Most companies treat social impact the way they treat office plants. Someone remembers to water them occasionally, they look nice in photos, and nobody measures whether they’re actually doing anything.

nasscom’s TechForGood initiative makes a different argument. Technology for social good isn’t a line item in your CSR budget. It’s a strategic lever that compounds over time.

I find this framing compelling because I’ve seen it work firsthand. Before moving to the Bay Area, I co-founded Doare.org in Brazil — a donation platform for non-profits that became the largest of its kind in Latin America. We built it because the problem was real and the technology to solve it was accessible. But what surprised me was how the mission attracted talent. Engineers who could have taken higher-paying jobs elsewhere chose to work on something that mattered to them. That retention advantage was worth more than any signing bonus.

The strategic case #

nasscom’s data is striking. Over 90% of established companies surveyed consider tech-for-good initiatives strategically important — not just nice-to-have. That number is higher than I expected, and it raises an obvious question: if almost everyone agrees this is important, why do most companies still treat it as an afterthought?

I think the answer is measurement. Traditional business metrics don’t capture the second-order effects of social impact well. You can measure donations and volunteer hours. You can’t easily measure the engineer who stayed an extra two years because they felt their work had purpose, or the candidate who chose your company over a competitor because of a project they read about on your engineering blog.

Those effects are real. They’re just slow. They compound quarterly, not daily, which makes them invisible in sprint retros and OKR reviews.

Talent as the primary lever #

The talent pipeline argument is the one that resonates most with me as an engineering manager. Hiring is hard. Retention is harder. And the engineers I’ve worked with who care about mission alignment (which skews younger but isn’t exclusive to any generation) will accept trade-offs on compensation and title if the work feels meaningful.

This isn’t altruism; it’s rational behavior. Engineers have options. When multiple offers look similar on paper, the differentiator is often “what does this company actually do?” A clear social impact story — not a marketing page, but visible, ongoing work — shifts that calculus.

nasscom’s framework connects this to ecosystem building. When companies invest in tech-for-good, they create communities. Developers build on shared platforms. Non-profits gain access to enterprise-grade tools. The investing company gets brand credibility, hiring advantages, and a network of organizations that view them as a partner rather than a vendor. It’s a different relationship than a sales pipeline produces.

COVID accelerated the timeline #

The pandemic made this harder to ignore. When hospitals needed contact tracing apps, when schools needed remote learning platforms, when food banks needed logistics software — the companies that could spin up pro bono engineering teams did so. And the ones that had already invested in social impact infrastructure responded faster because the muscles were already built.

I watched this play out across the Bay Area tech community in 2020. Companies with existing non-profit partnerships shipped solutions in weeks. Companies starting from scratch took months, if they shipped at all.

That response speed gap is the strategic argument in miniature. Social good investment creates organizational capabilities (rapid deployment, cross-sector partnerships, mission clarity) that pay off in ways unrelated to the original initiative. You build a donation platform and end up with engineers who are unusually good at working under constraints with ambiguous requirements. That skill transfers.

Beyond PR #

The risk with framing social good as strategic is that it becomes performative. Companies optimize for the appearance of impact rather than the substance. nasscom seems aware of this — their framework emphasizes measurement and accountability, not just participation.

My own bias: I think the companies that do this well are the ones where leadership genuinely cares. You can’t fake mission alignment. Engineers, especially senior ones, can smell performative social good from across the office. If your TechForGood initiative lives in a marketing deck and nowhere else, it’ll backfire.

But when it’s real — when engineers see their work making a tangible difference to real people — the strategic benefits follow naturally. You don’t have to manufacture them.

Start with a problem your team cares about. Ship something small. Measure what happens to engagement and retention six months later. The numbers tend to speak for themselves.