5 bad tech ideas that development organizations just keep trying

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.