Non-profits and B Corps face a technology challenge with a specific cost: every dollar spent poorly is a dollar that does not reach the people your organization exists to serve. Vendors quote your budget, not your mission. Platform decisions get made under your stretched ED or a single technical contractor without senior review. And the full-time CTO who could change all of that is rarely in the cards.
Roughly half of Develomentor’s clients over the years are mission-driven — from non-profits like Charity Navigator and Iron Matt to fintech B Corps like Next Street and BlueMark. Most are non-technical Executive Directors or founders managing a small, stretched team, or navigating a CTO departure with no one to hold the technical thread. The work below is what we are typically asked to do.
How the work shows up
- Platform and vendor decisions, reviewed before you sign. RFP review, build-vs-buy calls, CRM or data-platform consolidation, AI tool selection — with a senior practitioner accountable to your board, not the vendor’s quarter.
- Standing in for the CTO during a transition. When a technical leader departs or a board member’s term ends, Grant and the Develomentor team hold the engineering thread — running the team, owning the roadmap, and helping you hire the right permanent leader on the right timeline.
- Team and architecture assessments. A written deliverable with a readout you can take straight to your board, identifying what is working, what is at risk, and where the next dollar belongs.
- Search, data, and AI strategy. From donor and beneficiary data integrity to using AI responsibly inside the organization — drawn from Grant’s work as CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, co-founder of Lucidworks and committer on Apache Lucene and Solr.
Who this is for
- Non-profits with annual technology spend that has outgrown ad-hoc oversight
- B Corps and mission-aligned for-profits where values shape platform decisions
- Foundation-funded initiatives that need credible technical leadership for grants, audits, and board reporting
- Organizations between CTOs, or whose technical contractor has outgrown the role
We offer discounted rates for mission-driven organizations and, for the right cause, will work pro bono. Tell us what you are trying to move forward and we will come back with a proposed shape and timeline.
