The Smart Nonprofit. Beth Kanter

except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.

      Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

      For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone], or fax [phone].

      Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Kanter, Beth, 1957- author. | Fine, Allison H., 1964- author.

      Title: The smart nonprofit : staying human-centered in an automated world / Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

      Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2021052478 (print) | LCCN 2021052479 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119818120 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119818144 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119818137 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Nonprofit organizations. | Organizational change.

      Classification: LCC HD2769.15 .K37 2022 (print) | LCC HD2769.15 (ebook) | DDC 658/.048—dc23/eng/20211028

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052478

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052479

      Cover image(s): © Getty Images | Tuomas A. Lehtinen

      Cover design: Paul McCarthy

We dedicate this book to the millions of staff members, board members, and volunteers of nonprofits who do the hard work every day and with the smart use of smart tech can now work smarter. Thank you for making the world safer, smarter, happier, healthier, and fairer.

PREFACE

      For the last four years, we have been tracking the use of digital technologies like artificial intelligence, what we call “smart tech” in this book, for social good. Smart tech is very quickly becoming embedded in nonprofit operations. It is helping them automate tasks such as screening clients for services, filling out expense reports, and identifying prospective donors. Sometimes organizations are intentionally choosing to add smart tech to their efforts, but more often we are finding that smart tech is sneaking into organizations without organizations realizing it.

      This moment feels familiar. We have been writing about the wide scale adoption of social media since the early 2000s. We know the patterns of technology adoption: there are small commercial vendors with funny names overhyping the benefits and underplaying the risks, there are a few early adopters finding clever ways to use the technology, and there is the enormous ecosystem of nonprofits and foundations who are resistant to change and technology.

      We believed smart tech was part of the ongoing march of technology that makes organizations go faster and become more efficient until we had a talk with our friend Steve MacLaughlin, vice president of product management at Blackbaud. He told us during a podcast interview in October 2020 that the benefit of using smart tech isn't about increasing speed and scale; it's about time.

Smart tech is going to take over time-consuming rote tasks that are taking hours to do right now, freeing up enormous amounts of staff time. Steve calls this the “AI dividend.” We call it the “dividend of time” in this book. Whatever you call it, the idea is profound and potentially revolutionary.

      The choices organizations make about how to use their dividend of time is the key to the next stage in organizational life. We can choose to continue our frantic pace of work, responding to crises and flooding inboxes with email solicitations. Or we can choose to use this new time to reduce staff burnout, get to know clients on a deeper, human level, and focus on solving problems like homelessness in addition to serving homeless people. And as far-fetched as it may seem, we believe nonprofits can use this time to become the leaders in the ethical and responsible use of smart tech, the most powerful technology everyday people and organizations have ever used. Taken altogether, this is the essence of being a smart nonprofit.

      We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake work but only for those people and organizations that are thoughtful and knowledgeable about the use of smart tech. It also raises existential questions such as: When should machines do the work people do now? How can we be actively anti-biased using smart tech? What can we do differently or better with our new time? We hope this book gives you and your colleagues a solid foundation for understanding and answering these kinds of questions.

      We hope the increased dividend of time will be spent doing the things that only people can do: building strong relationships, dreaming up new solutions, creating and strengthening communities. We want to turn the page on our era of frantic busyness and scarcity to one in which smart nonprofits have the time to think and plan and even dream.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      All books are difficult to write. Add a pandemic on top of it, and a special kind of endurance is required. We are extremely grateful to our colleagues and friends and family who supported us during the writing of this book.

      You can't write a book during a global pandemic without the very patient support of your family. Allison would like to thank all of her Freiman boys for their patience and encouragement during the very long sheltering in place. Beth would like to thank her husband, Walter, and her children, Harry and Sara, who gave her the time and space to write.

      A special thanks to Brian Neill, Deborah Schindlar, Kelly Talbot, and the rest of the team at Wiley. We are very grateful for your enthusiasm for this book and our long partnership with the company. Onward!

      We'd also like to thank our book assistant, Kait Heacock, for her terrific work,

      This book would not have been possible without the early investment in our work on smart tech and philanthropy by Victoria Vrana and Parastou Youssefi at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They and their team are thoughtful, prescient innovators and advocates for the democratization of philanthropy.

We are very grateful for the time and input of experts working at the intersection of technology and social good. They are doing the hard work everyday of healing the world. In particular, we are thankful to: Alexandra Goodwin, Allen Gunn, Anna Bethke, Anurag Banerjee,