Sai Sahitya
With a tech scene that lags 40 years behind corporate America, many nonprofits and charities are hampered in staff productivity and effectiveness of their various programmes. Of the over 30,00,000 nonprofit NGOs in India, over 95 per cent have teams of under 20 employees with ‘0’ IT budget, the reason being that both the NGOs themselves and their patrons lack an awareness of the extent to which technology, in particular information technology, plays a role in organizational productivity and effectiveness, offering several times the returns on intentional investments.
The first step may be the hardest, but it’s made easier for most non-profits by two facts:
Corporate Donations: Numerous corporations the world over offer substantial donations on their software products:
As of the writing of this article, Google offers nonprofits its suite of office-productivity tools for free, thus saving an organization with 50 staff over Rs 75,000 per annum whilst also providing a means to centralize all of its documents. In addition to this, it provides over Rs 7,32,000 per month in its advertising services, with the potential to receive over Rs 28,00,000 per month, which can be used to bolster an organization’s efforts in PR and fundraising by targeting, say, the various headquarters of the UN, WHO, IMF, World Bank, etc. around the world;
Another organization, Amazon, offers over Rs 72,000 worth in its IT services for 1 year, renewable, to be used for anything from enhancing productivity and programme effectiveness, to guiding organizational strategy; whereas
Other organizations such as Zoom, Microsoft, Tableau, Adobe, etc offer lakh in concessions or donations on their various goods and services; and
Scalability: IT platform-as-a-service-providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offer all their services scalable, which means that organizations can start off with a small IT infrastructure, paying as little as a few hundred rupees a month, and scale to a larger enterprise infrastructure, paying an equivalent amount, and then later even scaling it back down when it’s no longer needed. This would preclude any necessity of making large up-front investments as was the case with physical IT-infrastructures.
Far from being a nuisance to adapt to, IT may in the near future even be used as a benchmark by which to judge the efficacy of a nonprofit. The key word is ‘intentional,’ since IT must be planned for from the beginning, with annual budgets and plans to include them significantly in proposals, adapt HR policies to cope with an increasingly technocratic world, bolster the organization’s autonomy, etc. Considering the zeitgeist, the course of development of the world at large, it doesn’t seem much of an option, inasmuch as one can only forestall it. It seems to be to the degree that organization neglects this fact by proactively accepting it that it is involuntarily thrust upon.
The author is a consultant in Data-Engineering and IT, with clients in Nagaland, the North-East, India, and abroad.
