OPINION: Canadian non-profits need an innovation boost
Non-profit organizations are often on the front lines combating the biggest challenges facing our world today. Searching for survivors after natural disasters. Ensuring access to food and medicine for those in need. Shepherding displaced people to safety in conflict zones.
Despite the high stakes, there remains tremendous pressure on these organizations to show accountability. Donors want to know that every penny counts toward service delivery.
As a result, Canada’s non-profits are constantly pushing themselves to drive down overhead costs (which are largely arbitrary), leaving less room for investing in things such as technology that could actually make organizations more effective and efficient. In fact, Canada’s non-profit sector is woefully underutilizing tech across many critical business functions. This leaves even less room for innovation, especially if that innovation involves new uses of technology. Stretched budgets and teams, along with a lack of comfort in using technology, leads to an institutional aversion to risk. And without the capacity to take on risk, non-profits will fail to innovate, and their potential to make a positive impact on our world will be diminished.
So how do we incentivize risk-taking in the non-profit sector? Maybe it’s time to take a page out of the venture capital playbook and to look more seriously at directly funding non-profit innovation.