Scaling Tech-Focused Nonprofits For Social Good
In the early 2000’s, Shannon Farley learned how to start a nonprofit from a CD-rom in the back of a how-to book. At the time, “nonprofit consulting” wasn’t a field yet, and the only good way to learn was by doing.
Shannon Farley, Fast Forward co-founder and Executive Director
Now, she’s a co-founder and Executive Director of Fast Forward, an organization focused on scaling startups that combine tech and social good, accelerating growth and impacting over 100 million lives.
Endless Network supports Fast Forward’s Startup Accelerator, which connects early-stage tech nonprofits with the funding, mentorship, and connections needed to scale. In 2021, the accelerator saw its largest and most global network yet, with founders from four continents. These tech innovators honed their business models, learned from Fast Forward alumni who have been in their shoes, and met dozens of mentors at tech companies. Ready to launch their solutions, they took the Demo Day stage and pitched their ideas to over 1,500 people across the world.
We spoke with Shannon about how she got interested in building bridges between tech and nonprofits, the challenges young social innovators face today, and her advice for the changemakers of the future.
Laying the foundations
The early 2000’s—the time Shannon was figuring out what nonprofit consulting could look like—brought with it the development of the internet and cell phones as tools that benefit activism. Specifically, she says, “the role of technology profoundly changed what was possible in the women's rights space. Everything changed [for] organizing, funding, visibility. And so I was sort of sniffing about, thinking, how could I get more involved in tech applications to social justice issues that are my driving force?”
At the beginning of her journey, the chasm between those working in the social justice “traditional” nonprofit sector and those in the tech sector was wide. When tech entrepreneurs offered their services to give back, organizations would ask them to do things like website development. The actual technology was often not integrated into the mission. That got her interested in how one could “support the next generation of Khan Academies or Wikipedias, the organizations that had impact at the core of their model but were building software or hardware to address the issues.”
Overcoming challenges
Tech nonprofits have to overcome a lot of challenges. At a foundational level, it’s hard to build capital for a tech company working for good. Shannon gives an example of funding a soup kitchen: if you know there are hungry people in the community, you can start one in your home and show donors that you recognize your community’s needs and can execute to benefit it. As you serve more people, the cost grows incrementally over time, as does the measurable impact.
But if you want to build an application that helps people find the best soup kitchen, with filters for diapers, counseling services, and sort the list by distance, there’s a lot of data at play. “It requires a pretty significant investment at the beginning to allow the organization to gather the data, verify that it's correct, and serve it in a way that allows people to easily access it,” she explains. “So from day one, you're spending money but don't have anyone on your platform. Once you get people on your platform, you can scale exponentially at a much lower cost per unit of impact.” But sometimes that can be a hard sell for funders, especially for new and creative apps that help people find services in realtime, something that hasn’t been developed much yet.
When starting a nonprofit, there’s almost always a “capital valley” - a crunch where there isn’t enough funding to cover ongoing development costs. That’s part of the reason Fast Forward has two accelerator programs—one for starting up and one for growth. When it comes to growing, these organizations need backend engineers, data scientists, lawyers - people that build long term sustainability for the company, but not in a way that excites most investors. To address that, one of the goals of the growth accelerator is to grow the cadre of tech leaders who care about these big problems and are willing to invest in them.
Pre-pandemic, there was a lot of skepticism around using technology to advance social good, especially since for-profits didn’t always set a good example. But the widespread shutdowns forced everyone to start using technology in new ways, from teaching to providing health and social services, to operate as communities and societies. This allowed tech nonprofits to really grow to meet that need.
At the same time, the capital did not meet the moment. These organizations were suddenly serving thousands more people than ever before, but without growing revenue to meet that demand. The question remains: “In the moment that we are in, how do we serve people to the highest level more efficiently? Technology can do that with dignity. It can rise to the challenge of the times we face. Capital has to be part of that picture. So too does political will and openness to tech solutions.”
Preparing the next generation
Shannon says one of the best things about being in this space is supporting young people with innovative ideas: “[These] young people who have struggled with a problem their whole life have also had a phone in their pocket their whole life.” So why wouldn’t their solution include a tech application?
Even though we don’t necessarily know what jobs will be for kids who are in preschool today, we can arm them with specific skills that drive innovation for social good. One is digital literacy: technology will forever be part of building a better world, and we’re only going more digital from here. Kids need to learn how to navigate that world, be comfortable with having bots and AI as part of their day-to-day work, and understand how to process digital information: if a bot underlines a misspelling or suggests a different phrase, students need to be able to understand how to use that information to make an informed choice.
The curricula shouldn’t “only be teaching you how to code a bot or a recommendation engine, but [how to] really have literacy in digital education, like we would have in civics or in humanities.” It should include how technology is built, and how to interact with these tools.
Seeing the growth that Fast Forward has made - from writing the idea down on a napkin to serving over 1,000 tech nonprofits - inspires Shannon to this day. Fast Forward’s work with Endless is allowing companies they’ve worked with to continue scaling, to “have a chance to solve some of the biggest challenges we face from education to health care to climate to criminal justice through innovative applications of technology.” She continues, “the world is better served when we apply technology to our biggest problems.”
Read more about their work in Fast Forward’s 2021 Impact Report, and for anyone looking to get involved in tech nonprofits, Shannon recommends checking out the Endless-supported job board.