From Random Hacks to the Future of Kindness
Last year I had a conversation with Brett Tackaberry, who founded and co-organizes Ottawa’s Random Hacks of Kindness, over my #impact30coffee challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed his knowledge spanning many fields covering business, design, and technology, and of course, his views on emerging business models and how the tech sector can open up new ways of giving back to society. We ended the conversation at the “future of kindness” and that it lies in our human nature of wanting to make people around us feel safe, secure, and ultimately: happy.
Over the weekend of April 26–28, 2019, at another sold out and successful Random Hacks of Kindness, I caught up with Brett again at the hackathon to find out what he discovered over the past year within the RHoK community and where his thoughts carry the movement to continue connecting talents and resources with great social good organizations.
Photos: Brandon Brule, Jason Fournier and Suvro(@bitsknit)
Last time we sat down and talked about social impact and Random Hacks of Kindness was around the same time in 2018. I was here in October with Sharon and we had so much fun working with Vélo Vanier. Over the year, what are some new insights you have discovered or things you’ve been working on?
BT: So, the event structure of Random Hacks hasn’t changed that much. It’s still is a number of organizations around the city and a bunch of developers and designers getting together. My understanding of it has changed a little bit in the past year. Participants are really easy to find. I’ll do a few tweets out and a couple of newsletters out, they get retweeted and then people show up.
It sells out a few weeks in advance, and if I put any sort of pressure on it, it will just sell out quicker. There’s no lack of enthusiasm or desire to give back. I sense that people have a lot of good will, a lot of expertise, a lot of time to give and they are looking for outlets to give back.
I see a lot of support. I don’t get a lot of money thrown at me but it’s really easy to find sponsorship and depending on when people’s budget come and go, I can tell by how well the companies or the markets are doing because that affects how much people can give. I’ve really only had to reach out to fairly close colleagues and friends to get enough money to run these things, so the money behind it is actually pretty easy to find too. I haven’t had to do anything crazy: no grants; no government funding; and, I don’t have to do any real call for sponsorship.
I go to friends, and that’s been pretty good. I think in terms of the supports, they are often from the people or the companies.
I always find it difficult to find participating organizations. I always shopped it out to those who have a good network in the not for profit area or the social enterprise space. So, over the last couple of years and more so the last year I started getting a better understanding of the challenges on how to find projects but also building networks. Even after having the network, it is still hard to get the projects into Random Hacks.
Now you’d think that people would have all these problems just ready to go, but they don’t. You know, when you think that “this is broken, that’s broken, and this thing… it could be better” there are a few things at play: more and more we realize that we can’t just go fixing people’s problems despite being a solutions-oriented society. We still can’t just go and trying to solve everything, right? It is being able to bring people along, identify their problems, and understand their problems. Be willing to champion them to own the problems and adopt technology to solve these things. That’s been a barrier.
The organizations that are being left behind are organizations that don’t have money as their primary business driver. They are not in it to make money, they are in it to feed people, keep people happy, to help improve literacy and so on. They do need to raise money, but they are not in it for that. Again, we have to come back and design software and be inclusive of the whole range of its users, which includes people who can’t pay for it. Therefore, you have to rethink business models so that you can run a business, sell your software, and also give it to the percentage of people who can never afford your services — you have to find ways to give it to them anyways so that they can get benefit from technology.
LJ: What are some of the barriers in getting companies and organizations buy into the idea of tech for good?
BT: The organizations and the people that work for them are easy to convince. They’ve always had to scrounge, make do, and do more with less. They never thought big tech is their partners, so it is new for them. In the past maybe they have gotten rejected, received second-class services, or they have been given solutions that don’t work for them. It is probably very frustrating for them. You know, again, people trying to solve other people’s problems. I think there’s a lot of barriers to bring them along. The mindset … maybe… to start off with.
On the other side of the fence. I don’t know if the model is there. There’s probably a spectrum of Corporate Social Responsibility corporations that goes through to have the level of understanding or commitment or enlightenment (laugh) of doing good. There are a few stages: they go from “none,” to “throw money at it,” to “have a few token programs,” to “it [social responsibility] being a part of how they create value.” There’s this whole spectrum, and we have to push people up to this spectrum of becoming good citizens.
The barriers on the corporate end are that these social organizations aren’t necessarily their growth curve. Nothing is stopping them, other than that they have to rethink their business models. Eventually, to start, it is going to have to come out of their profits somehow. They have to rethink what profit looks like — they have to rethink their supply chain. At Rebel we always go back to our supply chain. It doesn’t cost much to go up and down your supply chain and figure out ways you can serve people better. You have to rebuild your business basically — seems daunting — but maybe it is not as hard as you think.
LJ: I’ve encountered a few types of organizations over the past: you have the ones that are great at raising money but not very innovative, and on the other end you have the smaller organizations that are pushing new concepts and innovative ways of tackling social issues but are horrible at getting funded. How can this dynamic change and how can resources be better distributed?
BT: How can they get more resources? I’m not sure, that’s a clear problem, but they are tackling it already. There’re ways they can learn how to write grants or get access to different funding opportunities, but I don’t think I know this space that well other than some third-party understanding. How do companies and organizations with consistent funding get better at being more innovative? I think that’s where connections with the tech sector are important. This is where Civic Tech or Code4Canada fellowship comes in. We can have hackathons or lunch-and-learn to smash the different kinds of organizations together, or we can have fellowship programs that embed someone in an organization for 12–18 months. Those are great ways of getting expertise into organizations. I think the tech sector really need to create opportunities to share expertise so organizations can really start thinking innovatively.
LJ: Coming back to Random Hacks of Kindness, what do the organizations or the participants think? What are their biggest takeaways or insights that they’ve shared with you?
BT: Organizations that come, usually have an affinity to technology, to begin with. They get reaffirmed that there’re good people helping their organizations through technology. They are there to validate that concept. They now have the 10 people who are now invested in their cause, and will be there to help them and have produced some values. So they walk away with a set of new fans who would not have found them otherwise.
Participants, some live in a silo for the most part. Chances are that they don’t usually need the services that the people they are working with [at Random Hacks of Kindness] offer. For example, housing problems, food insecurity… they may have kids that need educational services like the challenge cards or the robot project. So they’ll have some affinities to these programs. What I really like is when you see people venture out of their comfort zones and you force them to interact with frontline workers. You get to really understand what people across the city and the challenges that they face. So you get to work with the people who understand the problem and how it is to work with frontline communities and the essence of the issues they are solving. I think this is a huge empathy builder. I love that part of it. The participants come up to me and say that they didn’t know that these challenges existed.
When they sign up to participate, there’s an input box asking why they are doing this. It is never about networking or getting a job. It is usually about that people want to give back, use their skills for a good cause, or help different organizations in their communities, that kind of things. So they walk away with a connection to that organization and also walk away with a better understanding of their own value and ways they can help.
LJ: Speaking from my experience — some organizations I have encountered would hire someone cheap and end up with a poor product, and they have very little idea to how they can access resources or perhaps come to Random Hacks and get their projects off the ground.
BT: Yea, that’s always a challenge. I wouldn’t recommend them to a small shop or a sole proprietor. It is a lot to ask of a small company for them to do work for free. I think I would suggest maybe a 5- or 7-person shop taking on one pro-bono project per year to give back. You are right, they can also come to RHoK, but there’re also some difficulties. We turn away some projects that are just “regular work.” I want people here to work on challenges. I don’t want participants to come here and just redesign a website or build fundraising tools. It is not rewarding for participants. I want people to feel they’re contributing to advancing the cause. This is definitely a gap, and unfortunately, organizations with needs in digital services have nowhere to turn to when they need service design, digital transformation, or service rethink. They can’t afford that, but they still need a hundred hours or more from a digital expert. That’s a big gap right now. Maybe it is a triangle situation where organization A has a need but cannot afford the cost, organization B delivers the work, but organization C pays organization B rather than having organization A pay for it. Like what happens in nature… symbiosis, you know. Sometimes companies have their Corporate Social Responsibility programs, but they don’t necessarily have the people or expertise to deliver to organizations that need it. It is in their mandate to help, but they need somebody to provide that service. Again, this is a situation where you need to be a little more creative. It is a gap so you might be able to experiment with this model.
LJ: I feel this is more of a conversation that will happen at the “C-level,” isn’t it?
BT: It is a little “C-level” kind of conversation right here. You will need someone that can champion the idea and get it to the decision-makers. Getting cash from people is hard. Or maybe we take money out of the situation and have your living expenses covered by providing you with things like food and shelter? I don’t know.
LJ: This is where the scene cuts to me living in a house on a tropical island, working away on exciting projects. I can see it as a reality show. Anyways, would you say that there is a need for new business models in the not-for-profit space?
BT: Yea. New ways of moving money and resources around. Everything takes money. Having to hire someone to raise enough to cover both the cost of fundraising and the real boost in productivity is not efficient. It is a waste of time to have 50 cents per dollar raised put to the cause. You did all the work and ended up only moving forward a little bit. If you can figure out a way to take money out of this situation, you can put all the energy into “doing good.” This is part of what Random Hacks represents. How do we get the expertise, the technology, and the opportunities straight to organizations in need without asking them to put their energy into coming up with the money first?
LJ: It sounds to me that now is the time to rethink the cost of generosity and what putting a price-tag on generosity does to the sector. Is it ok to put a price tag on it?
BT: That’s kind of the big question: everyone still operates in $. Should we even be talking in $? It is like asking people to measure happiness. How do you even measure happiness? To be able to measure impact or happiness is a big question because some people are trying to equate investment to the deployment of happiness, like “What can $1 get in happiness?”
Some people ask these questions and do the calculations to put an amount on impact. For example, loneliness cost a certain amount in health services, staying out of prison is worth something, learning a skill and getting a job is worth something…when a person takes a course from a local social enterprise, that person can move out of community housing because she is now able to work, get paid, and support a family. There’s value in keeping people out of homelessness and situations like that.
LJ: It is another new business model to consider. Just from my personal experience, sometimes organizations will have a smaller budget to start with, but once you dig deeper into their needs and get them to understand the value of the project to their organization, they do eventually come up with the amount they need to realize the project.
BT: You have to be creative in getting the budget for sure. There isn’t a lot of money sitting around. For example, at Rebel, we are always putting money into hiring new people or investing in our services and products. We can give in products, time and expertise, but there isn’t a lot of cash just sitting around. Sponsorship in cash happens but will be strategic. Companies don’t usually have money sitting in the bank that’s not spoken for, so you have to be creative when it comes to asking for money.
LJ: A lot of times it comes from knowing how companies or organizations operate. This means there’s an enormous benefit in understanding the business models of organizations and their value chain, what do you think?
BT: Exactly. What we did in my last shop was that whenever we create a bid for a project, we also build the business case for the project sponsor to bring to their bosses. They can present the business case to their bosses and make sure that they understand the impact of the project. That’s the way to do it: you help them. You make it easy for them and coach them to communicate what is valuable for their company. You need to understand and have empathy for your buyers, your buyers’ clients or funders, you need to spend a day in their shoes. You might discover that what they need is not just a marketing project, but it also affects the business development. You will then be able to get the two departments to sponsor the project together and create more value for them that way.
LJ: Especially in the not-for-profit scenario, it is never just about doing marketing or creating a campaign.
BT: Yes. It is going to affect their entire operation and the people that they serve.
