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Dasra Philanthropy Week 2025

Charting your NGO’s Tech Journey

Welcome to

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@dasraindia

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  • Technology Strategy Decisions are not made in a vacuum and have usually multiple viable options
    • Session is not about choosing the exact right decision but thinking through the options, their related compromises and power of peer learning.
  • Reflect from your real-life experiences
  • Tradeoffs or Thematic Discussion Areas to assist decision-making:
    • Funding Changes: Forces organisations to rethink their strategies on technology
    • Organisation Strategy Changes: Impacting tech strategy
    • Tech Overload/lack of right skills and capacity: Highlighting risks of over-reliance on software partners or poor organisation capacity to manage internal or external tech systems; Lack of Expertise on partner/internally
    • Scale: Design for scale when and dealing with sudden changes.

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Session Guide/Takeaways

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  • Case Brief at start of the session
  • Challenges every 15 minutes for 3 rounds with multiple options to choose from in each round with group discussion
  • Final debrief after third challenge and time for group consensus

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Session Guidelines

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Do’s and don’ts

  • Be respectfully vocal
  • Share your experiences
  • 15 mins per round to make your decision
  • Group Majority vote if you can’t decide your option

Time to Play

@dasraindia

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  • Goodlearning foundation, 15cr+ org, runs residential direct implementation of their education program in 5 centres, for this an app called 'residentlearning' tracks vocational education, health, parent engagement, amongst other things, is launched with the help of partner A
  • 3 years later, another app called 'scaleprogram' was launched, which is used by govt schools in the state adopting the 'Goodlearning' vocational education curriculum; here education outcomes are tracked. This is launched and run by Partner B
  • For context, the organisation does not have technology capacity and has high reliance on partners and their technology decisions. ‘Residentlearning’ app took approximately 6 months by vendor A to develop and deployed over a year. Scaling deep model is done through the ‘resident learning program as an experimental testbed to prove evidence of impact while the ‘scaleprogram’ is a scale up program that involves govt and partners.

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Case Brief

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Time to Play

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Consider

  1. Org capacity and process to manage internal or external vendors
  2. Budgetary constraints of managing and directing multiple partners
  3. What went wrong with previous vendor ?

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Remember

  • Think through related compromises
  • Leverage peer learning.
  • Reflect from your real-life experiences.
  • Tradeoffs or Thematic Discussion Areas:
    • Funding Changes
    • Organisation Strategy Changes
    • Tech Overload/lack of right skills and capacity
    • Designing for scale

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Reflection Points - Challenge 1

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Consider

  • Funding and lower cost tech designs
  • Prioritization of upskilling of internal staff but capacity constraints
  • Use case driven design to reduce feature set needs and simplify tech design
  • Platforms vs custom tech design

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Remember

  • Think through related compromises
  • Leverage peer learning.
  • Reflect from your real-life experiences.
  • Tradeoffs or Thematic Discussion Areas:
    • Funding Changes
    • Organisation Strategy Changes
    • Tech Overload/lack of right skills and capacity
    • Designing for scale

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Reflection Points - Challenge 2

@dasraindia

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  1. Funding Changes: Forces organisations to rethink their strategies on technology
  2. Organisation Strategy: Changes impacting the tech strategy
  3. Tech Overload/lack of right skills and capacity: Highlighting risks of over-reliance on software partners or poor organisation capacity to manage internal or external tech systems
    1. Upskilling of internal staff
    2. Use case driven design to reduce feature set needs and simplify tech design
    3. Platforms vs custom tech design
    4. Partner Management
  4. Scale: Design for scale when and dealing with sudden changes.
  5. Compliance Issues: Challenges around data privacy or reporting

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Reflection Points - Challenge 3

@dasraindia