Twilio.org & CareMessage Talk Corporate Tech Partnerships at Scale

Erin Reilly, VP of Social Impact and General Manager of Twilio.org, and Vineet Singal, Founder & CEO of CareMessage shared the stage at Accelerate Good Global to discuss a critical piece in the tech nonprofit puzzle—how to best leveraging corporate tech partnerships.

CareMessage is a tech platform that improves medical care for underserved communities. In the early days, founder Vineet Singal was faced with a common dilemma: should he build their tech product from the ground up or leverage the support and reliability of existing tech infrastructure? Twilio was the obvious choice. The tech company’s robust platform enabled CareMessage to scale to impact, while allowing the technical team to focus on other priorities. Vineet echoed a common theme in our accelerator program—avoid reinventing the wheel. “The more you can outsource to infrastructure providers, the better.” Whether that’s using AWS for cloud computing or leveraging API integration like Twilio to deliver messages to your customers, established technology strengthens your product and decreases strain on valuable engineering resources.

While most of us know Twilio as the communication bridge between ourselves and apps like Uber, it’s much more than that. Erin Reilly spoke about the platform’s strength in supporting impact metrics, which can be quite challenging to quantify, but are the ultimate measure of a nonprofit’s success. Erin shared an example from Twilio’s work with Camfed, a nonprofit focused on girls’ education in rural Africa. Teachers on the platform were responsible for submitting reports on their students, but thousands of them stopped doing so, which meant there was no way to measure the organization’s impact. Camfed ended up partnering with Twilio, which enabled them to send confirmation when teacher reporters were submitted. This simple addition triggered behavioral change, and Camfed was again able to collect data from teachers, allowing them to demonstrate impact.

The conversation between Erin, Vineet, and moderator Scott Budman of NBC Bay Area is chalk-full of great storytelling and advice. Check it out below!