the smart nonprofit with Beth Kanter and Allison Fine

It's no secret that nonprofit organizations are a bit behind the times when it comes to technology. There are many reasons why nonprofits are slower to adopt new technologies, from a lack of funding and resources to the fact that many of them work on tight budgets, which can make tech seem like an unnecessary expense. Add to that the fact that as humans, we don’t generally like change - adopting new technology at small organizations can feel insurmountable.

In today's episode, I’m talking with Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of the new book “The Smart Nonprofit: Staying Human-Centered in An Automated World” to share with us how we can integrate smart tech into nonprofit work to work more effectively and improve the impact of our work on the sector.

Myths that Beth and Allison  want us to walk away from:

• Smart technology is neutral and infallible.  There are two things that can make smart tech biased. One is the assumptions and biases of the computer programmer who made the tool, and the second is the datasets on which the AI is being built, which it uses to learn and create its patterns. 
• Cost is the main barrier for nonprofits to using smart technology. The number one barrier for nonprofits is not the resources and cost of the tools but the knowledge about what the tech does and how to use it to free up time for staff to work effectively. 

Beth and Allison’s tips on integrating smart tech into nonprofit work 

• Readiness: The first step is really pinpointing the pain point from the end user's point of view. We have to go through radical prioritization of what the pain point is and make it tiny especially if you're a smaller organization.
• Setting: Know what are the tools or the technical partners that we should look for.  The vendors that you select with smart tech have to have values that are aligned with your organization. 
• Mitigation of bias problems:  Be aware of the bias of the tools and try to mitigate the problems that it creates. One way you mitigate is to ask the developers what assumptions were built into it, how it was tested and then you can test it yourself.
• Go: This is where we start to implement. We implement it in really small pilots and set it up, learn as we go, and make it better. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

“It's really focusing on this reset, focusing on making the shift to smart tech so you can improve the culture of your organization. And both of them take this intentional work. And our dream is that organizations will embrace this because what we see if they do it again, this time to think time, to breathe a time to really improve the impact of their work on the sector. ” - Beth K. 

“You don't start to solve problems with a tool. You start to solve problems in conversation with a large group of stakeholders.” Allison F. 

Resources from this Episode

The Smart Nonprofit

The Good Partnership

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