Recently, the team at Open Impact published a timely report, “The New Normal: Capacity Building During a Time of Disruption,” with funding from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. It examines how we are responding to the forces buffeting the nonprofit sector and the need for new mindsets and behaviors, in both funders and grantees, to move social change “never backward, always forward.”

The “new normal” requires a shift from a “we can’t” or “our funders won’t” mindset to a more design-thinking inspired “What if we could” mentality. The report’s focus on adaptive leadership and emerging leaders is an important contribution to the capacity building field. That said, when fighting for social change, you never want to confuse a clear vision with a short distance.

One the major challenges and opportunities for impact at scale facing many nonprofit organizations is the proliferation of data and the power of digital technology. How do we mitigate the risks and harness these forces of change to drive improvement and impact? While thought-leaders like Lucy Bernholz, the Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford, are defining and defending our new digital civil society, few are looking at the capabilities gap arising in the nonprofit sector.

In my last blog post, “Why Data is Killing Your Favorite Nonprofit,” I talked about the exponential growth of data that is processed, communicated, and stored in our daily life and the implications for the nonprofit sector. For example, in 2009, hospitals received nearly $20 billion to adopt electronic health record (EHR) platforms. Unfortunately, there was no concomitant effort to upgrade the digital infrastructure of the nonprofit organizations that support many vulnerable patients and families in their homes and communities. The digital transformation of healthcare providers and personalized health services is placing some of our most vulnerable neighbors, and the community-based organizations they rely upon, on the wrong side of a NEW digital divide.