Are you a victim of enshiftification?
By Monica Delles
Website and Communications Coordinator, Center for Practical Bioethics
Join Us in Fighting Tech Platform Stranglehold on Small Nonprofits
The Center for Practical Bioethics makes a large impact in bioethics. However, based on our 10 fulltime, parttime and contract employees, the Center is very small. Finding ethical contractors and vendors to support our work is getting harder. Small businesses and nonprofits must clear a technology threshold to function, and I fear these organizations soon won’t be able to meet the threshold.
What is Enshiftification?
Enshiftification – a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time – is a newer term we understand too well. For example, every organization needs to communicate with its customers and supporters. Hence, you need a marketing email platform to legally send emails to your groups, ensuring you are meeting international standards. Let’s say you pay $500 a month for the basic plan to send 5,000 emails maximum at a time. One feature you like is the welcome email automation that allows you to automatically send a series of emails introducing new supporters to your organization. Great feature! But we no longer have that feature – it went behind a pay wall! When the platform added features, they changed the plan structure. To continue using automated welcome emails, we must pay more. We can’t. They deleted all but the first welcome email we created. Enshiftification.
An illuminating example of this tech business practice is highlighted in the British television series, The Black Mirror, season 7, episode 1, called, “Common People.” Quoting the episode plot summary: “The story centers around a woman who needs a subscription service to survive, the consequences she experiences as the price goes up and the quality declines, as well as the lengths her husband is willing to go to in order to cover the cost of the service.”
Who Owns Your Data?
Last year the Center needed to switch to a better Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. A CRM is a database of all contacts, relevant information, and tracks communications and any activity with that contact. Ours was outdated, expensive, and intended for much bigger organizations. First step was to download our data from the old CRM and import the data into the new CRM. As simple as this sounds this was not possible for us to achieve. We couldn’t download the data in any meaningful way without knowing code. The old company offered to do the export for a few thousand dollars. But it’s our data, not theirs. We refused and paid a developer to do the conversion.
We had this problem with our old website vendor. The time had come for us to edit the website directly. Our website vendor was a local small business, so when our new website vendor needed the data from our old website, you guessed it. It would cost us. We didn’t own our website, they did. We refused to pay the “ exit fee.” After hundreds of staff hours manually building the site on a different platform, we have a website we own.
Power in Numbers
We are a small nonprofit bioethics center. In the past year, I have told tech vendors that we refuse to give 5-star reviews in exchange for better service. We will not pay more for less service and we will not pay an exit fee for taking our data elsewhere. These tech companies know technology is not merely a want anymore; it is critically needed to survive in the world we operate in, Targeting the data and digital records of small businesses and nonprofits by bullying and blackmail is, at best, unethical.
We will find a local nonprofit support group to join. A group that shares their tech vendor experiences and lessons openly to help other nonprofits save money and time. Power in numbers. If I can’t find one, I’ll start one.
Being the little guy is tough. Nonprofits need to work together, not side by side. If you would like to join me on this journey, email me at mdelles@practicalbioethics.org.
