How nonprofits should use technology to become more efficient

Smartphone penetration is exponentially growing in Africa, but that doesn’t mean every nonprofit should create an app.

Here is a common scenario: Nonprofit A has a problem that they want to solve by creating a new app or technology. Foundation B is attracted to the idea of solving the problem with technology and provides Nonprofit A with the resources to do it. The Nonprofit is not specialized in tech development, has no software engineers or product managers on staff, and yet they are able to win a grant to design and build a technical solution from scratch.

So now that they have the funds, what do they do? They seek out vendors, technical design studios, freelance software engineers who can promise they can build the promised tech in less than three months (which ends up taking over one year). However, the nonprofit still has to answer these questions that they can’t simply outsource:

1. What is the lifecycle development analysis on the product build?

2. How will they quality assure and keep track of bugs within those versions?

3. Who is prioritizing what features are to be built in what order and how are they deciding whether the product meets quality standards for adoption?

4. Who will support the engineers on making those minute decisions?

5. What is the nonprofits strategy for adopting the technology once it’s ready to be implemented? Who will onboard users, teach them the technology and make it easy to use?

Unless the nonprofit is specifically focused on a technical solution with its core mission centered around the product, typically such projects fall to the wayside. Rarely are timelines met, easily extending 1-year beyond promised deadlines. By the time the donor report arrives on the product, the nonprofit is scrambling to ask for more time and resources to implement said technology. Grant funding, however, does not last forever. Is there a commercial application for the technology? Does the nonprofit then have the skills around sales, marketing, and customer acquisition to create a revenue stream around the technology? Perhaps it would have been more efficient for the nonprofit to have simply utilized and paid for an existing app that could solve this problem and integrate it for their beneficiaries than building it from scratch.

This is why ENVision mobile was strategically split from its nonprofit parent ENVenture. ENVenture’s skillset does not lie in selling technology and product management — the tech requires a whole new team with specific expertise in this industry to provide an off-the-shelf solution for organizations collecting financial data in low-resource contexts. However, in order for a successful split to occur, the following steps had to be taken:

1. Tapping outside expertise to create the management team. Having a strong management/co-founding team is necessary for any tech startup and the management team had to come from the outside of the organization. In this case, recruiting a CTO and a private-sector business lead is recommended.
2. Use the non-profit parent as the testing ground. As the first “customer”, many insights and knowledge will be gained for the new startup simply by working strategically with the nonprofit parent to ensure the technology is appropriately adopted and makes a case for product market fit.

ENVision mobile offers a very inexpensive solution compared to building out apps and dashboards in-house. Most importantly, the team at ENVision are experts at enabling organizations to become more efficient in using technology and enabling technology for microentrepreneurs to become more self-sufficient. Those skills are special — and we are excited to help organizations take more control of their data through offering attractive pricing and management of a technology that is difficult to create and maintain in-house.