NetHope Global Summit 2019
Hundreds of us were incredibly inspired by last week's NetHope Global Summit in Puerto Rico. After all, the intersection of NGO tech exec's (our heroes & sheroes), tech sector leaders (our inspiring peers), philanthropic funders and the consultants gluing us all together is a vibrant and magical place to BE.
Though this piece could dig deeply into the topics shared in the publicly available summit agenda linked below, we'd rather share six top take-aways that we traveled back to Box|Box.org HQ with over the weekend.
1. The NetHope a family is growing, evolving and accelerating its collective impact agenda. The level of trust and partnership for all stakeholder types (NGO, Tech provider, Consultant and Funders) is elevating.
We learned from family:
2. More cloud players / leaders are participating in the international NGO sub-segment that NetHope empowers. It was exciting to see emerging cloud leaders (many of the www.impactcloud.org leaders, for ex.) at the summit. It was also exciting to see more employee and consulting experts in town to serve our NGO heroes/sheroes.
3. More coalition momentum is building as demand for multi-platform (best-of-breed) platform integration escalates. The 20 integration/interoperability discussion hosted in the #ImpactCloud Interoperability lab (launched at NetHope) were especially instructive and exciting.
4. More funders like DFID, USAid and other foundations are joining the digital capacity building discussion at a deeper level. This is just another piece of evidence that funding tech (even infrastructure) and the sustainability models related is finally more mainstream.
It was also great to see NGO leaders like the panel below sharing where their field innovation reports, how they fund it and how they think about risk. The more technology providers and funders can learn about this, the better we can empower NGO tech leaders.
5. Change management, skills development, innovation/design leaders are finally getting a seat at the table. After all, we can dream about the power of technology for social impact all day but if we don't have the skills and change approach to make it successful we'll never realize our goals.
6. Volunteering with friends and colleagues makes it all better. It also reminds us all, even NGO leaders and corporate social impact leaders, why we're in this incredibly difficult work at all.
We can't wait to see the growth of the seeds planted this year in Puerto Rico. We're especially excited to celebrate even more progress next fall in Germany at NetHope Global Summit 2020.