Why Culture Eats Tools for Breakfast

And What That Means for Building Tech That Actually Works in Nonprofits

You’ve been there. A shiny new product is introduced and you need to sit through the demo call or training. It promises to streamline your work, drive collaboration, and unlock new insights. But a few weeks in, the team is still relying on spreadsheets, emails, and side conversations.

The platform gathers dust, and the promise fades.

It’s not that the tool was bad. It’s that the culture wasn’t considered. Or worse, the tool was never built to reflect it in the first place.

My Story: From Wall Street to the Nonprofit World

My first entry into the nonprofit world was at Asia Society, straight out of Merrill Lynch. I came in as a financial analyst. I lived and breathed data, systems, and efficiency.

Then, I shifted into nonprofit operations and later worked with organizations like City Harvest, I started seeing a pattern – The cultural mismatch between many tech tools and the realities of nonprofit work. We paid for tools that were technically impressive but practically unworkable. They weren’t designed for how nonprofits actually function. They created more workflows, not less.

Does this sound familiar? Sitting through long software demos, navigating complex onboarding processes, and being told to adjust your work around tools that were clearly designed for high-level sales pitches rather than daily nonprofit operations, learning products that add steps rather than reducing them, and require hours of training instead of integrating easily into existing team habits.

Yes - we’ve been there too. Javier—my Impactable co-founder—and I have sat through countless demos and training sessions over the years. We’ve been the nonprofit “user tests” for software that was clearly built to impress C-suites, not to support the program managers, analysts, and fundraisers doing the daily work. These tools were sold with flashy decks but left us with more tabs, more manual entry, and less time to actually serve communities.

That experience stayed with us. It’s why we started Impactable.

What Are the Lessons for Tech Here?

Here’s what I’ve learned. In nonprofits and mission-driven work, culture drives everything.

• People don’t use tools they don’t trust or see themselves in.
• Teams reject platforms that reinforce silos or feel extractive.
• And no amount of AI or automation can replace systems that were never human-centered to begin with.

Nonprofit culture is relational. It’s resourceful. It’s collaborative. And any tool that ignores that reality can only so far, no matter how smart the features are.

What We’re Doing Differently

With Impactable, we’re building tech that’s born from nonprofit experience—not just built for it. We’ve taken an intentional, human-centered approach:

• We designed the platform to alleviate workflows, not add to them.
• We focused on making it intuitive, so teams can onboard quickly and confidently.
• We built AI to accelerate what matters—drafting donor updates, analyzing program data, surfacing insights—not just generating noise.

We want program teams to spend more time talking to people, not toggling between systems. We want finance and fundraising to collaborate without duplicating efforts. And we want nonprofits to be tech-savvy in ways that actually support their values and ways of working.

We know we can’t change culture with a login screen. But we can build tools that respect it.

Impactable is more than a product—it’s a reflection of what we’ve long needed in this sector: technology that understands the work, honors the people doing it, and makes the whole system smarter, faster, and more human.