In today’s rapidly evolving social sector, the power of collaboration has never been more critical. As we reflect on recent conversations with our PagerDuty.org partners and customers, one truth stands clear: the most innovative solutions emerge when mission-driven organizations come together to share, learn, and inspire one another.

The Evolution of Impact Leadership: Beyond Resource Mobilization

The role of corporate impact leaders has transformed significantly. We’re no longer just resource providers—we’ve become crucial facilitators of cross-sector collaboration and knowledge sharing. Through PagerDuty.org’s recent convenings, both virtual and in-person, we’ve witnessed firsthand how this evolution is accelerating positive change across the social sector.

Virtual Bridges: The Impact Accelerator Global Convening

Our inaugural Impact Accelerator Virtual Partner Convening in December 2024 brought together an extraordinary coalition of changemakers. Organizations including Crisis Text Line, Empower Work, Trek Medics International, Turn.io, and Nexleaf Analytics joined forces to tackle pressing challenges in crisis response, mental health, and healthcare delivery.   

As Dena Trujillo, CEO of Crisis Text Line, powerfully stated, “We need to use this moment to work together and ensure everybody in the world has the support they need when they need it.” This call to action resonated throughout our discussions, and three critical themes emerged, each revealing the depth of insight and innovation within our community:

1. AI Adoption and Ethics

The ethical implementation of AI emerged as a central focus of our discussions with our partners and customers. Empower Work shared its journey of thoughtfully integrating AI into its operations, demonstrating how technology can enhance efficiency without compromising the human element of their work. Their approach exemplifies how organizations can leverage AI to handle backend processes while maintaining the authenticity and warmth of human connections in direct service delivery.

Nexleaf Analytics brought a crucial perspective to these discussions, emphasizing that the foundation of responsible AI lies in trustworthy, unbiased data. Their work with local communities and governments showcases how technology implementation must be grounded in cultural understanding and community needs.

2. Operational Excellence and Scaling Impact

The challenge of scaling impact while maintaining service quality sparked rich dialogue. Crisis Text Line and Trek Medics International shared compelling stories of how they’ve expanded their technology platforms to reach more communities in crisis. Their experiences highlighted the delicate balance between growth and sustainability, showing how strategic collaboration can help organizations scale without compromising their mission or straining their resources.

Turn.io demonstrated how leveraging familiar channels like WhatsApp can dramatically expand access to trusted information. Their success story illustrates how meeting communities where they are and on platforms they already use and trust can significantly enhance the reach and effectiveness of social impact initiatives.

3. Meeting the Moment and Building Resilient Solutions

Resilient solutions aren’t just a strategy – they’re essential to long-term impact and community trust. In times of transformation, the ability to collaborate and respond with purpose is vital to success. PagerDuty Operations Cloud helps human-centric platforms like Crisis Text Line’s volunteers respond to mental health crises 24/7 while preventing burnout and maintaining service quality. When mission-driven teams have enterprise-grade digital operations, they can focus on their core purpose rather than managing technical challenges, share resources more effectively, and build collective resilience that benefits the entire sector. This technological foundation transforms how organizations approach resilience – it’s no longer about heroic efforts during crises, but rather about building systematic, sustainable responses to ongoing challenges while maintaining the human touch that is essential to this work.

In Person, Real-Time Innovation: PagerDuty On Tour San Francisco

PagerDuty on Tour is a global series of events that bring PagerDuty’s customers, partners, and industry leaders together. In San Francisco, we convened in person with leaders from 15 nonprofit organizations, which brought our virtual discussions into sharper focus and prompted deep conversations about technological resilience and operational maturity. These face-to-face interactions allowed for nuanced exploration of how AI and automation can be thoughtfully integrated into nonprofit operations, with emphasis placed on maintaining mission alignment and community trust.

We uncovered that effective collaboration requires intentional cultivation of three key principles:

1. Creating safe spaces for sharing is critical. 

When organizations feel secure enough to discuss not just their successes but also their challenges and setbacks, the entire sector benefits from these learned experiences. We’ve seen how authentic dialogue leads to breakthrough solutions and unexpected partnerships.

2. Resource optimization becomes possible when organizations work together. 

We’ve witnessed partners sharing their technological infrastructure, exchanging best practices, and collectively solving problems that would have been insurmountable for any single organization. At the convening, two partners, Trek Medics International and Tech Matters, shared their recent partnership with the City of Los Angeles’s Crisis and Incident Response through its Community-led Engagement (CIRCLE) program. They’re collaborating with CIRCLE’s unarmed crisis response program focused on the homeless population that currently covers 40% of the city and averages 80 crisis response incidents per day.

3. Building sustainable partnerships requires moving beyond traditional transactional relationships and multi-sector collaboration.

The most impactful collaborations emerge from long-term commitments to shared learning and growth, supported by ongoing community building. “Developing AI for social impact doesn’t attract the same level of investment as commercial AI applications. We’ve had to be creative, partnering with foundations and governments to make it work. It’s not easy, but the potential for good is enormous,” said a tech nonprofit CEO.

Looking Forward: A Call to Action

The challenges facing our world are too complex for any single organization to solve alone. Looking ahead, we’re deepening our commitment to fostering collaboration across the social sector. We’re expanding our network, creating more opportunities for knowledge sharing, and supporting partners in their technological transformation journeys. Most importantly, we’re focused on measuring and amplifying our collective impact to ensure that our collaborative efforts create meaningful change.  

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With the insights, impact stories, and thought leadership shared during these events, we developed our first PagerDuty for Nonprofits White Paper resource to help guide purpose-driven organizations through their operational maturity journey, which is now available for download. PagerDuty is committed to supporting our nonprofit partners. Learn how PagerDuty can automate, orchestrate, and accelerate urgent work at your mission-driven organization. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today.