Better Technology Means Bigger Collective Action: Get Stronger Together with TechBridge

’Tis the season for thinking about the ways in which we can support the people in our communities who don’t have as much to be grateful for as we do.

These are the uninsured, the displaced and undereducated, and the hungry.

This is the language we use by default, and though it is not our intent, when we use these phrases, our conversations focus on abstract problems, not actual people.

The thing is, we need to see people before we can begin to help them solve their problems, especially during this holiday season. We have to understand who they are, what they need, what our biggest obstacles are in helping them, and who our most strategic partners are in both short and long-term solutions.

We Need to Harness the Power of Data

And not the kind of data that nonprofits have made do with over the decades. When it comes to having a true and lasting impact on generational poverty, disconnected documents and silos of databases aren’t going to cut it.

Nonprofits need access to the kinds of resources that the corporate sector has long used to generate extraordinary revenue. With these powerful tools, nonprofits (in collaboration with their philanthropic and community partners) can generate extraordinary collective action, which is its own kind of extraordinary revenue.

We break the cycle of generational poverty by equipping nonprofits with the elite, comprehensive tools they need to gather, analyze, maximize, and share their data. This makes it possible for nonprofits to function with heart and head, streamlining their services, better allocating their resources, and doing a better job of getting real help to real people trapped by their all-too-real circumstances.

So how do we work together with you — during this time of year when we can exemplify the best of humanity — to maximize our collective action on generational poverty? We start by creating a Transformation Roadmap that helps us best understand what you’ve been doing, what works well, and what could be improved.

The TechBridge Transformation Roadmap Takes into Consideration Your People, Processes, Technology, Goals, and Data

People are at the heart of any great movement. Who are your people? Are they primarily staff? Volunteers? Are you working with enough people? Enough people with the right skills? We’ll take stock and make recommendations.

Having a well-defined process is the key to clarity, which is the key to efficiency and efficacy. We take a look at the processes you currently have in place and consider whether they are minimizing time and redundancies in your work, as they ought to be doing.

Is your technology fit too tight? Most nonprofits have outgrown their current technology and need to upgrade to ensure that their programs run more efficiently. We’ll consider what tech is serving your purposes and what tech could help you improve the breadth and depth of your reach.

What were your organizational goals five years ago? What have you reached today? What are your organizational goals for tomorrow, and five years from now? Together we’ll consider these essential anchoring questions and aspirations.

Knowledge is power. How are you collecting, managing, reporting, analyzing, and sharing your data? Are you focusing on the knowledge that will give your organization the most power?

The TechBridge Plan for Maximum Collaborative Action

Once we’ve mapped out where you’ve been and where you want to go, we get to the fun part: maximizing your organizational potential so you are poised to affect maximum positive change in your community. That means articulating what your outcomes measurement, solution development, and operational management will look like when they are operating in the most beneficial way. That will entail defining what performance measurement and reporting will work best for your organization, analyzing change effectiveness, and determining impact factors. From there, we’ll design, develop, and implement the solutions we’ve defined as priorities in your Transformation Roadmap. Finally, we’ll define your support and maintenance plan to ensure that everything continues to run smoothly during your transformation.

Better technology positions your organization to sustain, grow, and innovate. The positive outcomes evolving as a result of your transformation are real, lasting, and — yes — lifesaving. Just look at Feeding America:

After their TechBridge transformation, Feeding America was able to improve its allocation of food to communities based on which communities needed more food and needed it most. That’s 4 billion pounds of food a year to 60,000 pantries across the US. Real food to real families who otherwise would not have had enough to eat.

Another case, Big Brothers Big Sisters:

With our help, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta were able to save $65k per year and increase their ability to grow new relationships by 78%. That’s real girls and boys who needed to model real, healthy relationships.

Millions of Men, Women, and Children Suffer from a Lack of Access to Shelter, Food, Employment, Education, Healthcare, and Financial Literacy

That means that millions of men, women, and children in your community, at this very moment, don’t have a safe place to sleep, don’t have enough food to eat, have no way to get a job to help them get a place to sleep or food to eat because they don’t have the education necessary to get a living wage job. And when they get sick, they have nowhere to turn. And when they do start earning money, it is so unfamiliar that they aren’t quite sure how to manage it best.

What a terrible, scary place for our fellow humans to be on any day, let alone Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Day. For them, these days look like every other disappointing day.

We owe it to our fellow human beings to work smarter, work stronger, and work together to harness the power of technology to maximize our collective positive action. Then they will have a safe place to sleep, enough food to eat, and opportunities to get jobs that will help them thrive, not just survive, because they will have gotten the education and support they need.

This is what is at stake. During the holidays, the need to come together to activate our best solutions is ever more urgent. This is the difference we can make — together, with TechBridge — for this generation and the next.

Learn More about Us …

… and how we can help your nonprofit make an even bigger difference.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.