I co-founded Doare.org in 2011. It became Brazil’s largest donation platform for nonprofits — over 4,500 organizations registered, payment infrastructure built from scratch, angel funding, the whole startup lifecycle. I left in 2014, but I still think about the problems we were trying to solve.

Watching what’s happening now has brought all of that back, in a way I didn’t expect.

The Nonprofit Digital Gap #

COVID-19 didn’t create the digital gap in the nonprofit sector. It exposed it. Most nonprofits I worked with in Brazil operated on spreadsheets and personal relationships. Donor communication happened through email blasts (if you were lucky) or phone calls. Volunteer coordination meant someone with a clipboard and a lot of patience.

That was 2011. In 2020, a lot of organizations are still operating the same way. The pandemic forced an overnight shift to digital that many weren’t ready for. Virtual fundraising, remote volunteer coordination, online donor management — these aren’t optional anymore. They’re survival.

There was a Forbes piece last month framing it as: “How COVID-19 Is Changing the Technology Needs of Nonprofits.” The framing is a bit off, honestly. COVID isn’t changing the needs; it’s making the existing needs impossible to ignore any longer. That’s a different thing.

What’s Actually Happening on the Ground #

The response from the tech community has been real. U.S. Digital Response mobilized over 4,000 tech volunteers within a month to help state and local governments expand their digital services. Code for America’s brigade network saw a surge in participation. Helpful Engineering — an open-source community that spun up specifically for pandemic response — coordinated engineers across time zones on ventilator designs and PPE supply chain tools.

These aren’t press releases. People are actually building things. And what I find interesting is the speed. Open-source communities and volunteer networks are moving faster than institutional pipelines. A government agency might take six months to procure a vendor for a digital intake form; a volunteer brigade builds one in a weekend.

That tracks with my experience at Doare.org. We built the initial donation platform in about three months with a team of five. Not because we were geniuses — we weren’t — but because we didn’t have procurement processes slowing us down. No committees. No RFPs.

The Sustainability Problem #

Here’s where I get cautious. I’ve seen this cycle before.

Crisis creates urgency. Urgency attracts volunteers. Volunteers build things fast. The crisis evolves. Volunteers move on. And suddenly the thing they built needs maintenance, and nobody’s around to maintain it.

At Doare.org, we spent three years building the platform and building the organization around it. The technology was maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% was partnerships with nonprofits, payment processor integrations (navigating Brazil’s banking system for small transactions was its own adventure), user support, and convincing organizations to trust an online platform with their donors’ money.

The volunteer surge we’re seeing right now is incredible. But I keep thinking about what happens in six months when the immediate crisis recedes. Who maintains the tools? Who handles the support tickets from the nonprofit that adopted something built by volunteers who’ve gone back to their day jobs? That’s not a rhetorical question — I genuinely don’t know, and I think about it more than is probably useful.

What Doare Taught Me #

Building tech for good isn’t harder than building tech for profit. It’s just different. The constraints aren’t usually technical; they’re trust, access and sustainability.

When we designed Doare’s payment architecture, we had to solve for organizations that had never processed an online payment. Some didn’t have bank accounts that supported electronic transfers. Others didn’t trust that the money would actually reach them. Those aren’t engineering problems. They’re relationship problems that happen to need engineering solutions — which is a category of problem that engineers often underestimate.

The current wave of tech-for-good work is inspiring. I just hope the people building these tools are thinking past the immediate crisis. A donation platform that works for three months and then breaks isn’t better than a spreadsheet — it’s worse, because now an organization has migrated its data to something that nobody maintains. I’ve seen that happen. It’s demoralizing for everyone involved.

What I’d Tell Builders Right Now #

Build with handoff in mind. Document everything. Use boring technology that the eventual maintainers will understand. Make the deployment simple enough that someone who isn’t a DevOps engineer can keep it running.

And talk to the organizations you’re building for. Not about technology. About what they actually need — which is usually simpler than what you want to build, and different in ways that will surprise you.

That’s what Doare taught me. The best tech-for-good work isn’t technically impressive. It’s reliable, understandable and still running five years later.