Positively Impacting 51 Million Lives With A Little Help From Our Friends at Twilio

Positively Impacting 51 Million Lives With A Little Help From Our Friends at Twilio

They’re connecting refugees with on-demand translators in moments of distress, giving young people a mental health coach in their pocket, and helping teachers overcome language barriers to stay connected with their students’ parents. Who are these social impact champions? They’re tech nonprofits - startups that are building original tech products but leveraging the nonprofit business model so they can focus 100% on social impact.

You’ve probably heard of organizations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, and Khan Academy. Surprise! They are all tech nonprofits. Fast Forward, a Twilio.org partner, is entirely focused on increasing funding and support for these organizations. Twilio partners with Fast Forward to grow the tech nonprofit ecosystem through deep product support, mentorship, and funding.

Celebrating 5 Years and 51 Million People Impacted

Fast Forward launched in 2014 (before the term “tech nonprofit” existed) with a mission to apply the best of the tech sector to our biggest social problems. In practice this means connecting tech nonprofits with the resources they need to achieve positive social impact at scale, and Fast Forward does this through programs like its Accelerator. Early stage tech nonprofits need the same things regular startups do: funding, community, technical tools, and connections.

After five years accelerating tech nonprofits, Fast Forward has a lot of impact to show. We’ve accelerated 41 tech nonprofits, and together these organizations have impacted over 51 million lives around the globe. Plus, these organizations have cumulatively raised $102 million in philanthropic follow-on funding.

Interestingly, tech nonprofit founders don’t look like your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. 63% of our Accelerator alumni have a founder who identifies as a woman, and 73% of these organizations have a founder who is a person of color. This diversity may be attributable to the fact that 78% of alumni have a founder who is solving a social problem they personally experienced.

Running a tech nonprofit is hard work. Social problems are inherently harder to solve, and founders face all the challenges of running a tech startup and a nonprofit. But thanks to tools like Twilio and the power of goodwill, tech nonprofits are able to deliver life-changing support to communities that are underserved or in hard-to-reach places. 51 million lives impacted didn’t come easily. Over the years, we’ve learned that some of the most profound support for tech nonprofits comes in the form of products and volunteers.

Here’s Why Deep Product Support Matters

Determining the right product partnerships in the early days has a huge long-term impact. One of our favorite alumni stories is that of Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, a multilingual communications platform that connects teachers with their students’ parents to improve student outcomes.

Growing up as a Korean immigrant in the UK, Heejae was lucky. Unlike her peers who fell behind in school due to the language barrier, Heejae had English-speaking parents who stayed engaged in her education. Heejae knew a tool like TalkingPoints was desperately needed. During grad school, Heejae took $5,000 out of her students loans to build TalkingPoints, and identified the products she’d need to build her minimum viable product: Twilio and Google Translate.

Twilio was a vital early product partner, enabling TalkingPoints to reach its users where they were. TalkingPoints serves teachers and parents in low-income communities. With parents most accessible via SMS, Twilio enabled TalkingPoints teachers to send messages from their desktop computers, which were translated and delivered to parents’ mobile phones. 10 million messages later, Twilio still enables what’s core to TalkingPoints today: two-way SMS communication that transcends language barriers and empowers parents to be a part of their students’ success.

Technical Volunteering Scales Impact

The Twilio Programmable Voice API has been critical for another Fast Forward accelerator alumni, Tarjimly. The Tarjimly app connects refugees and aid workers with bilinguals for longtail language translation. Working on a lean budget as an early stage tech nonprofit, Tarjimly leveraged volunteer support to integrate Twilio and enable two-way communication through its native mobile app.

To make this work, Tarjimly’s CTO Aziz Alghunaim started by scoping out the product clearly. He detailed the way in which the service they needed to build could fit within their existing infrastructure, and asked three volunteer engineers if they had thoughts on how to execute on the Twilio API integration. Abdul Alfozan, a volunteer from a tech company, came back with a stellar implementation idea and rolled out the project in less than two weeks.

Aziz and the Tarjimly team were as thrilled as Alfozan, whose 6 hour commitment made the build possible. Aziz attributes the ease of execution in part to Twilio’s low-lift implementation model, clear documentation, and support (the Twilio team hopped on the phone to discuss the architecture of the solution with Alfozan). In Alfozan's words, “I find it motivating to volunteer at Tarjimly. Nothing is more gratifying than knowing a feature I worked on helped improve some refugees experiences.”

Thanks to the Twilio API and Alfozan's support, Tarjimly has helped nearly 20,000 refugees and aid workers in decisive moments where on-demand translation makes a huge impact.

Easy to implement tools like Twilio, in tandem with support from technical volunteers, are changing the game for tech nonprofits like Tarjimly and TalkingPoints. Twilio lowers the barriers to building, and pro-bono support from engineers like Abdul enable lean tech nonprofits to deploy products that will improve millions of lives for the better.

Want to use your personal and professional skills to help tech nonprofits positively impact the next 50 million lives? Check out Fast Forward’s Digital Volunteer Board to discover accessible opportunities (seriously, you can volunteer from your phone) that empower you to advance positive social change, anytime, anywhere.

Christina Shatzen is VP of Marketing at Fast Forward, the organization dedicated to scaling tech nonprofits. Christina enables the tech nonprofit sector’s growth through increased visibility and events like Accelerate Good Global.