A technologist should absolutely try to change the world for the better, just like anyone else in other professions. As responsible humans, I feel that we have

A technologist should absolutely try to change the world for the better, just like anyone else in other professions. As responsible humans, I feel that we have an obligation to help others, especially those in need. I believe that us techies have this powerful skill to leverage technology to make change at greater scale and more cost effectively than possible ever before. But, we need to careful in wielding this powerful skill and make sure that we're having lasting positive changes; RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) are a great way of measuring and verifying the impact of our work. We're a team of techies who believe that we can change the world. We've built engageSPARK.com (a not-for-profit social business) to help organizations on the ground amplify their work through the use of Voice IVR, SMS Text, and Missed Call campaigns by making it super easy for non-techies to build interactive campaigns in just minutes in any country; think of us as "Twilio for non-techies". We spent a lot of time on our UX making it simple. As an example of our work, we did a large program with Mercy Corps to help 20,000 survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines learn how to budget and save money through interactive soap operas with quizzes (to measure comprehension at the end of each episode) delivered via Voice Calls and via SMS. They did an RCT and found amazing results for the people who received the campaigns via Voice Calls: 106% increase in use of savings products. The response rates for quizzes were 4.5% for SMS vs. 48% for Voice Calls. There have now been a few RCTs that show that Voice is a powerful medium in developing countries for behavior change (unlike in the west, people in most developing countries are not robocalled regularly and actually pick up most phone calls!). If you're a technologist and want to use your powerful skills to help alleviate poverty, come join our team! Our stack is JS, Python/Django, Java, and we're converting the back end from Java to Go microservices. And I strongly recommend reading Kentaro's book (from the nytimes article) as a necessary introduction when thinking about bringing technology to people in need. The world is littered with failed tech projects that were meant to alleviate poverty; let's make sure that we're not adding to the pile.