Giving Compass' Take:

• Ned Desmond praises Tech Matters, Jim Fruchterman's newest innovation to provide nonprofits with a means for wider-scale, higher impact giving.

• What sort of implications might this innovation have on combating coronavirus? How could online resources inform your journey towards more effective giving?

• Learn how to support nonprofits in the fight against COVID-19.

Social entrepreneurship pioneer Jim Fruchterman has launched a new nonprofit, Tech Matters, with $1.7 million in backing from corporate and foundation sources, including Twilio, Okta, Working Capital, Facebook and Schmidt Futures.

Tech Matters is Fruchterman’s new vehicle to address what he sees as a crippling weakness in the social good sector: the failure to use technology the way technologically savvy for-profits do.

“The social change sector has huge problems and is 10-20 years behind the times. People are finally waking up to the fact that if they really want to do social good at scale that’s going to involve software and data technology,” says Fruchterman. “The mission is to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity, not the richest 5% of it.”

In order to have the broadest possible impact, Tech Matters is aiming for wins at the technology systems level that can benefit multiple organizations facing similar challenges.

The firm’s first partnership is with Child Helpline International, which is working with Tech Matters to create a common platform for 170 groups around the world providing hotlines for children facing crises such as drug and sexual abuse.

Today, most of those 170 hotlines are either iffy hacks running on a computer somewhere or dependent on a volunteer, a phone and a pad of paper. The new platform will enable volunteers to track inbound messaging via SMS, voice, WhatsApp and WeChat.

With the COVID-19 crisis now raging, Fruchterman is especially eager to take on a close cousin to the crisis text hotline project. “The idea is that we could quickly provision solutions that would allow a new hotline to turn on in hours or a day at most.”

Read the full article about Tech Matters and enhancing your giving by Ned Desmond at TechCrunch.