2023 funding impact results
The Twilio.org Impact Fund14 provides grants and investments that help nonprofits and social enterprises accelerate digital transformation in order to make a bigger impact. We prioritize platforms and strategies that align with our key focus areas: supporting displaced communities, spurring climate action, and building equitable long-term wellbeing.
Our five funding cohorts
The Impact Fund allocates capital to nonprofit organizations and social enterprises across five strategically aligned cohorts, ranging from activating our employees and supporting our local communities, to fostering broader digital adoption within nonprofits and mobilizing for climate education and humanitarian action.
If your nonprofit is interested in learning about how our grants could help accelerate your organization’s impact, visit our website to include your organization in future open call grant rounds.
Digital Innovation: Scaling social impact through tech-inclusive funding
Many nonprofits want to make progress on digital transformation goals, but lack the developers and funds needed to build new technologies. In fact, only 1 in 4 nonprofits report having the developer talent they need. This disconnect is partly driven by existing funding models often being too restrictive, treating talent and technology as overhead costs instead of as investments. Worse, funding can take many months or even years to come through.
Twilio.org’s Digital Innovation Grant initiative seeks to empower nonprofits with the resources they need for digital transformation, recognizing the importance of technology in achieving their missions. We call this ‘tech-inclusive funding’. Our Digital Innovation Grants also fill a gap in the funding spectrum with a process that delivers a decision in weeks instead of months. The funds are meant to be flexible, which means they can support costs from personnel to technology infrastructure, programmatic functions, and more. Nonprofits can use these funds to experiment with new models of service delivery—helping them garner follow-on funding from governments, foundations, and individual donors.
2023 Digital Innovation Grant results
Tech-inclusive funding to drive impact at scale.
Supported 33 nonprofits with $3.2M USD in grant funding11
50% are founded or led by a woman, 34% are founded or led by a person of color, and 18% are founded or led by a member of the LGBTQ+ community
69M people are expected to be supported over the course of these digital innovation projects13
Accelerating innovation with Twilio.org’s Customer Acceleration Fund
As we look ahead, we aim to find new ways to continue building the technical capacity of nonprofits, beyond the Digital Innovation Grant initiative. In Q2 2024, Twilio.org launched the Customer Acceleration Fund (CAF) to bolster nonprofits’ technical capabilities through tailored consultative services. The inaugural CAF prioritizes 501(c)(3) organizations in the healthcare, education, and humanitarian sectors that want to work with Twilio.org and its network of 30+ technology partners to bring their digital initiatives to life. Twilio.org will select the technology partner and provide funding up to $25,000 USD to design and/or implement a solution tailored to the nonprofit’s specific needs.
Footnotes
11 To calculate grants and donations provided in 2023, we count dollars the Twilio.org Impact Fund deployed in 2023, including capital that was committed in previous years and deployed in 2023.
12 Product credits include $100 USD in product credits for each social impact customer that joins Twilio.org’s Impact Access Program. Product discounts are estimated as the average discounts for our identified social impact customers excluding for-profit customers with a social impact use case.
13 We collect the expected number of people served by our grantees through grantee applications. These numbers are only estimates and are subject to change over the course of the grant. Not all grantees estimate the number of people they will serve over the course of their grant period.
14 Our grants are made possible through the Twilio 1% equity pledge. In 2015, we reserved 1% of our common stock to fund the Twilio.org Impact Fund. Grant funding made in 2023 does not come from our operating budget or impact our path to profitability.