The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how much communities rely on nonprofits to deliver everything from groceries to lifesaving medical care. Some nonprofits rose to meet unprecedented demand for their services by deploying robots to pack meals and using online chatbots to give legal and mental health advice. This is the next generation of digital technology, what we call “smart tech” — technologies that make decisions for and instead of people. Learning how to use this technology well will be the difference between success and failure over the next decade of community-based nonprofit work.
Before you throw your hands up in disgust over more promises about technology making your life better, this is not the technology that has made our lives a daily game of whack-a-mole with people checking their email on average 74 times a day. That was the last generation of digital tech. Smart tech has the potential to rehumanize work and workplaces, and to free up time to do the real work of helping people — but only if we use it wisely and well.
Smart tech is currently best at doing rote tasks, like answering the same questions online through a chatbot, automatically filling out parts of a form, or looking for patterns within a large data set. This type of work takes up about 25 percent of staff time. Imagine what we could do for our communities with that extra time. We would have more time to spend talking and listening to people, more time saying thank you, more time telling stories. More time solving problems. More time just thinking and dreaming.
Smart tech products are now available for fundraising, hiring, communications, volunteering, finance, and more. Even the smallest community-based organizations are beginning to use the technology. For instance, social service agencies are increasingly using smart tech to screen people for services like emergency housing and food support. These automated forms make it easier to screen many more people. However, they aren’t neutral or infallible. Computer programmers will likely embed their own biases. For instance, in determining eligibility for housing, the forms may ask a question about credit history, a metric that often discriminates against people of color whose credit scores may be hurt by prejudicial economic practices. In addition, smart tech requires Library of Congress-size data sets to become adept at identifying patterns and making predictions. These data sets will have historic biases embedded within them.
It is critically important that community leaders understand what smart tech is, how it works, and how to use it ethically and responsibly. Here are three steps community organizations must take to successfully integrate smart tech into their efforts:
Be prepared. Using smart tech is a huge responsibility. It is important to take time to learn how it operates and about your responsibility to make sure it’s not discriminatory. Everyone involved needs to learn its capabilities and understand how their roles will change and how the organization will stay attuned to any impact on staff and clients.
Stay human-centric. There is a sweet spot in the use of smart tech where the technology does what it does best and people do the fundamentally human parts — like building relationships, solving problems, and telling stories. Some people call this convergence “co-boting.” It may take practice to figure out how to best balance smart tech and people, but the most important thing is to always ensure that people are in charge of the technology and not the other way around.
Use it sparingly. Smart tech is hot sauce, not ketchup. It is important to consider what tasks — not what jobs — can be automated. Smart tech is not an opportunity to slash jobs, but a chance to free people to do more meaningful work. For instance, smart tech can help identify new donors, but only fundraisers can talk to those donors and begin to build relationships with them. Having honest discussions with staff about changes to their roles and responsibilities and providing coaching and support to use smart tech are integral to success.
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Article by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter
Published in The Rotarian, October 2022
Allison Fine is among the nation’s preeminent writers and strategists on the use of technology for social good. She has given keynote addresses at conferences around the world.
Beth Kanter is an internationally recognized thought leader in digital transformation and well-being in the nonprofit workplace. She was named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company. Fine and Kanter co-authored The Smart Nonprofit: Staying HumanCentered in an Automated World.