Building a civic infrastructure from the ground up: Capacity for NGOs

John is 20 and works as a concierge at a gym club in Bucharest. He just left the child protection system and is now looking for a home, assisted by Ajungem Mari, a nonprofit that has stood by him every step of the way for the past seven years, providing 1:1 mentoring and help with his education. He is one of the 2,500 children and teens living in foster care, aged 7 to 20, whom thoroughly selected Ajungem Mari volunteers meet every week for at least eight months.

The organization has grown rapidly since inception in 2014, and is now active in Bucharest and more than half the country. A team of 1,400 volunteers needs to be trained and guided constantly, and substantial resources need to be allocated permanently.

Document-collection digital tool

As for most civil society organizations, Ajungem Mari’s income is a mix of grants, sponsorship and donations. Probably the most commonly used donation tool in Romania is a tax form that allows you to donate 3,5% of your annual income tax to a civil society organization, but the process has not been easy.   

Once you filled in your form, you had to sign it by hand and send it by mail to your local tax office or to the organization you were willing to support, but that took an extra step that not all people were willing or able to do. The organization, on the other hand, needed to handle all forms, or to find other ways to meet people where they were. That meant staff trying to convince people one by one in shopping malls or even out in the street. All in all, an incredible waste of time and resources.

In 2018, Commit Global has created Act for Good (deployed locally in Romania under the name Redirectioneaza), a digital tool that saves those valuable resources. People can digitally fill in and send their forms directly to their chosen organization, all within minutes and in a safe way, with no hassle for the NGO and 100% peace of mind for donors, who don’t have to worry about their commitments getting lost in the process.

Everyone can use it; maintenance and security issues are up to date and provided by Commit Global, all for free.

At the moment, more than 4,000  NGOs in Romania are enrolled on the platform, and over 50,000 people have used it in 2023. Ajungem Mari, the organization supporting John, is one of them. In 2022, 90% of their forms were collected on the platform. “Had it not been for this tool, we would have had to create it ourselves, with big efforts,” said Vivianda Nicolae, Ajungem Mari vice-president. “We had actually started discussing it with an IT team.”

Of course, not all countries have the 3,5% donation mechanism, but all NGOs, anywhere in the world, need to safely collect data or donations. Because we have done the research and thoroughly tested the user experience, we are confident all our digital solutions can easily be customized to fit your organization’s operational needs, no matter the size and scope, and your country’s digital safety procedures. Understanding how civil society organizations work and being able to respond 1:1 to the problem is what differentiates us from other open-source digital solutions that mainly focus on the technical aspect and/or are designed for business purposes. 

We not only wish to respond to a problem, we want to respond to a problem that many organizations throughout the world have.

Website-building tool

The work done at such a large scale and with an unprecedented success rate for Act for Good proved what a great need for digital tools tailored to the needs of NGOs there is. Creating an entire ecosystem for their benefit was the logical next step. A largely used digital solution is Website Factory, a platform that allows them to build their website in about a week, without prior knowledge of coding or web design. The need is definitely there – we estimate that about 70% of Romanian NGOs don’t have a website at all or their website is poorly designed and a security hazard.

After a year’s research, Website Factory was designed to fit the specific needs of NGOs, such as collecting donations or putting out annual reports. As with Act for Good, all security settings, updates, responsiveness and usability issues are in our hands, even after the website itself has been built.

“You can count they are always there”, Doru Toma, the Leaders for Justice (LfJ) coordinator, a 250-people community, said. As with many NGOs, LfJ did have a basic website, that had been made pro bono by an IT friend who was no longer available. “Our hands were tied,” Doru said.

He had built websites in WordPress before, so he could tell the difference with Website Factory. No need to install templates and plugins, clean and easy to use in the backend. All in all, it took three weeks until their new website was ready, and that included quite a long time spent by LfJ on getting free hosting, finding old passwords and exporting the old site’s content so that it could be uploaded on the new one. The CommitGlobal team was very patient and helped along the way, Doru said.

“The website will help us a lot. It’s not just a versatile business card, it also helps us to become more visible and gain more credibility in front of our stakeholders.”

Tools for better democracy

Even if NGOs had the funding to hire a development team for digital transformation, that would not be enough, because it’s not just a tech job. Moreover, staff would only get an extra task to create a digital presence, and would need to learn new skills in a short time.

And that is where the whole digital solutions-ecosystem designed by CommitGlobal comes in: from website building to volunteers’ and financial management tools, to a platform connecting academia and NGOS, to a centralized database of social sector-NGOs (both in progress at the moment). And all come with a 24h maintenance team.

Last but not least, the pool of digital tools not only helps with day to day operations, but plays a role in the health of a democratic society: better visibility, more credibility, more interconnectedness, and more transparency and accountability from state authorities – as is the case with Agora (locally named VotONG), a platform that allows NGOs to elect their representatives in crucial public institutions that ask for a civil society mandate, such as the Anti-discrimination National Council or the Council for Social Dialogue (that assesses every Government or Parliament proposal before it goes to vote, together with unions’ and employers’ representatives).

In Romania, 2020 was the first time Romanian civil society could elect its representatives in a transparent and scrupulous way, unanimously recognized by both the Government and the NGOs. Agora is a free digital solution that democratizes any NGO’s access to the decision-making process, and can easily be implemented anywhere such a need exists.  

Beyond individual tools: the need for an ecosystem

The success achieved by Commit Global with these digital tools was impressive but they quickly had to move beyond that if they wanted to go beyond a splash, into a sweeping significant change. “Once we proved not just the need, but the efficacy of our digital interventions, we realized we were now at a point where we had no choice but to build a solid, consistent ecosystem of solutions that work together fulfilling all the needs in the life of an NGO”, says Olivia Vereha, Director of Product for Commit Global. Commit Global now has almost 20 digital solutions ready to be deployed anywhere in the world, ranging from digital assistants that help manage stock, budgets, databases or volunteers, to fundraising, cooperation and advocacy tools and data-centric solutions that stand to benefit the entire sector.”

“Using our prior experience, we had the opportunity to design these tools from scratch in such a way that they can be immediately used by almost any organization in the world. This is the beauty of scalable technology. We profit from one experience and we share the wealth of that knowledge with millions more.”, continues Vereha. “This technology is unprecedented. It will change the world”.