Millennial Nonprofits are a Thing — Here’s What We Can Learn from Them
At the 2017 Our Common Future conferences, the Independent Sector presented Tech for Common Good, a cross-sector collaboration to understand and advance tech adoption and utilization in the social sector. The publication identified several trends that shape the work in social impact, one of which being that organizations tend to have one full-time employee for every $100,000 of budget, and one tech-focused full-time employee for every $1 million (if not more). This leaves organizations with budgets of under $500,000 relying predominantly on pre-existing tools for productivity, design, cybersecurity, accounting, and digital fundraising.
Enter millennial nonprofits
Tech for Common Good points to “millennial nonprofits,” or nonprofits that have started in recent years (often with millennials at the helm) as a model to follow given the numbers. As these younger nonprofits demonstrate, having technology woven into the organization’s DNA is something that can happen regardless of size, type, or location.
As TCG put it, “Legacy organizations discuss tech in the context of performing a function or a process, whereas the newer wave of social enterprises sees tech as vital to mission advancement.”
There are modes of thinking that can benefit any organization coming out of this new relationship to technology. We recommend reading through the entire 2015 report, co-authored by David Bull, Tris Lumley, Farooq Sabri and Ria Bowler (updated in 2016), but here are some highlights for what all organizations working towards social impact can learn from those matcha-sipping, rose-quartz-colored-glasses-wearing, #nofilter millennial nonprofits.
The players may change, but the game remains the same
Sure, when the social media age dawned, most nonprofit employees were using Facebook as a way of staying in touch with their college roommates or using Twitter to…do virtually nothing. Instagram photos were grainy, drenched in Toaster or Hefe filters and often posted without any caption or hashtag.
As the dance began to catch on, however, organizations and companies began to realize that their direct sales teams building in-depth relationships with a narrow customer group could open up into social media teams building brand identity across entire populations. Keeping your organization porous to the new technologies coming in will make your team more agile when it comes to taking advantage of innovations as they arise. This method of thinking will allow you to build on existing work rather than scrap old work to start fresh with a new platform.
Keep your head in the cloud — with your feet on the ground
One of the most flexible developments in technology has been the increasing popularity of cloud-based systems. Even tools as simple as Dropbox or Google Drive allow for employees to work from anywhere with an Internet connection, making for a more flexible environment both physically and digitally. Many millennial nonprofits now operate out of homes or coworking spaces, saving on overhead and building on quality and efficiency.
The potential issue here is that making work accessible from anywhere makes it tempting to work at any time. Good news if you need to be at home to let your super in on a Friday morning, less so if you’ve been putting in 18-hour days for the last week without a break. The new challenge that has come up with the new workforce is balancing work and life without the physical guardrails in place.
Sharing is caring
The startup atmosphere in most millennial nonprofits lends itself to a new lending economy. “Many organisations hold resources that they don’t need to use all the time, such as a minibus only used once a week or a meeting space empty three days a week,” writes Tech for Common Good. “If organisations can make use of the spare capacity of others, then fewer resources are needed overall to make things work.”
We see digital play a role in this already with services such as Craigslist or Facebook, and within closer communities like WeWork. Not only embracing the spirit of sharing with colleagues but also finding ways of doing it through a digital platform will save time and resources and allow nonprofits to more effectively scale up.
Diving deeper, open source software, or what Tech for Common Good terms “shared back office services” (email or applications), allows organizations to use the same tools versus trying to create several individual solutions to a shared problem.
Digital is a tool, not a personality
“It’s not about saying: ‘I’ve heard of this technology, how can we apply it?’ You need to start with the need and think about digital as one of the tools that can help you address it,” says Elizabeth Archer, Project Director of SENDirect. Rather than starting with the technological solution and finding the need to apply it to, start with the need, evaluate the potential solutions, and consider how technology can play into this. “It is ultimately a process of service transformation, facilitated by technology,” reads the report.
Make the user the decision maker
With emphasis on the user experience increasing, Tech for Common Good argues that nonprofits need to move away from the model of being “providers [that] ‘do things to’ people” and towards a model “where service users are empowered to choose and manage the products and services that they need.” This is the mantra that guides any number of disruptive millennial companies, from Lyft and Airbnb to Oscar and JustWorks.
As nonprofits consider this from their overall mission, this is also worth considering from the back-office perspective: Who will be using the digital tools in your organization? Put them in the driver’s seat when it comes to finding the tech that works for your organization.
Empowering your employees to have a say in the tools your organization uses is step one in building capacity and cultivating talent. In order to maintain your talent over time (and save the time and finances that come with onboarding new employees every few years), cultivate it by offering an education budget to allow them to keep on top of the latest trends and developments.
Dive deeper
Speaking of millennials… check out our guides on how to fundraise from millennials and how to find millennials online (using the power of data).
