Giving Compass' Take:

• Founders offer five key lessons that they learned when creating social impact startups and innovations. 

• How are you supporting social impact innovation with your charitable giving? In what ways are social startups changing the philanthropic landscape? 

•  Read more about social startup success. 


From healthcare, to education, to human rights, tech has the potential to drive social impact at scale. In this moment of global pandemic, growing economic insecurity and an uprising against racial injustice, the need for scalable solutions is greater than ever. But there are lessons we’ve seen founders learn the hard way time and again.

In the spirit of reaching impact at scale faster, we rounded up our top five lessons to take to heart if you want to turn your world-changing idea into a tech nonprofit. Distilled from The Tech Nonprofit Playbook, a free guide to starting a social impact startup, we drew from the learnings of tech nonprofits whose work has transformed their sectors.

  1. Get to know the problem intimately 
  2. Build a tech for good product, but don’t start from scratch 
  3. Learn the art of nonprofit judo
  4. Your people will make or break your organization
  5. Be intentional about how you measure impact

Read the full article about lessons from founders who launched social start-ups by Shannon Farley at TechCrunch.