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Category Archives: Technology
December 3, 2012, 9:49 am
10 People Honored for Using Technology to Improve Social Good
The SXSW Interactive Festival has announced the 2013 winners of its Dewey Winburne Community Service Award. Ten social entrepreneurs who are using technology to tackle tough problems like educational inequity, environmental degradation, and poverty will be honored in March at the social-media industry event, in Austin, Tex.
The awards are named after one of the festival’s co-founders, a teacher who was devoted to helping disadvantaged youths learn technology skills.
The winners are:
• Madhura Bhat, who co-founded Health for America, a fellowship program for young people to develop technology solutions to improve health care.
• Elizabeth Davidson, who co-founded ScriptEd, a nonprofit that trains volunteers from the tech industry to teach computer programming to students in New York City high schools.
• Arlene Ducao, who leads Open Infrared, a project that maps…
September 5, 2012, 8:09 pm
Update: Salesforce.com Retreats on Trademarking ‘Social Enterprise’
The software giant Salesforce.com has announced that it plans to withdraw its applications to trademark the term “social enterprise.”
The company, which had sought the trademark in Great Britain, Jamaica, the United States, and the European Union, has been using the term in its advertising for the last two years to describe how businesses use social media to connect with customers. In its announcement, Salesforce.com pointed to the outcry from nonprofits and socially minded businesses as the primary reason for its reversal.
“It was never our intention to create confusion in the social sector which we have supported since our founding,” Marc Benioff, chief executive of Saleforce.com, said in a written statement. “As a result of the feedback we received, Salesforce.com has decided to withdraw its efforts to trademark the term ‘social enterprise’ and plans to discontinue its use…
July 13, 2012, 9:19 am
Harnessing the Internet to Provide Low-Cost Higher Education
A University of the People student from Haiti (Photo courtesy of University of the People)
University of the People has an ambitious goal: to use the Internet to provide an extremely low-cost college education to students around the world. And the nonprofit’s big idea is starting to gain traction with grant makers.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $500,000 to support the university’s effort to gain accreditation. The grant comes on the heels of recent awards by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Intel Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Since its inception in 2009, University of the People has enrolled 1,500 students from 132 countries. Courses are taught by professors from around the world who volunteer their time, and the university offers degrees in…
June 21, 2012, 1:14 pm
‘Random Hacks of Kindness’ Uses Technology to Solve Problems
Programmers in San Francisco and Berlin got together recently to attempt to build a system that would allow immigrants to tell their families they’ve arrived safely at their destination without anyone else finding out.
In Nairobi, a similar group worked on a system to report election results in real time, including incidents of election violence and accusations of voter fraud.
In Toronto, others worked on a system that could allow Nepali women to send ultrasound pictures via mobile devices.
All of them were volunteers, willing to lend their technological expertise to nonprofits and causes.
These projects and others were part of the “Random Hacks of Kindness” weekend, a twice-yearly, 36-hour work session for designers, programmers, and technology experts to solve problems facing nonprofits and other organizations interested in doing good. The most recent events, held this…
March 19, 2012, 11:32 am
A Simple Map Can Help You Reach the Right Clients
Something as simple as a map can help organizations make sure they’re reaching the people who most need services, says Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network. As an example, she tells a story she heard from an employee at a local Red Cross.
The organization’s education department had a map on the wall with pins that marked the schools where the charity had made fire-safety presentations. One day a disaster-response colleague came by and asked about the map. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then he started to mark the locations of recent house fires.
The pushpins marking the fire-safety presentations and the X’s marking the location of the house fires were in different parts of town. Seeing the discrepancy, the organization realized it needed to reach out to schools in neighborhoods with a high incidence of fires, instead of just responding to…
March 9, 2012, 9:05 am
Matching Data Scientists and Nonprofits
Participants at the DC Datadive (Photo by Craig Barowsky)
More than 100 data scientists, nonprofit employees, and others gathered in Washington this month to put their skills to use with three charities that want to do a better job of harnessing the information they collect.
The problems participants tackled:
• How to create data visualizations that show the many ways that growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods influences children.
• Whether the financial data on charities’ informational tax returns can be used to create an early-warning system to alert nonprofits when they’re headed for trouble.
• What information to collect to measure an organization’s progress toward a big environmental goal.
The DC Datadive, which was organized by Data Without Borders with help from…
March 4, 2012, 12:50 pm
Nonprofit Data Visualization: a Gallery
A growing number of charities are turning to infographics and interactive data visualizations to explain complex issues succinctly, spur advocacy, support their fund raising, and show donors where their money is going. Click on the images below to see examples of their work.
Learn more: Data-rich graphics are transforming how nonprofits reach the public and helping them improve the way the serve others.
February 16, 2012, 5:04 pm
Charities Offered Chance to Win an Interactive Training Simulation
WILL Interactive creates training movies designed to help people make better decisions. The company created this simulation on diversity and resolving conflicts for the Anti-Defamation League. (Image provided by WILL Interactive)
A Maryland company that develops interactive training simulations is holding a competition to put its technology to work for social change.
In the training movies that WILL Interactive creates, the viewer becomes one of the characters, and how the story progresses depends on the answers people give to frequent questions. The goal is to help viewers make better decisions when confronted with similar problems in real life.
Among the projects the company has worked on: a simulation that the U.S. Army uses in its effort to prevent suicide.
The first step in creating a…
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