A Case for Slow Technology For Nonprofits
Maybe you’ve heard of the Slow Food Movement? It is the global movement for “better, cleaner and fairer“ food for all. The reason for the name is in opposition to the “fast food” movement of McDonald’s (and similar) chains.
Perhaps you’ve been introduced to the “Slow” movement overall. Inspired by Slow Food, the core philosophy of the Slow Movement is to find “the right pace” for everything – meaning that some things should happen fast and some should happen slow. By rejecting constant rush and acceleration, we can more mindfully and deliberately choose the speeds of our experiences.
In addition to the Slow Food movement, there are now established movements for Slow Cities, Slow/Sustainable Fashion, and Slow Education.
The Paradox of Time in Social Justice
Can there be such a thing as the Slow Social Justice movement? That feels so awkward to write and when I say it out loud it feels weird in my mouth. Social Justice has always had a bizarre relationship with time.
There is a justifiable and moral urgency in our work:
We cannot wait one second longer for equity
We need immediate educational opportunities
We demand justice now
We seek the end of poverty, racism, and war
I worked for a large US education nonprofit in the 2010s and every day there I felt was a day living with the unbearable evidence and consequences of the education gap. We needed to change educational access for the kids who were in school RIGHT NOW. Not for the next generation, not for the next class of kindergartners, but for kids RIGHT NOW. And by so many standards, we were failing and continue to fail.
But then again, we know intrinsically that these are not problems that can be solved with speed. The systems that are in place and perpetuating the status quo are deeply entrenched in and heavily protected by the collective psyche of the participants (ie all of us), and we all know that human psyches are historically hard and slow to change.
The logistics don’t make it that much easier on us to change – if every person in the United States were given an electric car right now, not only would most people have a hard time finding an open charging station, but if they did we would blow out the national power grid. We also know that serving people and communities requires trust and relationships, which by nature take significant time and investment to build, grow, suffer, recover, re-build, grow more, etc.
This is not a paradox to solve – it is one to vent about.
The Slow Technology Movement for Nonprofits
My work with nonprofits has been focused in the past mostly on technology and technology learning, and here I would like to envision what the “Slow Technology” movement could look like in nonprofit work.
Like the conversation about time and social justice, this is also an exploration of possibility. It is not a prescription, it is a musing, and it is my highest hope to engage with people like you on this topic more.
The Myth of Time-Saving Technology
My colleague and spreadsheet-soulmate Samantha Shain has written beautifully on the topic of time and technology for nonprofits and social justice work in her piece on Jevons’ paradox. I go back to this piece again and again, always finding it to ring clear and true.
One message of Samantha’s writing is to myth bust the snake oil we get sold that technology will “save us time.” Technology is resource intensive in and of itself, and any time that it “saves” is actually re-directed to other efforts. Those efforts are hopefully mission-aligned and have the best-case outcome of helping more people. These re-directed efforts may even manifest as continuing to spend time on technological development and maintenance – because once the benefits of the technology are seen we will ask for more of a good thing.
Core Principles of Slow Technology for Nonprofits
The Slow Technology movement doesn’t aim to save time. Instead, its core principle is to build and use technology to enhance our abilities in key aspects of nonprofit work that should take the time they take:
Relationship building
Community engagement
Fostering trust
In this framework, we:
Don’t try to learn or use technology in the quickest ways possible
Don’t look for ways technology can “speed up” key aspects of social justice work
Assess technology for its ability to support taking necessary time for our work
A Practical Example: The Donation Acknowledgement Letter
In looking at a practical example, let us consider the donation acknowledgement letter. When someone visits your nonprofit website, clicks on the donate button, and generously shares a part of themselves with your organization and mission, they are immediately responded to with an email acknowledgement – a “thank you” email – that likely also contains tax receipt information.
Fundraising systems like Give Lively, Classy, and all the rest have made this process exceedingly simply, straight-forward, automated, and FAST. What’s wrong with that?! There is nothing inherently wrong with it. But consider it from the Slow Technology perspective.
The exchange of money and acknowledgement here seems to me to be purely transactional, and we have nearly taken the humans out of the equation. Recurring donations have even less human involvement in the exchange.
We used technology to make this all “more efficient” – but we may have also given up whatever beauty and humanity we could have garnered as part of this exchange. If we wanted to inject more relationship building into this exchange, it would certainly take us more time. For example, I help organizations use technology to send asynchronous personalized videos to individual donors after their donations.
This CERTAINLY takes more time. It requires both the time to think strategically about how to use the technology, to think technically about how to set it up and maintain it, and to schedule into the day the time to make a short personal video thanking a donor by name.
This use of technology doesn’t claim to save time, it is very clear up front that it is facilitating the ability to use our time to be less transactional and more focused on building relationships with our donors.
Broader Applications of Slow Technology in Nonprofit Work
There are a million and one examples of how we are using technology that can be examined from the framework of the Slow Tech movement. The nonprofit world and social justice work are the perfect environments for this kind of examination. Relationship building is a very clear part of the work that does not necessarily lend itself to being “sped up” by technology, but there are so many more – learning, culture building, community building, trust building, creativity, critical thought, planning, reflecting, etc.
One of the promises of the technology age has been to save us time, but the promise of the Slow Tech movement is to help us to use our time in ways that ultimately help us connect with each other and bring the change in the world that we are working towards.
Want to chat about this more? Me too!! Let’s make the time for it together 🙂
