support, or prefer asynchronous communication.

Equity concerns everyone. And disabilities, personal needs, and health challenges can all change over time—so just because someone didn't need an accommodation previously doesn't invalidate the request today. The more effectively an organization addresses accessibility issues of all kinds—and thus removes barriers—the more effective it will be in fulfilling its mission.

Make Data Systems Equitable

Data is a subject of many contradictions in many social impact organizations. Sometimes organizations collect valuable data, like community feedback or qualitative evaluation, but then neglect to incorporate it into decision making. Sometimes organizations neglect to collect data in areas that could better surface equity issues, or improve how the organization communicates with and serves the community. For example, NTEN's Data Empowerment Report found that over 60% of respondent organizations never collect the pronouns its participants prefer, and just over 20% collect pronouns only occasionally. Without collecting pronouns, the organization can't communicate with individuals without making assumptions about their identity.

Jude Shimer, the CRM Manager at Center for Popular Democracy, experienced this particular neglect in multiple ways in interactions they had with organizations they engaged with as a community member. As they explain, the way organizations structure their data systems internally has external impacts that create barriers and distrust for program participants and supporters.

Common practices in nonprofit fundraising impact trans and nonbinary community members. I've experienced this as a donor, but fortunately have also had the opportunity to help organizations break those habits.

I once tried to submit an organization's donation form, but the form required a salutation, and there was no gender‐neutral option such as Mx. I contacted the org to see if they could make the field optional and/or add Mx, but they apologetically told me their technology didn't allow them to do either. So I didn't donate. The experience left me suspicious of the organization—if they couldn't accommodate trans or nonbinary donors, how could I be assured they accommodated trans and nonbinary people in the communities they served? And the issue is self‐perpetuating: pushing away trans community members removes their voices and hampers organizational growth.

If a community member does make it through an intake process—whether donating or signing up or participating in an event—what the organization does with their data matters. As Jude shares, it is important that organizations ensure there are systems to honor and protect the accuracy of data directly provided by users.

Data sharing can negatively impact trans community members. I once became a member of an organization without entering any gender data, but later received a membership card for “Ms. Jude Shimer.” Updating contact information with data obtained somewhere else may add an outdated salutation or gender to that individual's record. By referencing bad data, an org can misgender a community member, and misgendering is often an extremely unpleasant experience that will impact a person's impression of the org.

Worse, I had to call the organization twice before I stopped receiving emails addressed to “Ms. Jude Shimer.” Each time I was assured my salutation had been removed. Organizations often lack a protocol for making sure that updates to a person's name, pronouns, salutation, or gender are preserved. If a community member contacts an org to correct their information and these corrections are later undone by, for example, a rushed data update, misgendering that individual could cause them to lose trust in the organization and feel that the org's inclusion efforts are hollow.

Recently, I joined a cohort of trans tech professionals and allies from several nonprofits to provide feedback on the inclusivity of a specific company's tools. The company not only was receptive but later proactively sought our feedback on additional features. Whenever a company's technology does or should store data on individuals' identities, the company ought to routinely engage communities of that identity in their planning and design processes.

There is a lot to balance with data in social impact organizations: not being extractive by collecting more data than is necessary, while also collecting enough data to understand the communities and the organization's impact. It is critical for intentional service delivery and program evaluation that organizations collect data including race, disability, gender, and age; but there are many instances and communities for which that data or information—about, say, immigration status, service history, or even relationship status—in the wrong hands could have dangerous outcomes. If data could cause harm if shared, it's critical that both the collection processes and the storage tools are secure. For example, collecting sensitive data on a clipboard at an event is not safe, but collecting that data on a secured and protected laptop or tablet for data would be both safe and efficient, as the information would be added directly to the database. Security is key for all systems where data is stored, yet, according to the 2019 Global NGO Technology Report, only 41% of social impact organizations globally use encryption technology to protect their data.⁹ The data that community members trustingly share with social impact organizations still belongs to that member—so, it is essential that that data is stored securely.

Honoring self‐determination with data in social impact organizations means ensuring that community members have the flexibility to identify in authentic ways and not be restricted to demographic options that don't match their identity. For many social impact organizations, collecting data from community members is at least partly in compliance with reporting expectations from funders, including government and philanthropic grants. But just because a funder uses outdated, inaccurate, or otherwise different data structures for their own evaluation and reporting, that does not mean the grantee social impact organization needs to push those same structures onto community members. It is important that data management and use policies explain how an organization stores and secures constituent data, as well as how they will use it—including how they will adapt data to reporting requirements.

Furthermore, centering the community in data use means that organizations should use caution with tools for predictive analytics, and evaluate the presumptions those tools use both in their algorithms and comparative datasets. If an organization is working with communities already experiencing historic and systemic harm, it is likely that a predictive analytics tool negatively reinforces stereotypes or assumptions that may not be accurate. Relying on those tools, then, sets the organization up to perpetuate harm or to maintain systems that disadvantage or prevent community members from receiving the full breadth of their potential supports.

It is an honor to be trusted with the caretaking and safekeeping of data from community members. It behooves social impact organizations to prioritize safety, accuracy, and self‐determination so as to best position themselves for success.

Invest in Tech for Today and Tomorrow

The COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted everything across the globe. And while no multiyear strategic plan could have predicted it specifically, the sudden need to change how and where staff do their work is not an unreasonable inclusion in a technology road map. Important opportunities open up when organizations don't just look at the way technology supports the mission today but also look at how the investments made today could further effectiveness or flexibility in the future.

In NTEN's 2021 Tech‐Enabled Operations Report, respondents were asked how well‐prepared their organization was, either technologically or culturally, to shift to remote work because of the pandemic. Nearly one‐quarter (23%) of respondents reported not being prepared technologically for staff to work from home.¹⁰ This is a disappointing outcome—given that remote‐access and cloud‐based tools are not new, and given that folks with disabilities, caretakers, staff with children, and other groups have for years requested options to work more flexibly.

While of course an organization can't anticipate every manner of emergency, disaster, or community change, it is possible to infuse expenditures for immediate needs with an investment in the future.

At ZERO TO THREE, a learning management system (LMS) was implemented to support some of the professional development programs they run throughout the year. This online system integrated data and processes so that community members could smoothly register and participate in events, and the organization could easily track and manage participant lists, participation history, and more. Given the nature of the training events, some program staff and the community groups they worked with were used to working offline. But when the pandemic hit, making their more localized, offline processes less feasible, they were swiftly set up with online program delivery through the LMS used by other areas of the organization. How did this come about? Edima and her team already knew that the LMS could support many more programs than just the original groups involved in the implementation, so the LMS did not include tightly fitted customizations exclusive to a single program area. This broader application view meant that when the time was right—or, in this case, was forced upon them—the process of onboarding new teams and programs to the platform was fairly straightforward.

“Technology planning is key to successful implementation today,” says Edima. If an organization has a broad view of both its current needs and potential changes down the road, that organization doesn't necessarily need an IT road map or multiyear development timeline specifying decisions years in advance. Instead, organizations can develop documents or dashboards that indicate when current tools are up for renewal, when programs are expected to expand or change, and where staff have the highest areas of need. Focusing on those details would enable staffers to make decisions and investments today that can ripple forward to support effectiveness over the long term.

Build Power with Shared Infrastructure

A direct counteraction to the mindset of competition is to share the very tools an organization relies on with others to reuse and further build on. This could work in a number of ways. For example, some working in the climate action sector have shared a single back‐end database that houses comprehensive knowledge about the campaigns and topics that interest various constituents; as a result, they've been able to distribute more integrated calls to action.

Mala Kumar, Director of Tech for Social Good at GitHub, sees every day how open source software is developed in support of a social need, or the way an organization's work in one area can be redeployed all around the world by others. She shares:

One widely cited and successful example of open source software is DHIS2, which is led by the University of Oslo. It's now been deployed in 70+ countries around the world at some level—some instances are at the national level like in Kenya; most of them are at the sub‐national level like a district or region. It's really important because, as we consider the different systems—like electronic medical records for individuals, on up to the health management system to see where resources may be or what are the national rates of a certain disease—DHIS2 is on that aggregate level. This information is really important when it comes to public health funding, for example, because we could see an uptick in COVID‐19 or HIV, and DHIS2 plays a critical role in enabling that work. They started this as an open source platform and, while there are people in national and regional teams managing the software for their use, developers have also built apps that run on top of it that add customizations for localization needs.¹¹

When more of the tools organizations use are shared, funding and development work can be devoted to improvements to those tools or customizations for different use cases—or even additional pieces of software that enable different programs stemming from similar technical needs. Sharing infrastructure also accelerates learning, because groups can report how they have succeeded, and where others have encountered challenges putting the same technology in place. These collective lessons result in a better product for everyone—not to mention the goodwill and camaraderie that stem from such trusting collaboration.

Budget for Learning and Testing

Learning is one of the most valuable aspects of technology processes and projects for social impact, but it is not always free. When planning and budgeting for technology, organizations should consider how and where there may be space to invest in staff time, processes, or budget to enable active and regular learning and testing. As Edima explained in relation to their three‐week sprints, some of the opportunities for testing and learning may come from processes that ensure there are frequent opportunities to pause development and get feedback from project teams and stakeholders, quickly identifying issues or changes before more development takes place.

Central to focusing on learning is remembering that technology is going to change. GitHub's Mala Kumar refers to technology as “a living document” that we should expect to be constantly updated. This means that any information an organization learns about community needs—say, through program evaluation or feedback—can and should be applied to the technology that supports those community members and programs. This evolution of technology is a gift and a benefit, not a burden.