For community organizations

SIL 503, Technology for Social Good, is a course in the MA in Social Impact Leadership at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. It meets Wednesdays, 9:00 to 12:00, from September 9 through December 9, 2026.

The course asks an organization for one hour.

• You give one interview, about an hour, with someone who knows how the work is organized
• You receive the memo the pair writes, if you want it
• You pay nothing, install nothing, and are not obligated to act on anything the memo says
• You retain whatever the pair produces about your organization

Interview

A pair of students interviews one person, once, in the window between late October and early December. It can be conducted by Zoom. They arrive with a written protocol built in class the week before, and their questions cover four areas:

• People. Who handles technology in the organization, and who covers when that person is away
• Data. The systems client and program data are held in, and the work involved in moving them elsewhere
• Security. Which of the CIS Implementation Group 1 safeguards are in place, asked as a checklist rather than as a test
• Cost. What the current tools cost across a year, including the staff time to run them

They are not there to sell anything, and a student who arrives with a solution already chosen has done the assignment wrong.

Readiness self-check

Before or after the interview, you can run the same instrument the students use: our readiness self-check, about ten minutes in a browser. Seventeen questions quoted from three published instruments, ending with which one is worth running in full, with nothing stored or sent anywhere and the result remaining with you.

Memo

The pair writes a four-page consultant memo: a recommendation, what the capacity assessment found, an option set with at least three candidate tools compared, an ethics and data governance section, an accessibility plan, evaluation measures, a three-year cost table that prices staff time and training next to the subscription, and the conditions under which their own recommendation no longer applies.

The cost table prices training and staff time next to the subscription because those are the lines that usually go missing.

The recommendation follows what the interview finds. Some pairs recommend a purchase. Others recommend configuring a system you already pay for, fixing a process before any software is bought, or training staff on something already installed, and a well-argued recommendation against adoption earns full marks in this course.

The memo is graded coursework, not a consulting product, and the course does not require students to send it to you. Most will want to, and that exchange is between you and them.

The full requirements are on the Technology Strategy Pitch page.

Video work

Separately from the memo, a student on one track of the Digital Storytelling Project may ask to make a 3-to-5-minute piece about one of your programs or your mission. That is an additional conversation and an additional agreement, not part of the one-hour interview above, and it includes consent and right-of-reply rules for everyone who appears on camera. You are free to say no to it and still do the interview.

Supervision and data handling

The course instructor supervises every pair and grades all of the work. Your role is to provide context and participate in the interview; you do not assign a grade. Interviews follow a written protocol the class reviews beforehand, notes use roles rather than names, and anyone can decline any question.

FAQ

We barely use technology. Are we too small for this? Small organizations are the better match. The readiness instruments were built for organizations with no IT department, and the most useful memos tend to come from settings where the current system is paper, a shared drive, and one person’s memory.

Do we have to host students on site? No, and the interview can be conducted by Zoom.

An hour seems short. Is that really all? Yes, and it is deliberate. An earlier version of this course asked for several meetings across a semester, and the ask was larger than what most organizations could spare.

Who owns the memo? The students wrote it and you are free to use whatever they share with you, for anything, without credit or restriction.

What if we disagree with the recommendation? Tell them. Disagreement is useful to the students and costs them nothing in their grade.

What if our staff time disappears mid-semester? Email the instructor. Staffing crises and funding scrambles are ordinary, and a fallback case exists so that no student’s grade depends on your inbox.

Contact

If you would like to bring a technology question to a future semester of SIL 503, email Nari Yoo at nariyoo@umich.edu, University of Michigan School of Social Work.