Is COVID-19 revealing gaps in your digital infrastructure?
The majority of Canada’s social impact world is working from home right now. As painful as it might be, it’s also a huge privilege. The non-profit sector alone employs approximately 2.4 million people, so add to that social enterprises, co-operatives, academia, governments, business CSR teams, and freelancers, and you’re in the range of about five million people who are significantly changing how they go about their day-to-day work.
That’s millions of people just last week on the phone, on the internet, using and quickly learning a variety of digital tools to meet, brainstorm, collaborate, socialize, research, convene, and fundraise. Then there are all the back office operations tools and people rethinking digital processes for finance, payroll, project management, communications, and HR. At this time, even Facebook has gotten rare kudos for its responses to the pandemic, and perhaps even more significantly, more people are using it for the kinds of meaningful interactions that Mark Zuckerberg has been promoting for a long time.
Rhetorical question: Is the social impact world’s digital literacy and infrastructure robust enough?
No one expected millions of social impact workers to work from home all at once and the shift is revealing serious gaps in our digital literacy, digital protocols, and digital infrastructure. From the frustrations that I’ve heard from program managers learning how to host online events to finance administrators figuring out how to get two electronic signatures on cheques to social services agencies deciding on the best online survey tool. Despite the popularity of cloud-based work tools, non-profits scrambled to move their files from local servers to the cloud. Then there are the downstream questions such as: How do I login remotely? Where should we save this new online panel recording? Are our employees home computers fast enough? Or how private is our new video chat? An added twist is that a majority of social impact organizations don’t have IT departments to help them with technology selection, implementation, and helping workers learn new digital skills. Much of our work isn’t equipped for the digital era.
Could this be a turning point?
Every 5 percent increase in the effectiveness of the global NGO sector translates into $2 billion of enhanced annual global impact.
For years, social impact organizations have been struggling to convince funders and donors to invest in boosting their digital literacy, capacity, and infrastructure. With core organizational work being done online now and perhaps into the near future, it looks like the time for a more robust digital transformation has come.
A digitally transformed NGO benefits from connected workflows, the agility of task automation, more fully informed decisions made with good quality and readily available data, and the potential of virtual operations. Ultimately this helps with everything from effective program implementation to being a better manager.
According to the Center for the Digital Nonprofit in the US, “the effective integration of an NGO’s people, process, and technology investments into digital business models can enhance the impact of each budget dollar and thereby help close that gap: every 5 percent increase in the effectiveness of the global NGO sector translates into $2 billion of enhanced annual global impact.”
That should get your attention.
Most Canadian organizations that are held up as examples of digital social impact organizations were “born digital.” They hired people with digital skills, created processes for the digital world, and made their missions possible with technology. They are likely doing well through this time. But that’s not the majority. Many NGOs are set up to have some small portion of their employees working remotely at any given time, but few are prepared for all of them to do so at once. There continues to be however, laudable attempts to upgrade the social impact sector’s digital literacy and infrastructure by organizations such as advisory firm Grantbook, Powered by Data, and CIRA’s Community Investment Program.
Alongside the many grantmakers that are lifting restrictions on existing grants to provide more flexibility for grantees to deal with urgent issues, and the Government of Canada’s stimulus package, the social impact world needs a digital upgrade fund pronto.
It’s mission critical.
Vinod Rajasekaran
Publisher & CEO
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