Giving Compass' Take:

• The ACLU is building a product development technology team from United States Digital Service, the New York Times, and Kickstarter that is utilizing data visualization to help educate voters about ACLU legal fights and provide information about upcoming elections. 

• How can philanthropists become involved in helping more nonprofits utilize technology to advance their missions? 

• Read about the new wave of tech-for-good companies being built by women and minority groups. 

Even as the country was turning to the 99-year-old, New York-based nonprofit, it became increasingly clear that the organization’s digital infrastructure wasn’t quite up to the task.

According to Marco Carbone, the ACLU’s then-associate director of IT, he and his team at the time had never imagined that roughly 5 million people would hit their website at once–until it happened during CEO Anthony Romero’s interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC in 2016. “We had to turn all our attention to the infrastructure that was supporting this huge surge,” he says. They were able to bring the site back online in about 10 minutes.

Today Carbone is CTO of the ACLU, overseeing a team that has grown beyond just IT to include a new product development group–a sort of internal startup composed of designers and developers who came from the United States Digital Service, the New York Times, and Kickstarter. The six-person team aims to make the ACLU’s often wonky legal fights easily accessible and support the ACLU’s advocacy arm by helping people find information about elections.

For now, the ACLU’s goal is to resist Trump and his administration’s steady walk back of civil liberties, including immigrant rights, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and voting rights. After all, the ACLU’s new tech prowess is thanks almost entirely to what the organization calls the “Trump bump,” or the approximately $120 million in online donations that have poured in since the election.

While the ACLU’s lawyers fight Trump in the courts, the product development team fights him online by mobilizing the resistance using data visualization, sticky design, and an open-source data infrastructure that puts privacy first.

For the next three months, they will be laser-focused on one thing: A forceful repudiation of Trump in the midterm elections.

Read the full article about ACLU tech team by Katharine Schwab at FastCompany