Tag: digital-marketing

Organizing Tools in the Digital Genealogy

Micah Sifry is one of the political commentators whose writing about technology, organizing of the Resistance (or, in his preferred parlance, the Defiance) in Trump 2.0, and how organizations are alternatively finding footing and struggling this moment has been most informative and grounding for me in since the 2024 election. Micah was kind enough to link to my piece on the genealogy of digital teams and tools in his excellent Substack. He included this challenge:

My only addition would be to discuss how in the move from grassroots to the cloud, whether we’ve undervalued the power of self-organizing communities. In the earlier days of this field, campaigners often tapped “the power of the crowd” to get things done. We still have lots of distributed campaigning (as well as some negative experiences with the challenge of scaling between national leadership and local autonomy) but in addition to looking at how campaigns use staff and tools, which Browner Hamlin covers very well, I’d love to see more on how ordinary people as well as super-volunteers are either empowered, or entasked.

This is an excellent point and something that I have pretty strong opinions about. I’d like to dig into at greater length in the future, but for now will offer some quick thoughts.

I should say at the start that this is a place where my work in a global advocacy organisation is likely highly divergent from a US-based campaign or a community organisation. As always, I have perspectives on these differences but what I see on a daily basis in the global Greenpeace network is quite different from someone working an electoral campaign or doing community-based housing justice work, for example.

The organizing aspects of digital work has indeed become underserved in recent years. Instead there has been a significant emphasis on mobilization – which requires less effort on the part of people, is often quite time bound, and is more conducive to low bar asks like signing petitions or making donations. Organizing, by contrast, is hard, slow and messy.

From an institutional perspective, my sense is that there are a few key drivers. First, as I already wrote, organizing people is hard and slow. Second, most campaign strategies in my context have the role of volunteers in an organized state as an end-of-process outcome – not an essential part at the start of the campaign design or theory of change. Third, is a structural reality – in my context, organizing tends to sit in smaller, less resourced teams and the technologies for organizing don’t receive the same degree of investment as a CRM or website (due to the smaller staff constituency and smaller budgetary impacts).

But to model some of my previous writing on the genealogy of teams, this is an endpoint and not where things began. 

Thinking back tools for organizing people (or better still, tools for people to organize themselves) was a central part of the digital suite in the most successful campaigns and organizations. In fact the early days of digital saw some of the greatest potential as a domain of work through the tools made available to volunteers (and often built by volunteers) in the Dean campaign in 2004 – some of which were subsequently productized by Blue State Digital and other firms. Whether it was at Democracy for America or later the Obama campaign, internal social networks that enabled volunteers to start affinity groups or local groups, organize house parties and participate in field canvassing, while inviting family, friends and neighbors to join was a key part of the digital infrastructure.

I must again refer readers to Daniel Kreiss’s excellent book on the Dean, Kerry and Obama campaigns, “Taking Our Country Back.” It charts the emergence of digital teams and tools through those campaigns. If you’re interested in how they first started showing up, what their challenges were and how they grew – go read Kreiss. 

Whether it was the Dean or Obama campaigns or MoveOn.org – the 2000s were in many ways defined by digital campaigns trying to figure out how to build large groups of people who showed up not just online with petitions and donations but offline and in person as well. The heavily electoral nature of the technological innovations – with US presidential campaigns being a primary, but not exclusive, driver for new tools and new consultancies – meant that there was always a strong linkage between the purpose of offline organizing (the field functions of voter registration, persuasion and turnout) with the distributed qualities of digital. That is, online tools for organizing often closely mirrored the traditional functions of a political campaign.

After the success of the Obama campaign and the well documented popularity of My.BarackObama.com (aka MyBO), many nonprofit and labor leaders wanted to see the same power of digital organizing tools brought to bear in their own contexts. Many groups tried and failed to get the same results. A key learning for practitioners like myself was that expecting to get the same results as a dynamic presidential campaign in almost any context that wasn’t also a dynamic presidential campaign was going to be incredibly challenging. Learning that this is hard and it’s unlikely that an organization can get the same traction with an internal social network or organizing platform was key. But the lesson was not that organizing online was a bad investment. 

Moving forward we see the popularity of distributed online petitioning as a step towards democratized digital engagement. Change.org did this in more cynical ways, but technologist Nathan Woodhull launched ControlShift Labs as a more movement-oriented distributed organizing platform. He originated it with GetUp in Australia (an Open Network organization that was one of the first groups using the MoveOn.org model outside of the US). CSL was then incubated by Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), at the same time I was also launching an anti foreclosure and eviction project incubated at CEL that eventually became OccupyOurHomes.org. I was the first organization using ControlShift in the US because of this connection. We used the distributed petition and events platform as a vehicle to empower people facing foreclosure and eviction to tell their story and build support – both in their community and online. 

ControlShift was and is used by the Greenpeace network and is still a tool I love. While it’s very much a distributed petitioning tool, Nathan has always valued petitions as a starting point of engagement and campaigning – not an end point. The features that were added to CSL over time speak to this – from facilitating easy petition delivery to targets, to organizing offline events as a part of the campaign. When we were using CSL in Occupy Our Homes, we held weekly training calls for people who started petitions – helping them sharpen their campaign, think through who they can be asking for support and what steps they can be taking to move forward. 

An additional benefit of the ControlShift platform is it allowed for federation. So while I had resources to spend on digital organizing at Occupy Our Homes, many of the community based organisations I was working in network with – or even local Occupy encampments – did not have the technology infrastructure to take their offline work and promote it online. CSL allowed me to make this platform available to local groups for their own organizing purposes, a form of movement generosity that engendered stronger collaboration.

At its best, this sort of distributed petitioning platform can provide incredibly empowering opportunities for regular people and volunteers, not just paid activists.

As we look towards 2016, peer-to-peer SMS tools had a moment of popularity. I’d need to dig deeper to recall the exact products and when they were introduced…but writing from memory makes me think of that campaign cycle as the one where organizations and campaigns began to ask supporters to use distributed peer-to-peer text messaging as a key way to get people to attend events, make donations, and turn out to vote. 


Unlike an internal social network, peer-to-peer SMS has a lower barrier to participation and can be effectively run with smaller volunteer bases. So it is both more ubiquitous today but also more prone to high volume and low ethics implementations that can approach unwanted spam. Is that a good use of volunteer time? Probably not – but doing it with good data, for opted-in recipients can be a valuable connection, even as the spammers have made this less successful for everyone else. 

Similarly – virtual phonebank tools have been an effective form of volunteer participation from this mid-teens era for electoral campaigns. They remain a key pathway for how people can give their time in support of a campaign or organisation, talking directly to people that may be like them. For my context, it is not a common nor important tool. But to me the potential for value to be derived from good data and authentic forms of communication are high. Humans talking to humans, provided someone picks up the phone, feels anachronistically powerful at a time of AI slop and predatory spam.

The last point that comes to mind is the impressive implementation of Slack as a volunteer engagement and communications platform. In “Rules for Revolutionaries,” Becky Bond and Zack Exley tell the story of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and how they built an impressive volunteer apparatus supported heavily by consumer communications technologies. Though still riding the volumes of a dynamic presidential campaign, the principles they developed for trusting volunteers, opening lines of communication, connecting people, developing relational organizing models – all of this feels more replicable at smaller scales than the social network level tooling of the Obama campaigns. 

Micah is likely more familiar than I am around the recent history of digital distributed organizing, so I want to pull the camera back a bit on my thinking on “the power of the crowd” to get things done.”

There is a philosophical aspect to this and there is an organizational one. 

Organizations need to believe as a core part of their theory of change that people power is the critical force on the left for creating a better world. If you believe that, it should be reflected in your budgets, your staffing, your tools procurement. 

But if you believe people are just there to send in donations in the mail and not do much else, then it is unlikely that your organization will design campaigns that build a meaningful role for volunteers in your work.

Similarly, if you haven’t internalized an approach to people power that values volunteer/offline participation, it is very unlikely that you will be designing campaigns that benefit from what digital organizing tools or digital volunteer spaces can offer. And so over time – again, in my context at an international campaigning NGO – I have seen budget cuts and tools turned off for platforms that orient towards the volunteer experience or distributed organizing functionality because our campaigns are less and less oriented towards these activities as being essential to campaign success. 

Connecting to my previous essay on team evolutions over time, volunteer organizing was once a part of a generalist digital campaigner’s job description. But as digital teams grew, this became a more specialized function – either in a digital team or in a role housed in a volunteer or field team. They had tools to go with them – oftentimes tools that were separate from the rest of the digital marketing or CRM stack, but sometimes still integrated. 

What was relevant (again, in my experience, which will be very different to what we see in larger US orgs or political campaigns!) was that when budgets needed tightening, the freestanding ‘volunteer organizer’ technologies were easy line items to cut. They usually didn’t have a big staff allocation. Turning off a low volume tool and single role in the staff was an easier cut to make than someone writing emails to fundraise or a tool that generated a huge portion of the organization’s budget.

These have been painful evolutions to watch. 

In a time of global political upheaval and intense dissatisfaction with what major political parties are offering, with rising right wing nationalism in many parts of the world – the importance of tools and trained professionals to support regular people coming together, building trust and affinity, and having the technological options to take responsibility for making their communities or their country or the world a better please feels more important than ever. 

The technology itself isn’t the issue for me. There are some purpose built distributed organizing tools and plenty of larger digital community platforms (Discord, Slack, Facebook) that are fully capable of enabling people to come together to organize. The gaps stem more from a lack of commitment to real organizing within organizations (and outside of the political campaign context especially), as well as a lack of people who are trained as organizers capable of approaching technologies as a means to the end of organizing people together. 

I think the progressive movement has suffered from being so reliant on presidential campaigns as a vector for innovation. If the labor movement had been the primary source of digital technology funding, I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. Hell – if ACORN hadn’t been destroyed by Republicans (while most Democrats stood by in silence), I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. 

Ultimately, organizing is hard. It takes time. It takes money. It requires relating to people as complex beings. And building technology that supports this sort of work requires technologists who have a deep understanding of how organizing works. No doubt some of what we have exists because of people who have spent time working to build this understanding. But we don’t have enough. 

The two things I would hope for more of is organizations that commit to people power and show this by investing in tools and training for both volunteers and staff to support this as a fundamental building block for all strategic work. And that we all pay closer attention to the theories of change being advanced by politicians and by organizations – if people power isn’t central to how they are committed to making change, then we should be skeptical about committing to them with our money or our time. 

A Brief Genealogy of Digital Teams and Technologies

Author’s Note – This brief history was originally written for internal audiences in the Greenpeace network. It attempts to provide a broad overview of the way digital technologies and digital staffing have evolved over the last twenty-plus years, in particular in the non-profit advocacy sector and political sector. Both because these sectors in particular and digital technology in general have an historic bias towards American companies/organisations and because my perspective is that of an American who has worked in electoral and advocacy spaces, in the US and globally, there is a strong bend in this analysis towards events involving taking place in the US, with US participants. My hope is that this US-centric approach does not undermine the core content of this loose history, which is meant to describe large trends and dynamics within organisations around the world. I view this as a genealogy – a study of the lineage and developmental shifts in three clear epochs of time.

This is not meant to be a literal genealogy, nor an academic investigation of the evolutions of different civic tech platforms and their utilisations over the last 25+ years. I seek to capture in what follows a characterisation of the zeitgeist around technology and digital teams I have been a part of, built and seen operate around the world. 

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Advocacy organisations used the internet prior to 1998. Greenpeace itself was a pioneer in the use of websites and email. But the modern conception of the internet as a place for organising, building people power and engaging large audiences for political and policy ends can reasonably be linked to the founding of MoveOn.org in 1998. MoveOn.org was birthed out of the impeachment of US President Bill Clinton, when two successful California technologists started an online petition which they shared over email calling for Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” The petition garnered over half a million signatures, as well as helped recruit thousands of in-person petition delivery actions and tens of thousands of phone calls into Congress. 

MoveOn.org became effectively the first major digitally-native advocacy organisation. After Clinton was impeached, they asked petition signers to commit to engage in electoral activism and donate to candidates opposing those who had voted to impeach him. In short order, MoveOn.org had created a conceptual framework for digital advocacy that relied on emails, petitions, online donations, volunteer cultivation, phone calls to decision makers, and connecting people to elected officials. 

EPOCH 1 (~2000s): All-in-one (or two)

In this first epoch of digital advocacy, which I loosely place from 1998 to 2012, the industry had common hallmarks for teams and technologies. 

Epoch 1 – Teams

The MoveOn.org model relied primarily on ‘campaigners’ who were responsible for delivering multiple types of digital engagement, in different channels and settings. They managed email lists and used them for advocacy, list growth, fundraising, volunteer recruitment and earned media. They engaged with allies, elected officials and the media. They fundraised – almost exclusively through small dollar asks from their supporter base. They created videos and ads. They used digital tools to organise offline events – from house parties to protests. Somewhat anachronistically, MoveOn.org had almost no real website. For years, the domain was a compendium of petitions and little else. 

Moving on from MoveOn.org, there are common hallmarks of early digital teams in this epoch. While the naming convention varied (Internet? New Media? Digital?), teams were often similar in structure and skillset. 

Digital teams tended to be small. The people in them were usually generalists or people with multi-disciplinary responsibilities. If there was differentiation, it usually started with a web or visual designer and did not go much farther than that. Digital campaigners of this era were expected to: 

  • write emails, 
  • create web content, 
  • write blog posts, 
  • fundraise over email and on the website, 
  • recruit volunteers & drive attendance at offline events,
  • create social media content (as these sites started to exist), 
  • produce web videos, 
  • manage data (primarily email list segmentation within a digital toolkit), 
  • create and place digital advertisements, and 
  • conduct blogger and digital media outreach.

The notable exception may have been with the visual design and development of websites themselves. Those discrete tasks often required technical hard skills. If organisations did not have them, they were outsourced to agencies or skilled volunteers.

In most organisations that existed prior to the creation of the internet these tasks required close collaboration with other departments (Fundraising, Communications, Policy, Volunteer, etc). At MoveOn.org, campaigners were responsible for all of it. 

Early digital teams may have been independent departments in some organisations, but often they sat within a Communications department or grew out of an IT department. 

These multidisciplinary, generalist teams (augmented by expert designers and in some instances database or web developers) benefitted from operating in a domain that was nascent. There were no long-agreed best practices.  There were no degree programmes that turned out young graduates to staff organisations with similar people, with similar perspectives and philosophical approaches to the use of technology in advocacy and elections. In contrast, American electoral campaigning as it related to field (offline) organising, communications, and fundraising had best practice approaches that reached back to the days of Abraham Lincoln. Teams of digital generalists essentially had a blank slate to determine what would work best when it came to building power online.

Epoch 1 – Technologies

For the bulk of the first epoch, digital teams relied on online two types of digital tools. 

First and foremost were websites. Content management systems (CMS) became common as ways for non-technical or low-technical generalists to put content on web pages. The popularisation of CMSs as a tool for digital teams aligned with the emergence of Web 2.0 – which allowed for interactive websites, user-generated content, unique URLs for pages and posts. By using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) content editing, CMSs allowed more people of limited technical skills (like myself) to post frequently and bring attention to specific posts and pages via directly linking to URLs. 

The other primary tools were all-in-one digital toolkits. Products designed for advocacy and non-profit practices included broadcast email senders, email databases, fundraising functionality, petition pages, tell-a-friend pages, letter to the editor pages, and geomapped elected official datasets that allowed organisations to directly send petitions from constituents to elected officials. Practically speaking, these toolkits enabled digital teams to build lists, engage them with numerous types of engagement asks, raise money, and re-engage to build lists even more. They did not require hard technical skills – usually some basic HTML knowledge was sufficient to get the most from these toolkits. 

Early digital toolkits included products like GetActive, Convio, NGP, Engaging Networks, Action Kit and Democracy in Action. Later in this epoch also included Blue State Digital, Salsa Labs, EveryAction, NationBuilder and Action Network.

One critical factor at this stage of digital technology development in nonprofits is that there was little to no movement of data between websites and digital toolkits. Digital toolkit landing pages were generally styled to look similar to websites, but not be a part of them. If there was movement of data, it was periodic, manual transfer of donor information or membership information from fundraising or volunteer databases into or out of the digital toolkit. The processes for the bulk of this period were manual and infrequent (weekly? monthly?). Digital teams got to work primarily within one major platform (the toolkit) beyond the website – and email was the primary channel that was relevant for data-generating and data-utilising purposes.

From a technical perspective, the only necessary skills for effective use of most digital toolkits was basic HTML. This, conveniently, was also all that was needed for producing content on CMSs. And even this wasn’t totally critical, as both toolkits and CMSs had WYSIWYG interfaces that allowed emails and web pages to be published without any coding knowledge. 

Digital teams benefited from web developers and visual designers who had the technical capabilities to go beyond WYSIWYG editing, but campaigns and organisations could launch a substantive digital presence with only a CMS, a digital toolkit and a single campaigner with the responsibility of producing content across multiple digital channels. 

In essence a functional digital presence could be achieved through one person, of no to low technical skills, using as few as two technology platforms. (An exception could be noted that ActionKit always required SQL developer capacity and the MoveOn campaigners relied on some technical support to deliver email segmentation and list management). 

EPOCH 2 (~2010s): CRM at the centre  

Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2007-2008 was the first instance of a national campaign or major organisation to invest in building a massive, mature digital team. (“Taking Our Country Back” by Daniel Kreiss is an excellent look at how digital evolved from the Dean and Kerry campaigns in 2004 to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.) While the first campaign falls within the first epoch, it presaged what we would see as digital crew in other organisations: growth in teams and specialisation in roles. 

By the time President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, the shape of the next digital epoch’s teams and technologies was becoming clear. No longer was the structure of a US presidential campaign the outlier for digital team taxonomies – it was now a common structure. This included a more varied use of digital technologies.

Epoch 2 – Teams

OFA 2008 gave digital teams around the world a model for how resources could be allocated across different areas of digital practice to get the best results. This included heavy investments in design, in email and web page optimisation, in SMS programmes, in large-scale testing, and advertising.

More capacity allowed for greater specialisation. Greater specialisation allowed for more experimentation, the deepening of the best practices playbook within those domains, and, theoretically, greater organisational impact through higher efficacy. 

In practice this evolution saw the movement away from generalist digital practitioners and towards domain-level specialisation. A robust digital team might now include different people responsible for:

  • Email (but not necessarily differentiated between fundraising and non-fundraising emails)
  • Website content
  • Data management
  • Analytics & reporting
  • Web design & user experience
  • Video 
  • Mobile
  • Advertising 
  • Social media

The rise of bloggers as respected journalists saw the responsibility of blogger outreach move out of digital teams and back into more traditional communications/press teams. 

Practically speaking, we see a digital team that may have been composed of one to two types of job description in the 2000s become a team with eight or more differentiated roles in the 2010s. For national and international organisations, this proliferation of roles and headcount was not a fundamental barrier. Digital was a promising domain and unit heads were able to justify increased investment. That is, unlike most incumbent organisational functions, digital teams grew with the expectation that they would deliver measurable value and impact for their organisations. 

Epoch 2 – Technologies

For the early years of this period, most digital teams still employed a CMS and an all-in-one digital toolkit. But parts of the digital toolkit were beginning to be segmented off from use in favour of some ‘best in breed’ tooling choices. This could include things like purpose-built broadcast email platforms, highly optimised tell-a-friend or after action pages, and donation processing platforms. 

CRMs sought to unify online supporter and donor data across digital and non-digital platforms. Storing data about the same people in different systems required new technology and new skills for moving data and managing what constituted ‘truth’ about who someone was, what they had done with an organisation, and how they wanted to be communicated with. While fundraising teams had used CRMs – customer/constituent relationship management – for a while, CRM companies like Salesforce sought to integrate more marketing functionality that was relevant to digital engagement and campaigning. 

The rise of point to point APIs (application protocol interface) allowed simple data movement, often through visual interfaces but sometimes in code-based environments. The data movement was generally not too complicated – records moved from A to B to C and back again through linear processes. This required greater stewardship of data and provided a more clear benefit for segmentation and list management that went beyond email as a channel. 

Beyond this more simple technical infrastructure for data movement between systems, we also begin to see more advanced matching of email and donor data records to the voter file (in the US in particular). This requires developing a more sophisticated view of who individuals are and what data updates from external data sources (voter files, organising databases, consumer data) with datasets maintained by organisations and campaigns. This sort of person matching was between data sets where there were clear, unique identifiers (email, phone number, street address, name). In later years matching of supporters across differing data sources becomes more challenging, due to a lack of common unique identifiers (e.g. social media handles) or anonymisation of tracking data.

The growth of channels as domains of practice similarly led to an increase in the need for reporting dashboards and analytical tools that sat outside of the digital toolkit itself. Data could now be brought together across web, email, social, and fundraising channels. 

As the 2010s progress, we see an increase in the number of people in teams, an increase in the options for tooling to deliver largely similar digital outcomes as the 2000s, and a commensurate increase in the skills required to effectively manage those tools. Or, framed in the other direction, as we built teams with more people and specific skills, they sought out tools that would best enable them to achieve their narrowed areas of responsibility. Generalist digital campaigner roles became less and less common, but the perceived opportunities of specialisation and domain expertise made this feel like an easy choice for managers to make. 

EPOCH 3 (2020s): Data warehouse at the center

While the 2000s were a time of explosive digital growth that saw the emergence of social media and mobile smart devices by the later parts of the decade, the 2010s saw consolidation of tools and platforms used by campaigns and organisations. The internet was no longer a place of wild growth in the types of tools and platforms providing opportunities to organisations. Instead, it became a place where massive Silicon Valley corporations and their funders reduced innovation, limited competition and locked audiences in as commodified eyeballs to sell to advertisers or sources of data to, well, sell to advertisers too. 

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations even further towards digital reliance. The loss of offline and face-to-face engagement channels due to the risk of illness and death led to even more investment in digital teams and technologies. 

As the world began to come out of the pandemic, Silicon Valley introduced us to a new technology at scale – generative artificial intelligence. It arrives as an offer to solve the problems organisations and exchanges face – problems derived from the arc of digital team growth and technology proliferation. 

Epoch 3 – Teams

The 2020s see an increase in specialisations that were started a decade before. Email staff get split into different domains of practice. In some cases (INGOs), it is likely  fundraising experts and everything else experts, while with political and marketing contexts, the division may be between email writers and email optimisers. Social media staff proliferate with each new large platform and content type. Writing for a website is no longer the same job as writing for email or writing for a microblogging platform. Different engagement channels and platforms require their own staff to manage them and their audiences. (“Require” here reflects a common choice, but it is one to be examined soon.)

Data teams show even more signs of specialisation. Data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, data visualisation experts, data architects and more roles have become commonplace, both in terms of the sorts of job descriptions we see in organisations and the need for specialisation to make the tools we procure work effectively.

Generalist roles are largely gone from national and international organisations. The siloing of digital teams – which may also include the fracturing of these digital roles across digital, engagement, campaigning, fundraising, data and IT departments – means there is reduced integration between and interaction with different digital functions. There is a greatly reduced literacy of cross disciplinary knowledge – that is, someone whose job is to create content for Twitter and engage audiences there may not be able to write fundraising emails or draft website content. Someone tasked with web analytics may not be able to effectively strategise about email list segmentation or after-action conversion page design.

What are the consequences of the proliferation of headcount, specialisms, and tools? Different digital practitioners are reaching different, but overlapping, audiences through different channels. From the outside people may not perceive these differences directly, but many organisations find it harder to remain coherent. This in turn leads to poor messaging engagement in different channels, pasting content from one channel to another without a recognition of different audience and stylistic needs. 

It is critical to note that this is not simply a negative consequence of Conway’s Law reaching digital engagement outputs. Audiences that campaigns and organisations are trying to reach have indeed fragmented across social media channels. Greater investment and capacity is needed to reach them in this landscape. Algorithmic content delivery contributes to the same trend—you’re constantly chasing the trends that the algorithm favors in a given moment.

Organisations effectively have different internal digital stakeholders, with limited structural integration and less ability for people to be interoperable across roles and channel responsibilities. This leads to a loss of flexibility in resourcing (be it for crisis moments, or simple things like vacations or sick leave), competition for resources within digital channels, a lack of understanding of what works in different contexts. In my eyes, a critical consequence of this is the loss of creativity about how to stay on the cutting edge of digital engagement. 

Staff rely on stale best practices, meaning many organisations’ outputs look the same, regardless of what issue they are working on, what their brand is or which individuals are creating outputs. ‘Best practices’ need to be the baseline for creation of new emergent practices. Yet team structures and specialisation often limit this in reality.

Epoch 3 – Technologies

The ‘best in breed’ approach has proliferated further into this era, with even less reliance on all-in-one digital toolkits. The big difference is that breeds are getting smaller. Previously large platforms that provided multiple functions are being atomised into smaller and smaller technology domains. A single data platform has been replaced with multiple cloud solutions and new tooling choices at each stage of the data pipeline. On-platform functions are increasingly done off-platform. Many tools are required today to do what one or two tools did in previous eras. 

The architecture in place for systems and tools has evolved to seeing a data warehouse at the center of the map. The movement of data in and out of the warehouse, the production of data products that deliver value to ranges of stakeholders, the construction and maintenance of integrations and pipelines are consuming activities for digital and data technology teams. The pursuit for efficient data storage and movement practices, along with canonical understanding of who people are as they interact with numerous digital systems, is an essential dimension of this technological era. 

With the rise of smaller and smaller technology classes, increased specialisation of skills is required, forcing more FTEs to fill different technical roles (as we see above). The key here is the technology trend is driving a staffing and budgeting trend. 

Another dynamic in this era is that the companies selling all-in-one style digital tool sets have gone through a period of massive consolidation. Private equity has gotten involved, buying up competitors and degrading the quality of products on offer. This, paired with the availability of cheap money for Silicon Valley to apply into new investments and acquisitions had a powerful impact on the technology landscape.

Convio acquired GetActive, then Blackbaud acquired Convio. BSD split into two companies, both of which were acquired by larger firms. NGPVan / EveryAction acquired BSD Tools (BSD Kit?), ActionKit, DonorTrends and SalsaLabs. Then EveryAction was acquired by Apax Partners, a private equity firm. 

Only a handful of competitors are independent – notably companies like Action Network, Engaging Networks, and NationBuilder.

Major tech players like Salesforce, Hubspot and Microsoft have sought to offer an array of tools and functionalities that at least appear to have a level of unification and interoperability as to replicate past vintages of all-in-one digital solutions. However this is often not as clean as past tools – Salesforce’s offerings are closer to a Frankenstein monster, with body parts stitched together from other acquisitions, as opposed to technology built by one company with one coherent approach.  

AI as a Solution?

Looking across this genealogy, there are a number of meta trends:

  • The movement from generalist to specialist roles
  • The growth of the number of technology domains that require staffing and tooling
  • The atomisation of product offerings within technology domains (with associated increases in costs from procurement processes to maintenance)

Through all of this – from the creation of digital teams to their growth and proliferation – it is unclear if each epochs’ trends bring better results for organisations. Does each FTE today bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does each new platform that is switched on bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does the level of specialisation and technical hard skills make organisations more able to achieve their core outcomes of winning on their issue and having financial security? 

Teams are bigger. The quiver of tools in use is larger. But are the results any better?

Generative artificial intelligence products are being sold to executives who are asking these very questions. Whether or not generative AI actually can be a solution to organisations (and my sense so far is that they are not a solution at all), the appeal is obvious. I recently saw an AI company advertisement on LinkedIn targeting executives that was framed simply “For less than a third of the cost of a new Analytics Engineer, you can have a year long subscription to our AI data product.” The continued growth in staffing demands is untenable and AI is being sold as a solution.

The market for AI is with executives who, at some point, must stop hiring new FTEs as every incumbent tool is replaced by more and more niche products, each requiring their own technical expertise and product management. Regardless of whether AI can actually solve the problems of integrating systems, moving data, creating content and increasing staff efficiency – the market demand is a consequence of the trajectory of the last 25 years of digital teams and tools. 

Calling the Question

The enshittification of the internet – especially search and social platforms – also looms large in my thinking. I don’t think our teams and structures are well suited for the necessary period of adaptation, experimentation and innovation that we will have to muster in order to thrive in an enshittified internet. The calcification of thinking into rigid best practices is no longer right for digital teams. (See: Cynefin framework. We are no longer in an Obvious domain. We are in, at best, a Complex domain that requires emergent practices, or at worst a Chaotic one, that requires rapid response.)

As a manager of teams and someone supporting a network of organisations that are resource constrained, the current direction of travel feels unsustainable. The proliferation of tools and requisite numbers of digital and data staffing FTEs simply cannot continue without significant improvements on ROI and organisational impact. It is based on assumptions of arithmetic growth that simply are not reliable in most organisational contexts.

If technology isn’t working for organisations and if the results are not getting better, then there has to be a strategic and functional reset. The missions of nonprofits and campaigns are not waiting while technologists build more and more integrations, or onboard more and more staff. At some point, we must get on with the strategic work that digital and data teams are meant to support. 

Ultimately it should be clear that the freedom, the flexibility, and the lack of binding best practices of the first epoch of digital teams and technology are things that I find missing in today’s working environment. It is up to us all to find new pathways forward – hopefully with a commitment to creativity, courage, and collaboration to once again unlock the transformative power of digital technology in nonprofit organisations.

Special thanks to the feedback and input from Matt Compton, Maria Julia van Boekel Cheola Torres, Sebastian Sibelle, Chad Stein & Mike Townsley.