I’ve spent most of my life working in technology and much of it working with nonprofit organizations, trying to help them use tech to make people’s lives better.
In that time, I’ve learned that the first ideas social good leaders come up with for applying tech for good are usually terrible — a trait they share with leaders of tech for-profit companies, whose first ideas aren’t that great either. However, while the tech sector is particularly good at winnowing out bad ideas early, the nonprofit sector still has not learned these lessons.
As a result, just about every week, I find myself persuading a social good leader out of one or more bad ideas. And they’re usually the same ideas — ones that I’ve heard over and over. It’s not that these ideas are always wrong; it’s just they’re wrong at least 95% of the time.
About the author
Jim Fruchterman
Jim Fruchterman is an engineer and social entrepreneur. He was the founder and longtime CEO at Benetech, a Silicon Valley nonprofit technology company that develops software applications to address unmet needs of users in the social sector. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
