Author: Nick Martin

Nick Martin is an educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with over ten years of international development and peacebuilding experience. He is the founder and CEO of TechChange, a Washington DC-based social enterprise that provides tech training for social change. The TechChange model for technology training has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Economist, Fast Company, PBS NewsHour and more. Nick is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow (2013), an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow (2014), and an International Youth Foundation Global Fellow (2009). He was also the runner-up for the Society for International Development’s prestigious Rice Award which honors an outstanding young innovator in the field international development under the age of 32 (2014). Nick is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and George Washington Universities where he teaches graduate courses on Technology for Social Change, Technology for Crisis Response, and Mobile Phones for International Development. Nick received his BA with honors from Swarthmore College and holds an MA in Peace Education from the United Nations mandated University for Peace (UPEACE).

We are so excited to announce our newest initiative: A Diploma in Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation!

Over the past five years, we’ve been providing skills to over 6,000 alumni in more than 170 countries. During this time, we’ve been asked by both alumni and the organizations we work with: how can they get more? As a response to the crippling costs of graduate school tuition and the desire professionals have to get the hard skills they need to be successful, we’ve created this diploma program.

Whether you’re a working professional or a recent college grad looking for an alternative to graduate school, we have a diploma track suited to you. This 16-week online diploma program in Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation is designed to give you the technical skills and real-world experience you need to succeed in your career and make an impact in the world.

We’re here to help you learn new skills, build your network and grow your career. Ready to get started? Learn more and apply here. Hurry! Applications close September 4.

So long, 2014! Building on our annual posts in 2013 and 2012 (as well as a repeat performance at FailFest 2014!), we wanted to share a few highlights from our year, as well as appreciation for our amazing learning community, partners, and staff.

TechChange continues to flourish as a social enterprise. Our DC-based and recently re-certified B-Corp recently outgrew our old location near Capitol South and moved to U St. We welcomed new team members including Sara Pitcairn, Kendra Keith, Delanie Ricketts, Yohan Perera, Samita Thapa, and Liang Cai. We also launched a fellowship program for college students and recent graduates to apply their programming skills to social change, just like our junior programmers in 2014: Oscar Chen and Sean Bae.

This progress has been thanks to our new partnerships and growing learning community. We’ve partnered to create over 15 self-paced courses on topics such as scaling HIV prevention with A&PI Wellness Center, a free two-hour self-paced course on mobile data solutions with USAID and FHI360, and eight modules on NGO management with Creative Associates International. For our own open enrollment courses, we’ve welcomed 680 students in 13 facilitated four-week sessions, as well as launching two new topics in 3D Printing for Social Good and Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation.

To complement these courses, we’ve created powerful educational content, including 45 total minutes of beautiful animations for projects by Search for Common Ground, Feed the Future, and more. (Watch our new animation reel to get an idea.) We’ve also tried to end boring PDFs and open up reports with our Organizational Guide to ICT4D.

Underpinning all of this has been the extensive improvements developed by our tech team. We launched a new user and course management system that now has 2,461 users and 72 courses. We also provided white-labeled platforms for 8 organizations including USAID, TOL, MAMA, URC, THNK, Ashoka, A&PI, and more. Stay tuned for new offerings in the space of educational technology for development as a service.

TechChange has also invested in public communications, as we’ve grown to 12,500 followers on Twitter, revamped our YouTube channel and launched a weekly educational email series. We’ve also been recognized in publications such as Forbes and the the Guardian, while our staff have received received awards and nominations from 50 on Fire, Arianne de Rothschild, and Society for International Development. We also had opportunities to participate in Tech@State, SwitchPoint, the Action Summit, Swarthmore College, and M&E Tech.

But the most exciting development has been the initiatives undertaken by our alumni, including mHealth Apps for HIV, convening meetups in Zambia, finding jobs for alumni, and health mapping in Uganda. That’s why we’ve been happy to convene gatherings with General Assembly and Udemy, sponsored a team of Kosovo youth social entrepreneurs, and hosted the TechGirls #jobshadowday again!

Earlier this summer, I was selected to participate in the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship program. The fellowship brings together 25 leaders from North America and Europe to Cambridge University for two weeks to learn about social entrepreneurship, cross-cultural dialogue, and the humanities.

Having left graduate school at the University for Peace eight years ago, it has been a great opportunity to go “back to school” without having to take off a substantial amount of time; two weeks is just enough.

Here are some reflections on the experience, one week into the fellowship:

The interdisciplinary nature of the program is truly unique – it combines lectures and interactive sessions from some of the top professors in the business school and humanities department and includes a cross-cultural dialogue component.
The other fellows are truly amazing and inspiring people who come from all kinds of backgrounds. One started a social business that builds empathy through toys, another is working to improve nutrition in nursery schools across Europe. Read about all the fellows here.
As part of business training component of the program, we’ve been assigned mentors from the Cambridge business school who are extremely sharp and work with us individually to grow our enterprises while keeping our social mission central. The lectures focus on topics like Financial Sustainability from Mixed Income Streams, and Impact Investing in Developing Countries
As part of the business program we’ve also taken field trips to three different social enterprises based in the UK. My group went to a place called the Brigade, an old fire station converted into a restaurant and cooking school for unemployed and marginalized persons.
Through the humanities component, we’ve had lectures on topics like “Varying Concepts of the Jihad”, “Israel-Palestine: The Anatomy of Geopolitics”, “Media and Global Imagination”, and more. We’ve also had the opportunity to visit synagogues and mosques in London as well as attend a shabbat dinner. Read the full program agenda.

Finally, the food has also been amazing. The above picture was taken at our dinner at Magdalene College. It felt just like a scene from Harry Potter! After dinner Tristram Hunt, a member of Parliament, shared his thoughts on education and immigration in the UK.

All in all, similar to my PopTech fellowship experience last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some truly brilliant minds who share a passion for creating sustainable businesses with social impact. I’ll be coming home inspired with a number of new ideas to help take TechChange to the next level.

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of talented educators from all corners of the world. Two in particular who have had a tremendous impact on my life and approach to education at TechChange are Daryn Cambridge and Mohit Mukherjee.

Take a few minutes and watch both of their talks below. You’ll be glad you did!

Mohit and I met in the cafeteria line at the University for Peace back in 2005 while I was a student there and he was working for an organization on campus called the Earth Charter. I’ve been proud to call him a colleague and a friend ever since. I’ve taken many of his workshops through his center on topics like nonprofit leadership, social entrepreneurship, and education for the 21st century – they were all extremely useful and had tremendous impact helping to shape our approach at TechChange.

Watch his amazing TEDx talk below on Educating ChangeMakers.

Daryn and I met as he was finishing his Masters at AU and I was running an organization called DCPEACE, prior to TechChange. DCPEACE was a practical and comprehensive peace education program for elementary school students in Washington DC. He ran a series of teacher trainings for the program and worked as a teacher mentor. Over the years he and I have taught courses together, collaborated on various online learning activities, and more. He’s one of the brightest minds working in peace education today. Daryn currently works at the US Institute of Peace. Check out his phenomenal TEDx Talk below on Teaching and Learning Peace Online.

Thanks to Daryn and Mohit for sharing their thoughts on education via TEDx. We’re proud to work with you both!

One of the most difficult things as an entrepreneur is transitioning from a single person with an idea to a team of colleagues with a shared creative vision. Such a transition involves trust, time, and a certain degree of terror. But finding these fellow travelers who bring new skills, perspectives, and outlooks to bear on the original idea is without question the key to everything.

Over the past three years at TechChange, I’ve had the privilege working with hundreds of inspiring individuals: staff, advisory board members, and partners. Given the incessant pace of start-up life, it is sometimes easy to neglect the distance already traveled, the road already taken. Today, I’d like to to reflect on that journey and the contributions of one amazing individual: Chris Neu.

I first met Chris in the spring of 2010 while he was still working at the US Institute of Peace (USIP). I got a call from Dominic, my colleague and co-founder, saying “Chris Neu one of the smartest people I’ve ever met – he’s interested in coming over to work with us.” I remember thinking to myself, “One of the smartest people – huh? We’ll see.”

Three years later, I can confirm that Dominic was right.

Chris Neu is a firestorm of creativity, intelligence, and hard work. He is hardwired for start-up culture and possesses a rare unbridled energy for everything he does. He is the chief operations officer, the chief of staff, the photographer, the bookkeeper, the proposal writer, the facilitator, the blogger, the project manager, and so much more. He wears a TechChange t-shirt to every event and can be found enthusiastically sharing our story and message late into the night. And while he’s a frequent contributor to the many hilarious conversations that emerge in our tiny 3rd floor loft, he’s not afraid to take the hard line or unpopular stance in the interest of keeping the organization on track. He’s also the one hassling to me write more blog posts, so here you go, Chris!

Every leadership team is different but I believe the successful ones have people with complementary skill sets and fundamentally different personalities at the helm. To those sitting on great idea, I can confidently say: find someone who challenges you and disagrees with you, someone who pushes you to work harder and do more. Chris Neu is that person for me.

While in some sense the journey for TechChange is still just beginning, so much of our current success is a direct consequence of Chris’s tireless efforts over the past three years.

So today please join me in saying: Happy Birthday Mr. Neu and thank you for all you do for TechChange!

(Stay tuned as a I profile other staff members in weeks to come. Next up: Will Chester)

Mobile phones are more than just communications devices; they are also powerful tools to improve health care. Since 2012, TechChange and the mHealth Alliance have offered a four-week online certificate course in mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

Our mHealth course has brought together an incredible group of roughly 100 doctors, community health workers, academic researchers, IT administrators, and government officials from over 35 countries to share knowledge. Each time we do the course, we’ve been amazed at how mHealth has advanced global health.

Here are the three key mobile innovations changing the delivery of health care services that we’ll cover in our next course, which starts on November 18th.

1. Text Messages for Pregnant Mothers

Nearly 800 women die of childbirth or pregnancy-related complications every day, and 2.9 million newborn deaths occur every year. At the same time, at least 1 billion women in low- and middle-income countries own mobile phones, providing a promising opportunity to use mobile phones to improve maternal and child health. On Mother’s Day 2011, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), a public-private partnership between USAID, Johnson & Johnson, the mHealth Alliance, the United Nations Foundation, and BabyCenter.

MAMA message templates can be downloaded for free, which means any organization can take advantage of this content to prepare pregnant mothers for childbirth. In our online course, we’ll learn how to customize these messages for different contexts and help participants determine what technical platforms are best for delivering these messages. SMS technical platforms we plan to feature include FrontlineSMS, Telerivit, Voto Mobile, EngageSpark, and Textit.

2. Support for Community Health Workers

A recent report by Dalberg found that Sub-Saharan Africa will need to train more than 1 million additional community health workers to keep up with health care demands. Medic Mobile and Last Mile Health are two organizations working to provide training to community health care workers in countries like Liberia and Malawi. They have teamed up to create a mobile network for a district in Liberia and to design a mobile application that will dramatically improve community health care worker training and management. This mobile app will also improve community health care worker communication with clinicians based in health facilities. The mobile platform will also include automatic data collection and a reporting system that will create stronger, more efficient systems to manage patient records and monitor data quality.

Learn about how these organizations are using mobile technology to provide training for community health care workers and what other technologies and strategies organizations can use to provide similar support to marginalized populations. As part of the mHealth course, we’ll feature workshops with some of the leading software platforms for data collection and patient management, including CommCare and Magpi.

3. Moving Beyond the Pilot Phase

In recent years, a great deal of mHealth projects have entered the pilot phase, but few have gone on to reach scale. Among those that have scaled are Ureport, an SMS-based civic engagement platform based in Kenya, and Project Mwana in Zambia, which works to increase the testing and treatment of infants born with HIV. These projects show that with adequate preparation and when designing with scale in mind, it is possible to move beyond the pilot stage and increase the reach of mHealth programs.

However, sometimes barriers to scale can come from funders’ reluctance to support scaling programs rather than funding new and innovative ones. In our online mHealth course, we will look at strategies to get beyond scale, including human-centered design, working with funders, and learning from past mistakes.

We hope you decide to join us and meet all kinds of professionals from around the world working in the field of mHealth. Don’t miss out on what will be a great course!

Join this global mHealth learning community by signing up for the course today.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to present at PopTech 2013 and participate in the Poptech Social Innovation Fellowship program along with nine other super inspiring social entrepreneurs. What an amazing experience!

I had the great fortune of getting fantastic training/advice/wisdom from the Poptech faculty on the content of my talk as well as other challenges that we’re facing as an organization. Many thanks to Ken Banks, Michael Duarte, Erik Hersman, Cheryl Heller, Peter Durand, Jim Koch, Chloe Holderness, Kevin Starr, Heather Fleming, Grant Tudor, Lisa Witter, Priti Radhakrishnan, Susan Phillips, and the amazing staff at PopTech: Becky, Andrew, Ollie and Leetha. This group was truly an all-star cast of individuals at the forefront of social innovation. Read about them here.

Our Prezi as it appeared for PopTech. Click through and check it out!

After the presentation on Friday, a number of folks asked me about the presentation format. so I decided to share some details about how we made it and the design decisions that went into the process.

1. Unify your presentation with your organizational identity

In telling our story, we didn’t just want to read off bullet-point slides. We wanted to bring the audience into our office and show them what we see. We also wanted to take the most literal skeuomorphic approach to our presentation: a map should be represented by a map, a note by a sticky note, a website by a web page, etc. This was partly on the principle that we had the freedom to create our elements and not use pre-existing photos, but also that it reflects much of the design sense we have used in our online learning products. That unity of experience between our learning design and presentation intent was important to us — what you see is what you get. However, using that framework meant that we had to create depth in two-dimensional infinite canvas while still having believable rectangular frames to zoom into — an effect that we created through a fisheye illustration.

2. Bring your Prezi to Life

Since we had dedicated creative time to this project that is passionate about representing our brand well, we wanted to do a good job, but we didn’t want to overdo it either. We looked around for inspiration and we found a few neat ideas around the internet, which used subtle animated gifs to bring an environment to life. Of course, Prezi required that we used SWF instead of animated gifs, but we could achieve pretty much the same looping effect after we inserted the animations into our Prezi.

3. Get feedback and back up everything

The most valuable part of this project wasn’t just the creative team, but the feedback from other PopTech fellows and faculty about distilling information and pacing it. At the end of the day, Prezi is based on Flash. The same problems that led to us treating it as unreliable three years ago exist today. Naturally, the night before our presentation we were unable to download the presentation. Fortunately, we were able to work offline to rebuild our changes and export them for the presentation. The one saving grace of this experience with Prezi is that their online customer support was right on the ball when their product started having trouble. That’s one thing that we consider vital as we approach 10k followers — not just maintaining a product, but building a community.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to my fellow fellows: Esther, Nicole, Donnel, Emily, Alex, Anushka, Nathaniel, Jessica, and Julia – you all are an inspiration! Grateful for this experience and hope to join for PopTech 2014!

Greetings from Nairobi! I’m currently in Kenya to teach a three-day course on technology and social change as part of the Amani Institute’s course in Certificate in Social Innovation Management.

If you’re unfamiliar with the The Amani Institute, they’re a social-change organization focused on: “Preparing next-generation talent to tackle global challenges by filling the gap between university and the workforce through a new approach to higher education.

A little known fact is that the President of the Amani Institute is none other than my good friend Roshan Paul, who was instrumental in the early stages of TechChange. So I’m excited to join him in Nairobi and support Amani Institute and its inaugural class of changemakers.

“Nick: Don’t call it TechPeace, call it TechChange” – Roshan

I’ll be modeling the lessons after our George Washington University course on Technology for Crisis Response and Good Governance, as well as incorporating a number of new teaching ideas and techniques — many learned after spending a week at THNK school of creative leadership in Amsterdam.

Students will take part in the flagship TechChange zombie apocalypse mobile data collection simulation, a video games for social change unit, Twitter sweepstakes, early tech bingo, as well as a new exercise we’ve built for better understanding the challenges of user acquisition and so much more. Somewhere between and through these fun exercises, this course will also help these young entrepreneurs better understand and use a range of new technology tools for starting an enterprise. Although the Amani Institute isn’t a tech-focused organization, they recognize that the rapid increase of the role of technology in our lives and work mean that social innovators and change agents need to become better at understanding and harnessing technology as a tool for social change. That’s what brought me here!

Thanks again to everyone who turned out for the TechChange & Amani Institute Happy Hour on Wednesday! I’ve posted a few selected pictures below.

Stay tuned for more details (and photos!) from Kenya.

Even team members of an aspiring learning organization like TechChange need to go back to school from time to time. That’s why I’m excited to be in Amsterdam this week to attend THNK.

THNK is a leadership school in Amsterdam that offers part-time Executive Creative Leadership Program that attracts a blend of corporate change leaders, social entrepreneurs, and business entrepreneurs. Kudos to my dear friend and long-time co-conspirator Roshan Paul for nudging me to take this journey after we partnered with the Amani Institute for one of our courses on Intrapreneurship.

So far it has been a truly exceptional experience. My classmates range from creative designers to corporate consultants, to teachers, to health care workers, to NGO leaders, to programmers. The common thread is a desire to improve ourselves as leaders in non traditional (creative) ways.

Some highlights include:

A “mini challenge” where we used a human centered design process to re-conceive how the park next to our campus could be re-imagined with investment and technology.
An “inspiration gallery” where we explored the latest innovations in early learning (ages 0-8) in preparation for our larger challenge on finding ways to use new technology to improve early learning.
Lots of amazing conversations over drinks, on the bus, in the park, with my classmates.
The incredibly healthy and mostly delicious food (although I had to sneak a brownie yesterday)

So far the experience has also raised lots of interesting questions related to our work and educational model at TechChange:

How do we package the energy and social connectivity of a powerful in-person experience like this into an online learning environment?
How do we take a process like prototyping (in our case we used legos) that is very tactile and iterative, and replicate it in one of our TechChange courses?
How do we capture those informal moments (conversations on a bus or over beer) where so much learning takes place online?
And how do we sustain relationships across distances once the in-person classroom moments end in dynamic blended-learning models?

Maybe its not possible to replicate the classroom exactly and in every way but I’m not sure that should be the goal.

I do know that there’s so much more we can be doing to make online learning a more immersive and transformative experience and to find creative ways to complement, deepen and enhance learning with online tools. This has long been our passion at TechChange so I’m excited to develop new ways to enhance our model through my time here and to meet fellow travelers on a similar journey.

Lastly, I attempted to make the TechChange logo out of sand. Time to update our branding?

On second thought, maybe I’ll check in with our creative team first.

Last month, 130 doctors, nurses, development workers, techies, government officials, and academics from 35 countries joined us on an exciting four-week journey through the latest developments in mHealth.

Imagine how difficult (and expensive) it would have been to assemble this group into one classroom in person!

Thanks to the amazing team at the mHealth Alliance and an all star-roster of incredible experts, we managed to build upon the great success of our inaugural effort and deliver a powerful second installment of the online certificate course TC309: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

Three observations/trends emerged during the course:

Mobile data collection most discussed! Mobile data collection, management and analysis gained significant attention in the course forums. We were thrilled to be joined by Yaw Onokwa, one of the founders of Open Data Kit and Jeremy of CommCare who provided students with live demos of their respective software packages and shared a number of insights and best practices for developing surveys, acquiring and managing users, scaling data projects and more. The always-engaging Alain Labrique (Johns Hopkins University) joined us for a fantastic session on the continuum of care that touched on his exciting work in Bangladesh and the importance of investing in the evidence base.
The importance of human centered design (HCD): Human-centered design also featured prominently throughout the four weeks. Isaac Holman (co-founder of Medic Mobile) led participants through an exercise in drawing/mapping a health ecosystem based on HCD principles. Design experts Erica Kochi (UNICEF Innovation) and Robert Fabricant (Frog Design) shared a wealth of insights from their experiences in successfully launching and sustaining mHealth projects in a number of countries. For many of these world-class practitioners, this was the first time they had ever presented in an online course like this.
Fewer pilots + design for scale: After the New York Times featured an article last spring entitled The Benefits of Mobile Health on Hold there was certainly a lot of room for debate and critical discussion about “pilotitis”. Patty Mechael noted that one trend she has observed in last year is fewer organizations are starting pilots more are focused on designing for scale from the onset of a project. And finally, Gustav Praekelt shared the amazing work his foundation has undertaken to team up with leading private sector entities in South Africa to achieve scale (1 million+) in fighting HIV and preparing mothers for childbirth.

Three highlights from the course:

Techies + Healthies: We featured a TEDx Talk by Josh Nesbit titled, “Techies + Healthies”, which prompted an insightful discussion about the need to promote more engagement between practitioners from both fields. We also asked participants to reflect on their own orientation on the healthie – techie spectrum.
Zombies, Zombies, Zombies: What would a TechChange course be without a Zombie Apocalypse. This time, participants had to respond to an impending zombie invasion and practice gathering vital health and preparedness data using tools like Magpi, FrontlineSMS, CommCare formhub, OpenDataKit and more.
What a Map! We asked participants to describe the health systems in their own countries and then crowdsourced an interactive Google Map of everyone’s responses. I personally learned a tremendous amount about the challenges and opportunities that exist in other countries through this visualization and am excited to do more of these kinds of activities in future courses.

While there are always improvements to make and things we’ll work to do differently next time, overall, the course was a huge success. But don’t just take my word for it. Of the 30 participants so far who have completed our post-course survey, all 30 said the course fulfilled or surpassed their expectations and 27 out of the 30 said they are likely or very likely to recommend the course to a friend or colleague.

Here’s a selection of what our participants had to say:

“The blend of high notch experts with various diverse experiences in the mHealth and social spaces, the expert coordination, moderation and tech support by Nick and colleagues, brought practicality and vividness to the course. Are you a healthie or a techie? It does not matter. If you want to do mHealth right, then come to this course.” – Francis, World Vision International
“I felt truly engaged by this course, and was somewhat surprised by that as other online courses I have taken for credit have felt very distanced and flat in terms of educational energy. If you want to know what the leading experts in mhealth are saying about the state of the field, take this course. The best part? Live webinars that felt like inner circle information (how the insiders talk over drinks) coupled with direct access to ask your specific questions through text chat. I can’t wait to take a refresher course next year to see what’s new!” – Kirsten, Rice University
“The TechChange online course platform is amazing! They provide you with online learning that is exciting, user-friendly and highly informative. The speakers in the mHealth course are really great and I have learned a lot from the presentations and exercises. For people who are busy and cannot catch up on-time (like me!), you don’t need to worry because TechChange has provided a platform where you can retrieve videos, materials, audio recordings. So, go with TechChange as your top online course provider!” – Mary Rose, ACCESS Health International

The TechChange online platform also underwent all kinds of upgrades thanks to the tireless efforts of our dev team led by Will Chester. See what some of our participants had so to say:

“Here is a learning platform that is designed completely for the convenience of the individual – you can participate in as many sessions as you can and still have opportunity to catch up on those you’ve missed even 4 months after completing the course. You can even rate your performance by the tech points earned and look at what others have earned – which is a great way to motivate or encourage participation.” – Apera Iorwa, mHealth Alliance
“I thought the platform was great–very dynamic and user-friendly. I’ve taken several other online courses and this was the best platform thus far.” – Kiara Reilly, Booz Allen Hamilton

Stay tuned for details about the fall mHealth course and be sure to check out our lineup of upcoming courses: Social Media for Social Change, Intrapreneurship: Innovating from Within, and Tech for Emergency Management and more.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) to support capacity building and learning for their global community of users and implementers.