I used to run and recently sold a for-profit org focused entirely on tech solutions for social impact. So, bias is potentially unavoidable. With that caveat…
My learnings were that you have to distinguish between:
- organisations where tech can help improve operational efficiencies, and
- organisations that are tech/product-centric where operations support adoption of that product.
The first type of organisations would benefit from, e.g. migrating to ERPNext or CiviCRM from spreadsheets. As a tech community, we could do worse than build products for common use cases and help the organisations adopt these and adapt their operations. I would put Glific in this grouping too. Failures (including some of ours) arise from trying to build something too specific to a single organisation’s use case instead of helping them adopt a slightly more generic tool.
The second set of organisations want custom applications which naturally themselves to service contracts. However, more often than not these organisations don’t have strong product owners and very few have any previous experience releasing products. Everything is a project in the impact world - from funding to these developments. So you have a bunch of stakeholders applying myopic project vision to what should be an iterative product development in, usually, greenfield areas.
As you can probably tell, I would recommend staying away from the latter until that custom application becomes a common enough use case that it can be productised and no one organisation owns it.
