Advice for Tech Non-Profits | Hacker News Reader

Advice for Tech Non-Profits

mitchellh.com

53 pointsksec16 comments

I'm surprised about the "What is my donation doing?" section, because my experience is that most nontechnical nonprofits suck at this too. (Unless they have a very specific "your $50 donation buys a family a cow"-type marketing model, but those tend to be pretty misleading: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/05/donor-illusions/)

Many nonprofits have overhead like 80% (salary cost, management bonuses, marketing). Direct expense accountability is their cryptonite, and they will do everything to obfuscate it!

This isn't actually a very good way to assess whether a nonprofit is good: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...

What you actually need to do is assess whether the nonprofit's program works. But that's really hard.

OK except there are +1 million non-profits.. so you enthusiastically characterize "many" .. what about the long tail? What about uniquely effective? A large number of economic jurisdictions worldwide have no such thing. Why the rush to paint all non-profits with a single brush?

Non-profits similarly have a problem that also hounds for-profits: Fundraising as a separate activity detracts from the primary mission, and balancing between the two is a struggle.

My favourite tech non-profit is Software Freedom Conservancy, I think it does quite well on these points.

https://sfconservancy.org/

As someone working on a tech nonprofit right now, I find a ton of value in your post and really appreciate the time you took to elucidate the minutiae of seeking funding from qualified donors. Thank you.

If you want to easily donate crypto, cash, stocks, use your credit or debit card, to basically any nonprofit, go use https://every.org

Best part: they don’t charge the non profits fees! And they’re actually a non profit themselves!

Sounds like a SaaS offering waiting to be built

They exist already.

The more basic solution is for the non-profit to just add the info. Grab a squarespace template and just type in the info.

If anything, someone should just make an AI that sucks in all the things she mentioned and add it to the NPO's pages. As she mentioned, most NPO work is just marketing and fundraising, and hopefully a little bit of doing some of the work you started it for.

Yeah sounds like those SaaSes have a broken funnel/aren't doing a good job, because customers are still annoyed. Being second to market doesn't mean you can't be best!

> If anything, someone should just make an AI that sucks in all the things she mentioned and add it to the NPO's pages. As she mentioned, most NPO work is just marketing and fundraising, and hopefully a little bit of doing some of the work you started it for.

Mitchell is definitely a he, but yeah it sounds like most people don't want to do the marketing and fundraising, and I don't think AI is ready to take that on quite yet.

He notes specifically about how interacting with humans is a valuable part of the experience, sounds like they need better automated management/coralling of existing resources, not necessarily AI.

100% agreed. Awesome!

Here is our 501(c)(3) tech non-profit. All corporate profits are directed to children. Clear and transparent.

https://aid.aideo.us/

Clear and transparent, yes. Useful, no. By that statement buying the CEOs kid a house is totally within bounds.

> All corporate profits

$0 profit by paying the "CEO" all the money - 20 years later all the profits have gone to good charitable causes ... all $0 of it.

I just clicked around your site and I have no idea what your organization does.

The spidery green font is really hard to read against the background.

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