4 Creative Ways Nonprofits Are Using Technology and Data to Further Their Missions

One of the benefits of data in the nonprofit sector often includes efficiency in donor engagement. But some organizations are also creatively applying technology and data to further their missions — improving community engagement, advocacy and day-to-day work to serve their constituents better.

At Tech Forward, a Tech Impact conference held in Nashville, Tennessee, last week, nonprofits shared how their creative approaches to technology are transforming their missions. Here are four case studies.

Charity: water Brings Donors Into the Story With Immersive Tech

In its 19-year existence, Charity: water has brought clean water to 20 million people across 29 countries. Now it's experimenting with the Experience Lab, a 60-minute storytelling arc designed to break through short attention spans while driving connection, awareness and support for its cause.

“There are 10 different touch points in this space that we would then use to create some engagement with you to tell the story of the global water crisis,” Brian Seay, Experience Lab director, Charity: water, said in his session, “The Experience Lab: How Technology, Creativity, and Storytelling are Changing the Way We View the Global Water Crisis.” “And so for us, this is the experiment that we're trying to utilize technology to achieve our goals.”

Located in Franklin, Tennessee, the Experience Lab transports visitors to northwestern Uganda, where women and children walk daily for unsafe water. Visitors walk that journey on a treadmill facing a video wall in a 94-degree room while carrying a 40-pound jerry can. Later, they sit down and watch via virtual reality headsets the day clean water reached one community.

The nonprofit signed an eight-year lease, committing to updating the space to keep visitors engaged through 2033. So far, the experiment is working. In its first six months, 5,000 people visited, generating $2.2 million in donations.

“It's not about storytelling in a way that makes them feel guilty,” Seay said. “It’s about truly trying to engage them in such a way that they will then want to act upon what they see. And so all of our space is designed around this concept of narrative transportation, but primarily this virtual reality film is what triggers these neural pathways for them — what makes them want to solve a problem.”

The Bail Project Uses Dashboards to Empower Staff

At The Bail Project, dashboards are more than executive scorecards. Staff rely on them to manage caseloads, which include bailing out clients, sending court date reminders and arranging their transportation.

While staff loved the simplicity of a former dashboard, the custom-coded version often broke during system updates and was no longer sustainable, Samantha Levinson, director of program innovation and client experience at The Bail Project, said.

The new system pulls in court case IDs, tracks outreach attempts, prioritizes action steps and includes motivational widgets that show progress toward daily goals. Unlike typical widgets that focus on high-level revenue or key performance indicators, these are tailored to keep staff motivated and connected to client outcomes.

“It helped our staff really understand how the data system was connected to the service delivery for their clients, and also to what … their expectations were for service delivery,” Levinson said.

Though staff were resistant, adoption was rapid. Her team collected feedback before building the new tool and gave users about three months for training and transition.

“In this instance, we did everything we could to get the dashboard to adapt to our staff,” Levinson said. “And so folks still had their questions, but we had better answers, and it made more sense for people in their workflow. And so they didn't actually have to change their practices to adapt to a new tool, which is normally what people have to do when you roll anything out like that.”

Everytown for Gun Safety Uses AI to Fight Misinformation

Everytown for Gun Safety faced two major challenges: outdated official gun violence data and widespread misinformation. The organization turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to close both gaps.

It developed two AI-powered tools: EveryShot, which scans tens of thousands of news articles daily and categorizes incidents of gun violence in real time, and Ask Everytown, a chatbot built on the organization’s vetted knowledge base.

What would have required dozens of staff without the AI-assisted technology only requires one staffer spending a few hours each week to oversee quality control, Nick Suplina, senior vice president at Everytown for Gun Safety, said. Additionally, both tools link to their sources.

“We want the media to be able to get accurate, reliable information — to be a source,” Suplina said in his session, “Big Problems, New Solutions: Tackling Society’s Most Intractable Challenges with AI Optimism.” “And so this was really … freeing up time from critical policy people and research folks to allow them to focus on other aspects of the work.

“I will say that the ChatGPTs of the world and other products have gotten so much better even since we started this project, but still to this day, it's getting critical facts and insights — about the issue that we know best — wrong, and so hallucinating data and making up answers.”

Heights Philadelphia Turns Public Data Into Actionable Insights

For Heights Philadelphia, public data has been a force multiplier. The organization blends public school data with its own student records to give staff richer context and to strengthen grant applications, Michael Hollander, vice president of data and innovation at Heights Philadelphia, said in his session, “Public Data, Public Impact: How to Use Open/Public Data to Amplify Your Nonprofit's Impact.”

“The powerful piece of this is that we're mixing the public data … with our own data, so we can see the context of what's happening with our students in our programs in these schools,” he said.

That approach helped Heights Philadelphia make the case for a violence intervention grant that could be used for education support. Using city data on shootings, the organization mapped the 57 blocks in Philadelphia that had at least 10 shootings since 2015 and then overlaid school locations. The analysis showed many of the schools it served were either within a quarter-mile radius or just outside those highest-violence areas.

“This was a way that we could provide some context to why it was important for us, in particular, to get this money,” Hollander said.

From immersive storytelling to AI-powered research to reimagined dashboards, these nonprofits show that technology can be a catalyst for deeper engagement, smarter advocacy and more effective operations.