Tech for Good Is Now One of Our Three Pillars. Here’s What That Means

Why Invisible Building now lists tech for good alongside web design and e-commerce, and the rules learned from AWARE, Barnardo’s FixIT and Moira Community.

Published on April 17, 2023

We’ve redrawn the services page this month around three things: web design, e-commerce, and tech for good. The first two won’t surprise anyone who has worked with us. The third has been true for years without ever being written down, so this is me writing it down.

Tech for Good at Invisible Building: illustration of the studio in a future city

What tech for good means here

I don’t mean an app with a cause attached. I mean a way of working that we have ended up applying, over and over, to organisations that exist for something other than profit.

It started in 2015, when Invisible Building was in the first cohort of the Building Change Trust’s Techies in Residence programme, embedded for ten weeks with AWARE to take their Mood Matters schools programme onto a phone. It carried on in 2021, when we went back into Techies in Residence (by then run by the Community Foundation with Comic Relief money) with Barnardo’s NI, and built FixIT, a picture-first tool that lets refugee families report a housing repair without needing English. And for the last year it has been closer to home: helping to found Moira Community Association in our own village, and being its treasurer.

Three very different projects. The same handful of rules underneath.

The rules

Build with, not for. Every one of those projects was built alongside the people who would support it and, wherever we could, the people who would use it. The residency model is the best way I have found to do this: months embedded, not a brief over a desk. It is why I keep going back.

Small and specific beats platform. Nobody at Barnardo’s asked for a platform. They asked for the boiler to get fixed without a phone call. The best charity technology solves one problem so well that it disappears.

Boring technology. Web apps, not native. Plain stacks. Hosting that costs pounds a month. Things a volunteer can run in five years’ time without a developer on retainer. FixIT is built that way. So is Moira Community’s website.

Plan for the day after launch. This is the one I got wrong the first time. The AWARE residency ended with a working prototype and no funding to take it further, and I have thought about that ever since. With FixIT we scoped for hosting, languages and handover from the first week, and it is still live.

Plumbing counts. A Facebook group run properly. A bank account with the right signatories. Forms instead of email threads. A constitution that survives its founders. None of it is glamorous, and it is exactly where community groups fall over. Moira has taught me more about tech for good than either app did.

Why make it a pillar

Partly because it is a fair description of the work. Partly because I want to do more of it, and the easiest way to get asked is to say so. And partly because the businesses we build Shopify stores for tend to like it too. It says something about how we work that a portfolio of nice product pages can’t.

So: if you run a charity, a community group or a social enterprise in Northern Ireland and you are weighing up something digital (a tool, a website, a funding application with a technology line in it, or just whether the thing you’re thinking of is a good idea), get in touch. That is now, officially, a third of what we do.