In 2025, two nonprofits asked their funders for a technology grant. One was told no. The other was told yes, and it spent more than a year building a tool that the team did not adopt because the programme had ended by the time it was launched. Both nonprofits are now back to maintaining paper registers and copying data into Excel. The problem here does not rest solely with the funder or the nonprofits. It is that both treat software as something you buy rather than something you run.
