The Tech4Good Community, an organisation that aims to amplify the social impact of nonprofits by leveraging technology, launched OTTER, or Online Tech Training Engagement Resource, a tech platform for nonprofits in India. This platform can be used by nonprofits to access support, avail discounts, and get mentorship from companies like Google, Salesforce, Atlassian, Give India, and Razorpay.
“We want to improve access to technology for nonprofits, especially small and remote ones,” said Rinju Rajan, Co-Founder of Tech4Good Community, adding that OTTER has been two years in the making. OTTER helps nonprofits identify any technological gaps they face, and helps them with tools to bridge that gap. “OTTER has the potential to help nonprofits quickly become more impactful,” said Anusha Meher Bhargava, Co-Founder, Tech4Good Community.
Tech4Good said it has built partnerships with other technology companies for employee engagement, conduct workshops, and enable nonprofits’ access to things such as management information systems, fundraising platforms, payment gateways, programme management software, online data collection tools, and donor/beneficiary management systems. “These solutions have helped nonprofits react with agility during the pandemic and widen the social impact,” Tech4Good said in a statement.
For example, Jagrutha Mahila Sangathne (JMS), a Dalit women-run community-based organisation in north Karnataka that works on issues surrounding employment, issues of self-help groups, human rights, and more, required various types of data to manage and this was mostly done manually. OTTER said they shifted to a digital data collection exercise, where Google Earth Outreach stepped in to train staff in Open Data Kit. Tech4Good said that while previously, 30-40 forms were collected in three hours manually, it has doubled to 80-100 forms in 2 hours.
“OTTER addresses a huge unsolved problem in the nonprofit-volunteer ecosystem today: the search,” said Prashanth B, Tech Lead, Google India. “The more time I spend searching, the less time I spend solving. OTTER turns this around by building a system through which nonprofits and mentors can discover each other. It's not a social network, it's a network of societies,” he added.
According to the organisation, nonprofits can get special discounts on paid tools and tool-makers can better understand how their tools are used on the ground. “We want nonprofits to benefit from technology the same way that companies do, be it through a payment gateway, an online data collection tool, or a management information system,” said Akhila Somanath, Co-Founder at Tech4Good Community.
Girish Ananthanarayanan, COO and Director-Scale Programmes at education nonprofit Peepul India, said that for nonprofits, using the right solution can save a lot of time and resources. “Whether it is to manage remote work, disseminate information, or track impact for lakhs of people, the right solution can save an incredible amount of time and resources. I’m exhilarated to see OTTER being launched – finally a one stop shop to search for and connect to solutions,” he said.