My goal in Technology for Good: How Nonprofit Leaders Are Using Software and Data to Solve Our Most Pressing Social Problems is to provide the first “how-to” guide for starting a deliberately nonprofit tech company and how nonprofits are using tech for good. Technology is increasingly indispensable to delivering social impact at scale, and the differences between for-profit and nonprofit tech enterprises are well worth highlighting. The book highlights more than 60 nonprofits from all over the world that are using tech as a critical part of their successful nonprofit programs.

Technology for Good opens with two chapters on the most common bad and good ideas related to nonprofits’ use of technology. The good ideas include three of the best approaches for success when using tech for good: 1) equipping people on the front lines of social change, 2) moving major tech projects into the cloud, and 3) killing “dinosaurs.”

The nonprofit field is generally slow to innovate, in part because it has traditionally lacked funding for technology and experienced tech staff, hindering efforts to use tech for good. However, the many crises facing us demand that we collectively must do much more with the same (or less!) funding. One way to do that is to use technology to create innovative and cost-effective ways to deliver programs, starting by taking a hard look at programs and organizations that are no longer fit for today’s challenges. That means it’s time to kill a few dinosaurs!—Jim Fruchterman

Excerpt From Technology for Good

Large parts of the social sector are dominated by dinosaurs: nonprofits or government agencies doing their work the same way it’s been done for decades rather than innovating in using tech for good. A social innovation that was amazing in the 1940s, 1960s, or 1980s has very likely run its course by the 2020s. If incumbents are resistant to change, a great approach for a smart social good leader is to use tech to scale a new, far less expensive, and far better way to accomplish the social objective of delivering social impact. The dinosaurs that don’t update their approaches should eventually die of irrelevance.

Read the full article about nonprofits using tech for good by Jim Fruchterman at Stanford Social Innovation Review.