Ideas for tech-savvy nonprofits
Insights on nonprofit technology, software strategy, and building better systems. Delivered to your inbox.
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Running on Spite
When a software company traps a nonprofit in a year-long renewal just to access their own data, it's time to jump ship.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read DO-RE-MI. Start at the very beginning.
Where does the nonprofit Impact Flywheel really begin, the story or the work? A friendly argument with Adam Jeske, and why I think it always starts with the story.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read From Generalists to Specialists
As nonprofits grow, generalist tools give way to specialist ones. Three rules for leaders watching that happen on their own teams, including what the urge for a 'one stop shop' is actually telling you.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Honeystack Summer Camp
Honeystack is running two summer cohorts for nonprofit leaders: Tech Savvy Nonprofit and Claude Cowork for Nonprofits.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read No One is Chasing You
Framing nonprofit work as a race to adopt AI is ridiculous. Are your funders threatening to cut your funding and donate to your competitors if you don't embrace AI? Of course not.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read The Right Work
How Honeystack helps nonprofits decide which technology work matters most — through Discovery, Cycles, and a culture that follows.
Lucy Petroucheva · 3 min read The Flywheel is Built on Software
A tour of the software underneath every component of the nonprofit impact flywheel: telling the story, rallying support, doing good, and measuring impact.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Nonprofits do 4 things well
Every successful nonprofit does four things well — tell a compelling story, rally support, do good in the world, and measure impact. Each one fuels the next.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read It's the day of the show, y'all
Software–and now AI–touch every part of nonprofit work. Nonprofits need leaders they can trust to help them adapt to this new way of working. We can help.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Good Tech Together
The Good Tech Summit in Washington DC: two days of sessions on nonprofits and AI. Lots of ideas. Lots of pilots. Ted could have lived with a little less speculation. The best advice of the conference came from a climate leader and had nothing to do with technology.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read A few thoughts to close the week
Grab bag. Claude's team plan is cheaper for small nonprofits. Andy Crouch spent two days at Anthropic and wants the next era of tech to show "humility" and "moral seriousness" (a man can dream). A colleague needs fifteen minutes with nonprofit leaders to talk AI. The Good Tech Summit is next week.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Information vs Education
2.3 million books a year. 7.5 million blog posts a day. 500 hours of YouTube every minute. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. LLMs were trained on the whole pile and can answer any question you can imagine. But can AI teach you?
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Claude vs ChatGPT
Claude is having a moment. Ted's hunch is that most nonprofit staff can now be data analysts, so he built a sample dataset (500 people, 75 organizations, 6,000 payments) and handed it to both Claude and ChatGPT. He picked a side.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read What Is a Forest?
Scientists examined ten datasets of the world's forests and agreed on only 26% of them. A forest is lots of trees, but what kind of trees, and how many, and how concentrated? Nonprofits hit the same wall with words like "collaborate," "partner," and "systems change."
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Performance-Enhancing Drugs
The Enhanced Games are happening in a few months, to the sporting world's dismay. Athletes embrace performance-enhancing drugs and shatter world records. For Ted, AI is the ultimate performance-enhancing drug for knowledge work. Did McGwire and Sosa practice less after they started juicing?
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read My subscribers doubled overnight
It was nearly a disaster. Spammers were signing up for Ted's newsletter, and dozens of strangers got an unsolicited email with the subject line: "You just made a new friend."
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Email is King
All great work starts with constraints. Artists need a canvas. Engineers accept the laws of physics. How does a nonprofit get its message to the world? Ted usually says "it depends." Not this time.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read my other audience
For nearly two years Ted has been writing this newsletter about nonprofits, and has never mentioned his own. Eight girls in Ghana. He has known them by name for twelve years. He has eight favorites.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read I require your opinions
A few months into Honeystack, Ted is learning something about v1: no single person knows all the tools their team uses, or speaks for how everyone feels about them. He is rethinking the app, and he wants readers to weigh in before he builds v2.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Developing a product mindset
If consolidation isn't the answer for fragmented nonprofits, what is? A friend in literacy asked Ted the question. The answer runs through Square, Nvidia, and the saint, the legend, the only Dolly Parton.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom
The film You've Got Mail bills itself as a romantic comedy, but everyone knows it's an economic thriller. Kathleen Kelly, the lion of the independent bookstore, visits Starbucks at least twice. Ted built a local history of Wichita coffee shops, and the results have something to say about the too-many-nonprofits debate.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read Going on record as a fragmentationalist
"There are too many nonprofits and they need to consolidate" is one of Ted's least favorite sentiments. Even if a community magically consolidated forty literacy nonprofits down to five, thirty-five new ones would spring up within three years. People brimming with delusion cannot be talked out of starting things.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read Untethered Relatives
"Taxes are too high." "Nonprofits are underfunded." "We should be spending more on public education." All three are moral opinions dressed up as analysis, and they are so common they deserve a name: the untethered relative.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read The conservation olympics
Ted is writing from Abu Dhabi, where he joined the Reverse the Red team at the IUCN World Congress. For conservationists, this is the Olympics. He has learned that there are frog people, and that you can save a rainforest and still lose the lemurs inside it.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Introducing Honeystack
Ted starts every cohort and consulting engagement the same way: by helping nonprofit leaders identify their tech stack. You can't make progress on a challenge you can't see. So he built Honeystack, a free app that visualizes a nonprofit's stack and makes it shareable with the team.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Mise en place
Mise en place is French for "everything in its place." Read the recipe. Collect ingredients. Gather tools. Then begin. Software has lulled nonprofit leaders into a false sense of security: if we just use the tools, we will have a well-run organization. Results vary.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read I got a promotion this summer
This summer Ted was promoted to Super Senior Software Engineer at tedkriwiel.com. In the twelve months before meeting Claude Code, he built zero apps. In the four months since, he has built five. Did you get a promotion this summer too?
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Mcdonald's is a real estate company
Nearly half of nonprofit leaders say software has no impact on their work. It's cold out here for your friendly neighborhood nonprofit technology enthusiast. McDonald's is the fifth largest commercial real estate holder in the world, which matters because sometimes the thing you do is not the thing you do.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Jimmy Kimmel bakes his own pizzas
Jimmy Kimmel bakes pizzas in a custom brick oven at his home in LA. A man viewed by 1.7 million people every night has hobbies. David Epstein calls the obsessive American focus on specialization "the cult of the head start," and nonprofit leaders have quietly been dodging it.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read To bundle or not to bundle
In 2024, Disney, Hulu, and HBO Max bundled their services. Netflix had sold us on cutting the cord from cable a decade earlier. Humans are a silly bunch. The same cycle of fragmentation and consolidation runs through politics, sports, religion, and the software nonprofits use every day.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read One year in
One year ago Ted launched tedkriwiel.com. Since then: 38 blog posts, 2 cohorts, 9 speaking events, 50+ nonprofits coached. In the twelve months before that: zero, zero, zero, zero. He is not measuring himself against the internet. He is measuring himself against the year prior.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Who can we trust?
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) wrote essays defending the existence of fairies, based on a single photograph. A hundred years later, Ted's Ghanaian friend says the elders in his family share AI-generated videos on WhatsApp and cannot tell they are fake.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read A Nonprofit Guide to Software Pricing
Pricing software is a maze of user tiers, transaction fees, volume caps, and mystery bundles. Mailchimp's pricing page is bananas. Hubspot's Create-a-Bundle is a particular form of torture. A few rules of thumb for nonprofits that do not want to get taken.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Nurture Relationships with Intention using a CRM
The final piece in a four-part series on nurturing relationships, and the first one that actually talks about software. A walkthrough of configuring Attio for donors, board members, and volunteers: naming the journey, defining the call to action, setting time in stage, and assigning a lead. A CRM should be a moving sidewalk, not a mausoleum.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read Design a process for nurturing relationships
Want to grab coffee? Would you like to meet my parents? Should we get a dog? Will you marry me? Trust grows as the invitations escalate, and every person in a nonprofit's orbit is somewhere on that ladder: Identified, Engaged, Invited, Active, or Dormant.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read The elements of a relationship
Nonprofits live and breathe relationships, and almost none have an intentional process to steward them. Before designing one, it helps to understand how relationships actually work: context, rituals, discovery, mutuality, call and response, destination. Notice there is no software yet?
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Relationships should be effortful
An old man in Calcutta draws water from a well by hand. A traveler shows him a pulley system that would do the work in seconds. The old man refuses. If the water came up that easily, how could it possibly taste as good?
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Measured Humanity
In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois and a team of students from Atlanta University hand-painted 63 data visualizations for the Paris World Fair. The goal was to challenge Social Darwinism, not with rhetoric, but with evidence. It is art as much as it is science.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Feedback loops
This one comes courtesy of a mistake Ted made last week. A form he built did not send a confirmation email, and six people ended up stuck in limbo. The nearest analog: pushing the up arrow next to an elevator and nothing happens.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Content that scratches an itch
Scrolling LinkedIn usually feels like a colossal waste of time. This week Ted built a long-form flipbook that stopped people in their tracks, including him. He has a backlog of ten videos on processes for nonprofits, from Zapier to shared drives, and he needs a vote on which one goes first.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Three hats
Every good product is built on three disciplines: engineering (how), design (what), and product (why). Nonprofits draw from all three whether they know it or not. The only prerequisite is the same for all three: caring about the people being served.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Pandering isn't a product
GoodMail, the Gmail for nonprofits. Smack, the Slack for nonprofits. Designly, the Canva for nonprofits. These do not exist because email, chat, and graphic design are utilities, not nonprofit specialties. A drill with a cross on it. What are you trying to hide?
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read ¡GOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLL!
"Establish a sense of belonging among refugee families in our community." Beautiful. Also unmeasurable. Weak verbs are the kryptonite of strong goals. Support, empower, foster, and encourage are lovely words, but nobody can count units of empowerment.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Everything in one place
Software companies say they will help you put "everything in one place." Refrigerators for cold things, pantries for food, drawers for socks, sheds for tools. Software is like a dishwasher: it helps us do things faster, but remains remarkably silent about how to use it with others. Marriages have ended at the dishwasher.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Shower thoughts on hubs
A community spends 12 months building a Digital Resource Hub for unhoused people, and nobody uses it. Fragmentation was the community leaders' problem, not the unhoused population's. Also, a free hub for finding shelters already exists, pre-installed on every browser, used by 3.5 billion people a day.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read How charity: water builds trust in 20 seconds
Most humans frown on anyone who talks at them for two minutes straight. Ted has been an entrepreneur for eight years and has never once been asked to give an elevator pitch. The pitch lives on the internet now, though, and charity: water knows exactly how to use its twenty seconds.
Ted Kriwiel · 7 min read What even is a program?
A program is something your organization does for someone. Simple enough, until you realize how many nonprofits are offering microloans to megabanks or free food to billionaires. Mission creep is what happens when the answer to "who do we serve" stops matching the answer to "what do we do."
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Maybe do less?
Underfunded relative to what? Nonprofit causes like eliminating child poverty or preventing climate change are too big for any budget to match, so leaders work 60-hour weeks to close the gap. In art they are known as starving artists. In altruism, we call them martyrs.
Ted Kriwiel · 7 min read Where Art Thou?
Maps are like ogres: they have layers. Countries span continents (Greenland). Territories belong to three countries (Kashmir). Cities cross state lines (Bristol, country music's birthplace). One zip code in Alaska is 13,700 square miles. Land is political, and most nonprofit maps are at the wrong level of detail.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Hard for me to tell you this
Most of us know not to fire someone over Slack. A clear message can still fail to transmit when the medium, audience, context, or timing is wrong. Loom, a short-form screen recording tool, sits between an email and a Zoom call and is quietly one of the best communication tools nonprofits are not using.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read We are what we use
Surfers choose Quiksilver or Billabong. Carpenters choose DeWalt or Milwaukee. Farmers are either green (John Deere) or red (Case IH). When Microsoft nearly hired Sam Altman in 2023, a sticking point was whether OpenAI could keep using Slack or switch to Teams. Billions of dollars on the line, and the tool mattered.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Nonprofits are giving away their power
A 2024 survey named "using volunteers" as nonprofits' most popular tactic for reducing expenses. The idea sounds efficient, even clever. It is actually the moment a nonprofit stops building systems and starts cobbling them.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read Prove it!
Big Brothers Big Sisters tracked mentored kids against a control group for thirty years and showed a 20% lift in college attendance and 15% more in lifetime earnings. Most nonprofits will never have data like that. A few cheap substitutes: zip codes, external benchmarks, and the 342-days-since-last-injury sign.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read The First Step to Becoming a Tech-Savvy Nonprofit
A seven-person nonprofit needs workspace, website, fundraising, events, project management, accounting, payroll, timekeeping, CRM, email marketing, graphic design, and chat software. That's more than you would think. The first step to taming it is not buying anything new. It is making a list of what you already have.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Ready, Set, Go! Give your tech stack a new look in 2025.
"Last year you said next year." A Linear ad that cut close to home. If this is the year to tackle the tech stack, here is a curated list of the frameworks, pitfalls, and resources from 2024 that can help.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Manage Expectations
Companies find shiny new software. People believe this tool will change everything. It doesn't. This is how organizations end up changing tools every twelve months, a software doom spiral that burns out the team and never reaches productivity.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read The perfect scene from a quintessential fall film
No nonprofit software content this week. Just a love letter to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, fall, and whether building a comfortable life domesticates us. Whatever you do this Thanksgiving, do not forget that you are a wild animal.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Release New Software Features on Your Schedule
Windows 95 used to come in a box. Today, software updates itself every month and ships dozens of new features a year. Most of that is noise, but teams love to play with the shiny new thing, and if no one is in charge, the tech stack becomes bloated and hard to use.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Feel Like You’re Drowning in Software? You’re Not Alone
A nonprofit with seven employees and $500,000 in revenue has to juggle accounting, payroll, project management, scheduling, and on and on and on. Everyone wants one software to rule them all. Well, there's not. The alternative is worse: piles of paper, checks, and fax machines.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read The first Nonprofit Tech Cohort is complete
The haters said it wasn't possible. (Ted does not have any haters.) Six nonprofit leaders just finished his first tech cohort, and the biggest surprise was how hungry they were to learn software. They also used crayons.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Read This Before You Roll Out a New Project Management Tool
Remember group projects in school? If you remember them fondly, you are the problem. Before a nonprofit rolls out Asana or Basecamp or ClickUp, there are four things the team has to agree on, or the tool will collect dust in a month. One of them is that tasks called "do budget" are not tasks.
Ted Kriwiel · 5 min read Never Lose Track of Your Team's Progress Again
Project management software streamlines communication by eliminating it. Asana, ClickUp, Monday, and Basecamp cut out the status-update emails, the meetings that could have been an email, and the chat interruptions asking what the status of something is. Lucy and Ethel would have loved a kanban board.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Don't give up on your inbox. (Yet.)
An overflowing inbox is a symptom, not the disease. When someone does not get a reply, they chase it from email to Slack to a text message, and now three notifications exist for the same ask. This is why no one can find anything.
Ted Kriwiel · 6 min read Build a custom CRM in seven minutes
No-code builders like Knack, Airtable, and Retool are Google Forms on steroids. Ted stumbled onto Knack eight years ago looking for a way to track donors for Eight Oaks, built the database in an afternoon, and has barely changed it since. The demo is seven minutes long.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Your questions answered
A Q&A for Ted's first nonprofit tech cohort in Fall 2024. Five-ish spots left. $350 for the whole organization, even though the same process used to cost $5,000 when Ted ran it at Moonbase Labs. Someone asked if it would be fun. Yes.
Ted Kriwiel · 3 min read Software moves fast
Software used to update every two or three years. Now new features ship every month, which makes it tempting to hold onto a tool with white knuckles. Try to hold it loosely. The "So That" framework, learned from Lianna Patch, is a cheap way to figure out what you actually need.
Ted Kriwiel · 4 min read Don't collect data until you know what to do with it
Most organizations try to collect as much data as possible and worry about what to do with it later. Every extra question is a paper cut in someone's day. Nobody woke up this morning hoping to fill out longer forms.
Ted Kriwiel · 2 min read Factory tour for knowledge workers
Ted has been on a lot of factory tours, mostly because he lives in the Air Capital of the world. Hard hats, safety goggles, pristine rooms full of talented people running expensive machinery. If a nonprofit does "knowledge work," what does its factory tour look like?
Ted Kriwiel · 1 min read