State of Progressive Tech in Australia, 2020
Table of Contents
Who are we?
We are a growing network of progressive member organisations committed to teaming up on tech to win. We want a world where progressive organisations and activists have the best tools possible, and the skills and support to use them.
The Progressive Tech Network is in its founding stages - and so we're focussed on learning about our shared needs, and the key interventions we can make through collaboration. When the network launches in late August, members will have access to a library of shared tools, resources and code; training and mentorship programs; and a networked community who work together on solutions to shared challenges.
Read more about who we are and how you can join here.
Why we did this
It’s hard enough to win progressive change. It’s harder when our tech doesn’t work for us, and when we’re trying to solve our common challenges in isolation.
This survey makes the challenges clear: organisations report that they’re constantly reinventing the wheel, operating in silos, using inadequate tools with insufficient skills, making do with minimal investment, that the tech space is exclusionary, that tech staff are often unsupported, and that we’re not doing the long-term movement-wide thinking on tech that we need.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Networks like the Progressive Coders Network (US), the Movement Cooperative (US) and the OPEN Tech Network (international) show us how much we have to gain from working and learning together on tech here in Australia.
But it will take organisations coming together as a network to build the relationships and trust needed for tech collaboration to take root.
Respondents
This report is based off a comprehensive survey that was completed by more than 50 tech/digital staff from across the progressive sector in Australia.
Organisations who completed the survey focus on:
Organisations who completed the survey have a staff size of:
How many digital staff do organisations have?
(e.g. social media or project manager of digital project)
How many tech staff do organisations have?
(e.g. developer, data scientist)
What are organisations' yearly tech & digital budgets?
Yearly budget for tech & digital, not including staff salaries
Demographics
What is the gender of people who completed the survey?
What is the age of people who completed the survey?
People who completed the survey identified as:
Technology Stack
What database(s) do organisations use?
Other: Union Ware, Member Solutions, Redicase, Looker, Raisers Edge, IMiS, Kudos, Campaign Monitor, Drip, Airtable
What website manager do organisations use?
Other: Membership Solutions, Wix, Forestry CMS, Prismic CMS, Raisely
What do organisations use to send emails?
Other: Membership Solutions, Braze, Mailgun, Active Campaign, CiviMail, Drip, Marketo, Supporterbase, Raisely
What do organisations use to create petitions and/or targeted emails to decision makers?
Other: Survey Monkey, Engaging Networks, Community Run, New/Mode
What do organisations use to send SMS and/or P2P texts?
Other: ThruText, SMS Broadcast, SMS Magic, Plivo, DirectSMS, 5CentSMS, New/Mode, Spoke, Burst SMS, Vidcorp, Strive
What do organisations use to log contact with volunteers/members?
Other: Jira, Excel, RaisersEdge, Union Central, Pipedrive, Airtable
What do organisations use for fundraising?
Other: Salesforce, RaisersEdge
Needs Analysis
We all know anecdotally that the progressive sector’s tech isn’t working as well as we want it to - but what exactly are the problems and how widespread are they?
Organisations reported both a short term and a long term gap. Our tech isn’t working for us, or the communities we work with, on a day-to-day basis. But we’re also not doing the long-term planning and building we need to set our movements up for success in the future.
What are the biggest problems with your tech at the moment?
In short, the progressive sector wants better tech, but a number of factors are getting in the way. Key themes included:
- A lack of budget, capacity and resource prioritisation for tech, which is exacerbated for smaller grassroots organisations by the high costs of many tools and agencies
- The lack of internal tech skills which is further exacerbated by the lack of training opportunities to upskill
- Dissatisfaction with current tech stacks due to limited functionality and flexibility
- The lack of integration between multiple tools and platforms
The smaller the organisation’s budget, the more frequently these problems were mentioned – particularly the lack of resources, capacity and skills to execute a good tech program, as well as dissatisfaction with their current tech stack, particularly their CRMs. This often caused a reliance on agencies that strained limited budgets, and were not suitable for the rapid response nature of advocacy.
Some larger organisations mentioned a lack of data analytics tools, major issues with integrating multiple tools and a theme of resistance to change tech from senior management. Even though their organisations often had sufficient budgets, large NGOs and unions still consistently named the challenge of struggling to hire tech staff and lacking the inhouse tech skills for many projects.
What are your organisation's tech priorities for the next 3 months?
Survey respondents named a huge range of tech priorities over the coming months, but themes included:
- Significantly improving existing tools, particularly websites and CRMs
- Migrating to new tools, particularly new databases
- Further integrating existing tech
- Improving data analytics and reporting
- Fixing bugs, resolving errors and cleaning data
- Growing social media channels
- Training staff and volunteers in tech and digital campaigning
- Responding to COVID-19 including setting up virtual events and better internal communications systems for remote working
The majority of short-term priorities focussed on improving existing tools. For most organisations, this meant changing from one off-the-shelf database to another, rather than building new custom tools in-house - likely because of the lack of in-house dev capacity across the sector.
What do you wish your organisation could do with technology that you can't right now?
The most frequent tech desire across the sector is building custom tech. Both large and small organisations mentioned this as an ambition, particularly for building a new custom CRM to suit their campaigning and organising needs. Other tools mentioned included chatbots, peer-to-peer SMS, realtime monitoring and analytics dashboards, as well as automation and AI. Unions in particular frequently mentioned custom tech to support members.
The second most common response to this question, particularly frequent with large organisations, was better integrating tech tools.
Other ‘wishes’ included:
- Large data analysis projects
- Building more in-house tech capacity
- ‘Doing tech quicker’ to be more responsive, including reducing time it takes to launch actions, respond to external events, identify online leaders and diagnose issues.
- Creating an encrypted CRM to improve data security
- Improving organising tech, including distributed local group infrastructure and tools for taking ‘deep care’ of volunteer leaders
Do you face any of the following internal roadblocks?
Smaller organisations mentioned the lack of capacity and budget as the number one roadblock. Whereas while budget constraints were still mentioned by some big organisations, the number one roadblock was the lack of internal tech expertise.
Other roadblocks mentioned included:
- No long term planning
- Senior management being resistant to change and new tools
- Poor data quality
- Siloing of team, including a disconnect between campaigners and tech team
Solutions
Collectively, we have the tools and capacity to solve the problems that we face - and progressive organisations are ready to collaborate to make this happen.
Survey participants said they would consider sharing their current technology, and contributing to developing new open tools for like-minded organisations. People named a wide variety of tech and digital skills they wanted to learn - most of which were skills that other participants said they were able to share. The majority of organisations want to collaborate but just haven’t had the relationships or a space to do so.
Would you consider helping contribute to developing new open tools for the progressive sector?
Would you or any other staff want to learn specific tech/digital skills through a workshop or mentoring program?
Would you or any other staff be able to share your tech/digital skills through either a workshop or mentoring program?
What infrastructure do you think we as a movement need to start building to be ready for changes coming in the next 3-5 years?
It is interesting to compare people’s long-term and movement-wide infrastructure priorities, with their own organisation’s short-term priorities (Q2) and internal ‘wishes’ (Q3).
Long-term priorities that were also mentioned as short-term priorities and internal focusses included:
- Improving systems integration
- Building automation and machine learning
- Further investment in tech capacity and upskilling staff
- Improving CRMs, including making them fit for purpose for Australian organisations (rather than American), for grassroots organising contexts, and for First Nations and POC organisations
Long-term movement-wide priorities that were barely mentioned in earlier organisational priorities include:
- Improving accessibility of progressive tech
- Collaborating on building better movement-wide shared tools
These two long-term priorities – of accessibility and collaboration – are particularly important to highlight given there is a shared analysis of the need, but very few organisations currently have the capacity to prioritise them in their short-term plans.
What do you think your organisation can contribute to the network?
The below responses to this question have been grouped and listed in order of frequency they were mentioned:
- Advice and knowledge**
- Technical skills**
- Capacity to test new things
- Direct mentoring of smaller organisations
- Openness to collaboration
- Sharing tools and content
**A broad range of experience, knowledge and skills areas were mentioned including: coding, social media, organising tech and design.
Which skills are you able to share?
Which skills are you interested in learning?
What do you think your organisation would like to get out of the network?
The below responses to this question have been grouped and listed in order of frequency they were mentioned:
- Support and best practice advice on coding and tech from a diverse brains trust
- Sharing actual tools and code
- Feeling like I am a part of a progressive tech community
- Learning new tech skills
- Direct support and capacity injections during rapid response moments
- Testing new tools and solutions collaboratively
This is where the Progressive Tech Network comes in
We are a growing network of progressive member organisations committed to teaming up on tech to win. We want a world where progressive organisations and activists have the best tools possible, and the skills and support to use them.
Our network of progressive campaigning organisations and the tech vendors & agencies who support us widens access to existing tech tools and skills, and drives longer term, movement-scale planning around the tech we need to fight for and win progressive change.
If your organisation hasn’t yet started a conversation about joining the network and you’d like to hear more, fill out this form to share what you’re keen to get out of it and what your organisation could offer. If you have any questions, please get in touch at hello@progtech.net.au