10 points I learned about developing ‘Tech for Good’
I attended Nesta’s #techforgood event for UK Fundraising last week, which addressed how to engender digital innovation in charities. First up, here are two points about this blog:
The event was operated on a Chatham House rule basis. What is Chatham House Rule? Well, it’s a bit like the first rule of Fight Club, except that you are allowed to talk about it, just not attribute comments to specific people. This means that this write-up of points made may come across as a little generalised, but I have reported them if I felt they had some universal validity.
One speaker apologised that their points were mainly about challenges, and not solutions. And so, a lot of the points below may seem negative. But I think they’re important. Because in order to find solutions, we need to overcome challenges. And in order to overcome challenges we need to be able to identify them.
So, here are the 10 key points I learned at the event:
The ceo is often entrepreneurial in spirit, but this spirit is swamped by the length of their own to-do list. It’s therefore key to persuade the rest of the senior team of the importance of the work.
Trustees of charities – particularly larger ones – are often risk averse, they meet infrequently, and yet they have to sign off on tech decisions. This is a bad fit for technological innovation in particular.
The key trick is to get Trustees to a position where they’re comfortable with what is proposed.
Often the senior person withi