Kill the Dinosaurs

My goal in Technology for Good: How Nonprofit Leaders Are Using Software and Data to Solve Our Most Pressing Social Problems is to provide the first “how-to” guide for starting a deliberately nonprofit tech company. Technology is increasingly indispensable to delivering social impact at scale, and the differences between for-profit and nonprofit tech enterprises are well worth highlighting. The book highlights more than 60 nonprofits from all over the world that are using tech as a critical part of their successful nonprofit programs.

Technology for Good opens with two chapters on the most common bad and good ideas related to nonprofits’ use of technology. The good ideas include three of the best approaches for success: 1) equipping people on the front lines of social change, 2) moving major tech projects into the cloud, and 3) killing “dinosaurs.”

The nonprofit field is generally slow to innovate, in part because it has traditionally lacked funding for technology and experienced tech staff. However, the many crises facing us demand that we collectively must do much more with the same (or less!) funding. One way to do that is to use technology to create innovative and cost-effective ways to deliver programs, starting by taking a hard look at programs and organizations that are no longer fit for today’s challenges. That means it’s time to kill a few dinosaurs!—Jim Fruchterman

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Large parts of the social sector are dominated by dinosaurs: nonprofits or government agencies doing their work the same way it’s been done for decades. A social innovation that was amazing in the 1940s, 1960s, or 1980s has very likely run its course by the 2020s. If incumbents are resistant to change, a great approach for a smart social good leader is to use tech to scale a new, far less expensive, and far better way to accomplish the social objective of delivering social impact. The dinosaurs that don’t update their approaches should eventually die of irrelevance.

In his groundbreaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), Clayton Christensen documents how for-profit companies that have innovated in the past and achieved market dominance are often reluctant to overturn the steady stream of profits coming their way. Innovation stops because the companies don’t want to upset a profitable status quo. Customers still like the products very much and want to keep buying them. Highly successful companies with a flagship product have a particularly hard time innovating a highly profitable but aging product. They are susceptible to new innovators who show up with a disruptive new product that ends up displacing the incumbent product. As a result, large companies in the tech industry have learned their lesson and frequently use their financial resources to buy out new innovative companies. Sometimes they shut them down (shortly after buying them!) to extend the life of their cash-cow product (dinosaurs as cows?). Alternatively, these acquired companies sometimes breathe new life into the larger company that is in danger of losing its edge.

As noted earlier, the nonprofit sector moves even more slowly. Powerful forces maintain large incumbents in place. Nonprofits depend on donors rather than customers, which is another example of the social sector’s structural problem, where the people paying are not the people benefiting from the work (whether it is technology or a program). A big part of the challenge for tech-for-good innovators is to buck this imbalance and focus on the needs of people on the front lines of social change, both the people delivering the services and those benefiting from them.

It’s hard to make a major shift in how you operate your nonprofit when your donors have come to expect a very specific program from you and your brand. Nonprofits that depend on government funding also struggle to change because government contracts are usually highly specific on exactly how the nonprofit is to operate its funded programs. It’s hard to innovate when the “how” you deliver your program is dictated to you rather than just the “what” of the needed social impact.

As time goes on, an organization can do everything “right” and still lose its position and fade from relevance. The dinosaurs in a given field often think they are doing the best job possible. They can confuse their program activities with their mission, which may lead the organization to thinking that its mission is to continue delivering its existing programs rather than reinventing them to better meet the needs of the people they serve. These legacy programs treat specific symptoms of a social problem in a traditional way rather than addressing its root causes.

Even after dinosaurs in the social sector become less relevant, they can go on living for a very long time thanks to donor inertia! Once certain practices are established and the donor funding keeps flowing, such organizations are hard to dislodge even long after they outlive their usefulness or their cost-effectiveness.

Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation, a leading funder of social entrepreneurs working on global poverty, has a different descriptor for the organizations I label “dinosaurs.” In his article “Don’t Feed the Zombies” (2023), he blames the funder community for supporting ineffective nonprofits. He cites research from Max Roser of Our World in Data that shows that nonprofits can vary by more than one hundred to one in cost-effectiveness in solving a particular social problem. Worse, some of the evaluated nonprofits seem to be actively harming the people they are supposed to serve!

Dinosaurs are frequently filled with good people, and I am not advocating that those people suffer through job loss that may come with innovation. However, if there is a far better way to address the needs of a disadvantaged community, we owe it to the community to stop funding programs that are relatively ineffective. The people working for dinosaurs could be better deployed doing something much better. Many of them know this but don’t know what to do instead.

You might work in an organization with a legacy program that bears a startling resemblance to a dinosaur. Perhaps you have begun thinking about how to innovate with a more modern and better approach to the same social problem.

It is easy to think of a large bureaucratic organization as a dinosaur that needs to be replaced. Many social entrepreneurs started their careers to overcome failings they saw in government agencies or larger nonprofits. However, over the long arc of a successful social enterprise, the dinosaur we must kill might be our own! Rather than waiting for someone else to kill the dinosaur and replace you, better to pivot to a better way of delivering on your mission. Pivoting is also less violent in that it refashions your aging dinosaur of a program into something new.

Yesterday’s insurgent can easily become today’s dinosaur. Sometimes you need to keep the program operating in a similar way but reinvent the technology. Sometimes you need to move higher up in the social good food chain by shifting from direct services to influencing others in the field to update how they operate.