Do You Believe in Magic?
Every so often, you come across a company where all the pieces line up.
I’ve been around tech long enough to be a little skeptical. Most companies have one or two of the things that matter. A good idea with nobody behind it who’s done it before. Experienced people chasing a problem nobody really has. Great technology looking for a reason to exist.
It’s rare to find all of it in one place. When you do, you notice.
Here’s what I look for:
• The right technology, at the right time.
• Previous experience. People who have built this kind of thing before.
• Lessons learned. The kind you only get by doing it, getting some of it wrong, and paying attention.
• Passion. The kind that brings people back to a problem after they’ve already won.
• A problem that matters. Big enough to be worth all of the above.
Any one of those is common. All five together is not. And when they do come together, things start to feel a little like magic.
I’m seeing that right now with NonProfitly. Full disclosure: they’re a Mason Strategic client. But I wouldn’t write this if I didn’t believe it.
The problem
Human service organizations are where we take on our hardest problems. Homelessness. Foster care. Addiction. Unemployment. Families trying to get back on their feet.
And they’re losing their people.
Turnover in human services casework runs between 30% and 60% a year. The average frontline caseworker stays about 1.8 years. Every departure costs the organization somewhere between 70% and 200% of that person’s salary.
But the real cost isn’t on the balance sheet. It’s the client who loses their primary relationship, sometimes the only stable relationship in their life, and has to start over with a stranger. In child welfare, every caseworker turnover can add up to six months to a child’s time in foster care.
Six months. Because of a staffing event.
Nobody intended that. It compounded anyway.
The experience
The team behind NonProfitly isn’t new to this. They built one of the most widely adopted outcome tracking platforms in human services, grew it alongside thousands of organizations, and saw it through an acquisition.
Most people would have taken the win and moved on. They didn’t.
The lessons learned
They kept watching. And across data from more than 10,000 organizations, one finding kept showing up.
The strongest predictor of positive outcomes wasn’t the program model. It wasn’t the service dosage. It wasn’t the technology platform.
It was the relationship between the worker and the person they’re helping.
That’s the same relationship turnover destroys.
Here’s the part I respect most. They’re the first to say the systems this sector built, including some of what they built, were designed for funders, not workers. Caseworkers spend something like 40% of their time on documentation. The software measured what programs do and treated the thing that actually drives results as invisible.
Their words: “We built systems for the wrong thing.”
You don’t hear a lot of founders say that out loud.
The technology
A few years ago, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. Now there is.
AI can finally take a real chunk of the paperwork off a caseworker’s plate, and it can be done in a way that protects the people being served. That matters a lot when your clients have already been let down by the systems that were supposed to help them.
At the same time, decades of research on helping relationships point to the specific things that make them work. Which means the relationship doesn’t have to stay invisible anymore.
Put those two together and you can build something this sector has never really had.
The passion
This is the part you can’t fake.
These are people who already had their success. They came back because they saw what the tools did, and didn’t do, for the people doing the work. And they felt responsible for fixing it.
They call it “returning to serve.” After spending time with them, I believe it.
What’s coming
I can’t say much yet.
NonProfitly is getting ready to launch something new. It’s built on everything above: the experience, the lessons, the research, and technology that finally makes it possible.
Here’s what I will say. If it does what I think it will, it gives human service organizations a real shot at keeping their best people. It puts the relationship between worker and client at the center, where it belongs. And it gives leaders and funders an early read on whether the work is on track, not two years later in a final report.
That’s not a small thing. These organizations are on the front lines of the most pressing social issues we face. Anything that helps them keep the right people in the room longer helps everyone they serve.
So, do you believe in magic?
I’m not much for hype. But I do know what it looks like when the right technology, real experience, hard-won lessons, genuine passion, and a problem that matters all show up in the same place.
That’s what I’m seeing at NonProfitly.
Stay tuned. More soon.