Innovation in the Social Sector: The Impetus for Using Technology to Enhance Equity & Center Human Connection

We are one year from the first reported case of COVID in Canada, the phrase “building back better” — bridging the social, structural and economic fault lines of the past — is widely used across sectors. From President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign to the Government of Canada’s Building Back Better: A Plan to Fight the COVID-19 Recession, to United Way Fundraising Campaigns, “building back better “ holds a promise of better. But for whom are we building back better? And how?

COVID-19 has brought rising housing insecurity, homelessness, food insecurity, incidences of domestic violence, poverty, and more. It has exposed, and entrenched, racial disparities across health and wellbeing, and some instances stoked discrimination and xenophobia. At the same time, the pandemic has forced a rapid digital adoption across all sectors. Our dependence on technology has exponentially increased, but at a far greater pace than digital access, literacy or equity. While technology is an important tool in our collective build towards “better,” how we use it will determine whether we move forward from, or replicate, the social and economic inequities that are before us today.

Digitization is inevitable, and in many ways desirable. COVID-19 has accelerated us towards a high-tech, low-touch economy —  Zoom meetings, contactless delivery and pickup, tap-only purchasing, and self-serve customer service portals —  more quickly than many of us were prepared for. A high-tech, low-touch economy drives consistency, efficiency and scale — worthy endeavours in a period of recovery. In many ways, our technological adaptations feel like adequate, or even preferred, substitutions for our previous reliance on face-to-face interaction. Given the state of the digital divide however, it is possible that our growing penchant for high-tech, low-touch solutions is at odds with our shared intention to build back a better, more equitable society.

But it doesn’t need to be.

While sectors such as health, finance and business are ahead in digital adoption, the Canadian social sector — made up largely by charities, nonprofits, and government agencies — is on the precipice of digitization, with momentum behind and uncertainty ahead. The current high-tech, low-touch economy cannot be simply blanketed by the social sector: by nature, many beneficiaries of the social sector prefer, and even need, a high-touch approach. Now is the opportunity to resist in the social sector and instead build a path towards digitization, post-COVID, that puts people and wellbeing at the center of not only technology design, but also service design and business models.

Fortunately, it’s possible. High-tech,  high-touch models — once thought opposed — bring promise of the best of both worlds: efficiency, scale, and humanity. There are numerous examples across health, hospitality, and customer success that indicate technology can be used not to replace human interaction, but to improve it (e.g. better matching of services to needs, online consultations and treatment, collecting more useful data, creating customer choice and autonomy, and establishing loyalty).

As the social sector looks to technology to create better client outcomes, save costs, and respond to new realities of COVID, and changing social pressures to come, we offer a set of guidelines:

• Customer success is as pertinent to the social service sector as it is to private enterprise, and should be treated as such.
• Success of technology implementation should be defined as much by customer experience and satisfaction, as it is customer outcomes.
• High-tech, high-touch approaches to value creation in the social sector should enhance efficiency, but not at the expense of customer satisfaction and experiences.

Simply put, we should spend the same amount of energy innovating our high-touch customer service principles as we do in innovating the technologies themselves, especially given the current inequities caused by access, literacy, language, and geography. As the social sector moves towards digital service delivery, workers in the social sector need to be equipped to navigate customer relationships and service delivery in a digital/blended context. Further, people who are already marginalized by the digital divide and other intersecting factors  should not have to compromise human connection and support at the expense of clumsy digital adoption.

Therefore, as arbitrators of funding, innovation, and outcomes, government funders of the social sector need to consider how their investments of choice support customer satisfaction and experience, by setting a framework for ensuring technology supports efficiency, scale, and humanity throughout the entire design, assessment, and implementation process. This includes involving people with lived experience, and embracing ethical, human-centered approaches to scaling technology innovation.

The risk of overlooking the human need for connection as we move towards digitization is simply too great to ignore in this period of transformation. As the ethics around technology and service delivery change rapidly, we need not lose sight of the value of human connection from a customer perspective. If done thoughtfully, we are more than capable of reducing social and economic inequities. If done recklessly, the social sector will feel the impacts of the digital divide for decades to come.