Giving Compass' Take:
- Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses the importance of aligning a nonprofit's digital infrastructure with technology, and how that can be done.
- With online privacy such a hot button issue right now, what is the philanthropy sector doing to protect stakeholders? Are we also making sure that the technology we use promotes equity? We shouldn't leave this up to an IT team — everybody, at all levels of an organization, must be heard.
- Learn about code switching across the digital/data divide.
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Well-aligned digital infrastructure should be the aspiration of all nonprofits, everywhere. Nonprofits today are dependent on digital software and hardware. Just as they manage their financial, physical, and human resources, so must they align their digital technology with their values to achieve their mission.
Aligning technology with mission requires understanding the organization’s complete tech stack — the layers of infrastructure, including hardware, software, and organizational practices and policies, that undergird our everyday use of digital technology. The stack includes the organization’s choice of computer storage (cloud or onsite); software and hardware choices; and processes for collecting, storing, using, sharing, and destroying digital information, from emails to board dockets. It necessitates decisions about software, hardware, external vendors, and the organization’s data governance practices. Aligning the technology and digital practices with organizational purpose is as important as managing and governing your analog resource — time, money, and human capital — toward mission.
The nonprofit sector in the United States alone includes more than one million organizations with missions that are wide-ranging and often at odds with one another. Because of this, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to aligning technology with organizational mission. However, it is possible to identify common values that hold for the nonprofit sector across its multitude of missions by focusing on its overall function and purpose. In contrast with for-profit corporations, nonprofits exist to ensure that a diversity of public-benefiting efforts, which are not served by the larger market or public sector, can flourish. The tactics designed into the form to ensure the public benefit include limiting the possibility of individual profit, self-governance, and accountability for activities.
Read the full article about the ethics of designing digital infrastructure by Lucy Bernholz and Lyndon Ormond-Parker at Stanford Social Innovation Review.