Tech-philanthropy

Philanthropy sector has been stagnating for many years now. As the complexity of challenges grows so does the effectiveness of the old approaches to solving them. Nonprofit organisations are failing to meet the growing demands of donors, cutting corners on transparency and undermining trust, which triggers major dissatisfaction of the traditional ways of giving. What is happening and how the tech-philanthropy paradigm can help us overcome those challenges is the main goal of this article.

Without any doubt, tech platforms and solutions are capable of changing the way we collaborate and create value. We see dramatic changes and transformations in almost all sectors of business and science, but it looks humanitarian and I would say the most crucial sector and a need of the day, significantly lags in advancement and benefits from new technologies. Even the largest organisations, like the UN, having enough resources and manpower, are unable to leverage technology to significantly challenge the most pressing issues.

What is happening ?

We’ve identified 4 potential reasons why technology penetration in the humanitarian sector is slower, despite the urgent need.

#1 Growing complexity of the tech solutions

As the technology complexity and customer expectations are growing, a solution becomes more demanding to the variety of knowledge the organisation needs to possess to implement a successful IT project. To develop and maintain even the simplest solution, an organisation needs to hire and care for at least 5-10 full-time highly-skilled IT people. In addition, it needs a better structure of the leadership, inviting CTO, CIO, CDO to the c-suit and a tech-savvy president. That makes it almost incompatible with the old modus-operandi of nonprofit organisational model.

#2 Donations as a main source of revenue

With a fluctuating donation system and a traditional low-cost operational model, adding so many systemic human resources is barely possible or justifiable. There should be a solid plan on how to maintain sustainable income, not only to develop, but to maintain and grow IT solutions to serve the beneficiaries and the non profit organisation without engaging into full-scale IT business and crossing ethical red lines, that businesses usually do.

#Nonprofit structure

Non-paid trustee board, that in tech usually serving as a driving force behind successful IT solutions, is incapable of committing full time to the project and unable to deliver a meaningful solution in a current highly-demanding tech environment. 

All and many other minor organisational factors make it almost impossible for a nonprofit organisation to deliver an IT solution bigger than a website, while tech startups with a pure for-profit model, can make a much bigger impact  without even knowing it. 

The bottom line - IT requires infrastructure, resources  and attention that in a current structure is impossible to implement.

#4 No clear roadmap

Startups are usually focusing on one particular well-identified problem. Humanitarian solutions on the other hand have many facets, systemic consequences and hidden agendas. To navigate them is to actively exchange information with the IT team that should work on the solution of a social problem at hand, not only the code. That means changing the plans, structure and goals. That requires a different skill-set and approach to project planning and implementation.

Current solutions

As a result of above structural problems, humanitarian projects are effectively competing with tech-giants and for-profit companies, both in budgets and quality of service that customers expect.

#1 In-house team

In house IT team usually consists of a few full-time tech-savvy staff, 

volunteers, students and external consultants. In such an unstable environment, with no structure, roadmap and incentives, meaningful results could be achieved in many years, when the actual problem could change in scope, making all efforts worthless. 

#2 Dev shops

Having initial funding, nonprofits could potentially turn to IT services company that could deliver a world-class platform with meaningful functionality. However, having no direct incentives in the outcomes, experience and understanding of the problem, having a single goal to deliver the project according to the specifications and move to a new one - rarely works for solving complex problems in a changing environment. Servicing the platform, which is never a core service for dev-shops, usually too expensive and inefficient, could easily become a burden to the budget of the organisation and its donors. In addition, having no clear roadmap and innate understanding of the IT team about the task could significantly increase the project initial budget with a high probability of being never finished.

#3 Fully volunteering projects

While we see some great IT projects solving humanitarian problems are launching on the market and getting attention, we see major roadblocks for such  initiatives.  

• Volunteering projects take too long and solve too little.
• Lack of close collaboration between IT team and nonprofits. 
• Disconnection between perceived problem by the IT team and actual problem on the ground. 
• Unstable delivery due to personal funding issues and potential employment opportunities.
• Limited funding options.

With many challenges that any traditional tech startups already face, humanitarian projects add complexity, uncertainty and funding, making such initiatives highly challenging to deliver on scale. 

#4  Big-tech

With potentially unlimited human and financial resources, big-tech potentially have everything to deliver great humanitarian IT projects and change millions of lives. However, in practice, we rarely see any such solutions. 

Undoubtedly many solutions certainly are bringing much value to the society and solving some critical social problems, we see that the structure of for-profit approach and lack of intention of solving particular problems are making such impacts highly unstable with potentially sunsetting useful elements due to economical reasons or even unintentionally exacerbating the problem. 

Although big-tech is capable of delivering impressive humanitarian IT projects and value to the society, their profit and share value-first approach and lack of systemic understanding and collaboration with social actors make them less effective than they could be

Summarising the problem:

Humanitarian sector is lagging behind in the use of new technologies despite the urgent need and evident efficiencies, and there are major structural roadblocks that hinder its adoption, including growing complexity of tech solutions, funding challenges, and governance structures. Nonprofit organisations lack structure and funding, big-tech giants lack of intention. As a result there’s not a single entity that is fully equipped and capable to deliver both qualitative and scalable tech solutions for solving social and environment challenges. 

Tech-philanthropy

We’re composing tech-philanthropy as a separate entity and a paradigm that brings to the field different sets of systems and structures. Apparently, it needs to meet the above challenges, take the best from each approach and build a new structure that is capable of operating on different levels of understanding: 

Tech - which is a physical level, like technologies, platforms, services, architectures

Philanthropy - a vital level of bringing resources and capabilities as well as bringing a deeper understanding of the problems and strong intention to solve them. 

By actively exchanging information and resources, collaborating and seeking ways to improve each other, creating an emergence  - that is what we called Tech-philanthropy - a mental level that creates a new way of understanding how we can solve bigger social and environmental problems with tech capabilities in a modern business environment.

The key features of tech-philanthropy:

• Systemic. All services are deeply systemic in nature. 
• Impact oriented. Impact is measured and communicated. 
• Data-first - Collecting and processing data.
• Operating as a business entity, with governance structures of nonprofit. 
• Serve as an tech-abstraction layer for the whole nonprofit sector
• Services architecture. 
• Creating sustainable and scalable social solutions, using modern organisational models and traditional tech-growth strategies.

Tech-philanthropy as paradigm

Firstly, we encourage and support philanthropists in taking this modern approach to their investment. This paradigm instructs investors how to choose appropriate beneficiaries, organisations and goals, that are capable of integrating tech-philanthropy principles, improving delivery of the social impact and sustainably growing itself throughout the time without additional investments. The latter is the biggest advantage of tech-philanthropy. 

Secondly, we’re bringing tech systems and approaches to beneficiaries. By thinking as a tech-startup, integrating newest technologies and communication tools, social projects can not only survive, but thrive and bring and scale value without external management or constant funding pressure.

Thirdly, it serves as a fertile ground to grow new social projects out of successful ones. Tech philanthropy instructs creating services architecture and learning that could be used by new startups, complementing or empowering new waves of social projects and services that can rely on ready-to-use and inexpensive capabilities that are previously intentionally developed per-design. In essence, each tech-philanthropy project is a stand-alone incubator.

Tech-philanthropy as service

We’re actively delivering key tech services to social projects. Although there are many services on the market, most of them are targeting traditional startups growth paradigms and do not fit social strategies. As a matter of fact, most social projects need higher free tiers due to the nature of their work. We create abstraction levels, ready-to-use solutions and financial-licensing for social projects to be able to grow, overcoming traditional market obstacles. 

Tech-philanthropy as fund

In this role it acts as an incubator. It identifies, supports and develops best social projects and technologies, providing essential resources and structures for them to grow and serve effectively. We open insights to a new paradigm, clearly demonstrating how these fundamental technologies and services can play a crucial part in effectively solving current problems. 

Summary

Needless to say, technology can help us to solve the current crisis. But it also can exacerbate it. The difference is understanding and intention that we put. Currently there are no structures delivering both equations, with nonprofits limited with structure, big-tech limited in will. Tech-philanthropy delivers a new emergence level, that uses technology as an underlying level and philanthropy as a paradigm level, to create a new structure that is capable and equipped of creating social projects on scale.

Tech-philanthropy could be embodied in investment philosophy, could be social tech service or a tech-focused philanthropic fund. In all cases, tech philanthropy is an overarching paradigm that connects latest technologies with social projects to empower impact and solve complexities we currently face. 

iPhilanthropist is a developer of this approach as  well as providing tech-philanthropy services on all levels. We invite you to explore this concept with us and delighted to support the success of your investment strategy.