Emerging technologies offer a wealth of opportunities to improve social impact and stakeholder engagement.
For most not-for-profit (NFP) organizations, thinking about investment in emerging digital technologies is a luxury. Many NFPs are still struggling with some basic, hefty challenges in this area: lack of investment, IT obsolescence and the technology leadership void. That’s without even mentioning the wider sector challenges of declining trust, increasing competition for funding and engagement, alongside heightened regulation. So, even thinking about technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and microservice-architecture-based platforms may seem a step too far. Like it or not, technology is moving forward, and the Everything as a Service (XaaS) economy holds more opportunities for NFPs than barriers. Many of the wider challenges mentioned above can be overcome with these solutions. And platform maturity has significantly reduced the risk of IT/digital investment.
