We Keep Building Digital Projects. We Never Build Digital Organizations.

I've spent the last several years working with civil society organizations across East Africa - nonprofits, think tanks, advocacy groups, cultural institutions - helping them think through what they call "digital transformation." I've sat in strategy sessions, facilitated workshops, reviewed monitoring dashboards, and watched Slack workspaces go silent three months after launch.

The pattern is consistent enough that I no longer think of it as individual organizational failure. It's structural.

Organizations complete digital projects successfully. They launch websites, adopt collaboration platforms, build databases, train staff on new tools. The grant gets spent. The consultant submits their final report. The donor checks a box. And then, quietly, the organization returns to operating the way it always has.

Not because people resisted the technology. Not because the training was inadequate. But because the technology was never integrated into how the organization actually works.

The Project Mentality

Most organizations I work with operate in cycles. A donor releases funding for a specific initiative - advocacy around policy reform, a youth engagement program, a research project on climate adaptation. The organization hires staff, runs activities, produces deliverables, submits reports. Then the cycle begins again.

Digital adoption follows this same rhythm. A grant comes through labeled "digital transformation" or "innovation capacity building" or "data strengthening." The organization uses it to buy software subscriptions, hire a consultant to set up systems, conduct training sessions. Staff learn the tools. The project ends. The tools gradually stop being used.

This happens with remarkable consistency across different types of technology:

Collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams get introduced with enthusiasm. Channels are created, people are onboarded, there's initial activity. Within months, the real coordination has migrated back to WhatsApp. Decisions happen there. Urgent questions get asked there. The collaboration platform becomes a place where official announcements are posted, mostly by one or two people.

Websites get redesigned beautifully. Content strategies are developed. Content management training happens. Then the website sits unchanged for months because no one internally owns the ongoing work of updating it. The website was a project. Maintaining it is operations.

Databases get built for monitoring and evaluation, often because a donor requires structured data reporting. They're populated diligently during the grant period. After the project closes, no one enters data anymore because the database was never connected to how the organization actually tracks its work.

Social media strategies get developed by communications staff who attend workshops and come back energized. But they remain disconnected from program staff who hold the substantive knowledge. Posts get made, but they reflect organizational activity rather than organizational insight. The Instagram account is active. The institutional knowledge remains fragmented.

I've watched dashboards sit unused after the reporting period they were built for. I've seen monitoring systems adopted because donors required them, not because leadership needed them to make decisions. I've reviewed beautifully documented processes that no one follows.

The Fundamental Misunderstanding

The assumption, usually implicit, is that digital transformation is about adoption. Get people using the tools. Train them properly. Make the interfaces intuitive. Demonstrate the value. Then usage will stick.

But that's not how organizations actually change.

When an organization adopts a new tool without changing how it makes decisions, coordinates work, preserves knowledge, or generates value, the tool becomes decoration. It exists parallel to how things actually get done, not integrated into it.

I'll give an example that keeps repeating across organizations:

An advocacy group introduces a project management platform. Tasks get created, deadlines get set, responsibilities get assigned. Staff are trained. For a few weeks, people check the platform regularly. Then someone sends an urgent request on WhatsApp. Someone else responds there. A quick decision gets made. The task gets done. The platform never gets updated to reflect what actually happened.

Why? Because the platform was introduced as a tool, not as a change in how the organization coordinates. The tool requires you to document tasks, update progress, communicate through structured channels. But the organization's actual workflow is built around immediacy, informality, and verbal communication. Those workflows were never redesigned. So the tool gets used when convenient and ignored when it's not.

This isn't resistance. It's rational behavior. People default to the systems that actually move their work forward.

Capacity Asymmetry

There's often a gap between who decides to adopt digital systems and who actually uses them.

Leadership teams attend conferences, hear presentations about digital transformation, meet with consultants, make strategic decisions to adopt new platforms. They see the value in structured data, institutional memory, scalable communications.

Operational teams - program officers, communications staff, project coordinators-are the ones who have to change their daily workflows to accommodate the new systems. They're told the tools will make their work easier, but often they make it more visible, more documented, more accountable. That's not the same thing as easier.

Neither group ends up truly owning the system.

Leadership doesn't use the tools daily, so they don't feel the friction or understand why adoption stalls. Operations uses the tools when required but doesn't have authority to redesign workflows around them. The digital consultant who built the system is already working with another organization.

So the system sits in an institutional no-man's land. Too important to abandon completely. Not important enough to actually integrate.

The Reporting Trap

A significant amount of digital adoption in civil society happens because of donor requirements. Donors want dashboards. They want monitoring data. They want digital communications outputs that demonstrate reach and impact.

Organizations build systems to produce these things.

But the systems are designed for external reporting, not internal operations. The monitoring dashboard tracks what the donor wants to see, not what the organization needs to understand about its own work. The social media metrics demonstrate activity but don't reflect whether the organization's ideas are influencing the conversations that matter to its mission.

I've seen this most clearly with databases. They get populated meticulously during active grant periods. Data entry becomes part of the grant's operational requirements. Then the grant closes, and the data entry stops, because the database was built for reporting to that donor, not for the organization's own decision-making.

When digital systems are designed for external accountability rather than internal capability, they remain external. They're outputs. They're not how the organization thinks.

What Capability Actually Looks Like

I've also worked with organizations that became genuinely digitally capable, though they're less common.

What distinguishes them is not better tools or more training. It's that they redesigned their operations around digital infrastructure.

One think tank I worked with didn't just adopt a knowledge management system. They changed how they stored institutional memory, how new staff were onboarded, how research was documented and shared. The system wasn't added to their workflow. The workflow was rebuilt around the system.

A cultural organization didn't just create a social media strategy. They integrated digital communications into how they thought about their programs from inception. Every program was designed with digital reach as a primary consideration, not an afterthought. The communications team wasn't separate from the program team. They were the same people.

An advocacy coalition didn't just use project management software. They restructured how they coordinated across member organizations, moving from quarterly in-person meetings to continuous digital collaboration punctuated by strategic convenings. The tool enabled a different model of operation, not just a digital version of the old model.

In each case, technology wasn't the project. Institutional redesign was the project. Technology was the infrastructure that made the redesign possible.

Why This Matters Beyond Technology

The distinction between digital activity and digital capability matters because civil society organizations are operating in an increasingly digital environment whether they want to or not.

Public discourse happens on digital platforms. Policy processes involve digital consultation. Advocacy requires digital reach. Fundraising depends on digital credibility. Knowledge production is distributed and digital. Movements coordinate online.

Organizations that treat digital as a communications channel or a data collection method will continue functioning. But they'll remain institutionally analog in a digital ecosystem.

They'll keep producing content without building audience. They'll keep collecting data without generating insight. They'll keep using tools without changing operations. They'll be visible online without being influential there.

This matters practically. Organizations that are digitally active but not digitally capable spend resources inefficiently. They pay for software subscriptions that don't get used. They hire consultants repeatedly to solve the same problems. They lose institutional knowledge when staff leave because knowledge lives in individual inboxes rather than shared systems. They can't scale their impact because their operations don't scale.

And it matters strategically. The organizations that will be most effective in the next decade won't necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most staff. They'll be the ones whose operations are designed for digital speed, digital reach, digital coordination, and digital knowledge.

The Sustainability Question

Most of the organizations I work with are donor-dependent. Digital transformation initiatives almost always start with grant funding labeled for that purpose.

This creates a structural problem: digital capability is treated as a fundable project rather than operational infrastructure.

When the grant ends, the subscription expires, the consultant moves on, the training is over - and the organization is expected to "sustain" what was built. But you can't sustain something that was never integrated. You can only maintain it, and maintenance requires continuous resources that weren't built into the operational budget.

I've watched organizations lose entire digital systems because they couldn't afford to renew a $100/month subscription. Not because the organization couldn't find $100. But because that line item didn't exist in any budget category after the grant closed. Digital was funded as innovation. Operations were funded separately. The two never merged.

The organizations that become sustainably digital don't wait for transformation grants. They treat digital infrastructure the same way they treat office space or staff salaries - as a basic operational requirement that gets built into every budget from the beginning.

What We Keep Getting Wrong

We keep approaching this as a knowledge problem. More training. Better user interfaces. Clearer value propositions. Stronger change management.

But it's not a knowledge problem. Most people understand what the tools do. They understand the theory of why structured documentation is valuable, why institutional memory matters, why digital coordination could be more efficient.

They don't use the tools anyway because the tools require changes to organizational operations that never happen.

We built the database. We didn't change how decisions get made. We introduced the collaboration platform. We didn't restructure how teams coordinate. We created the website. We didn't build capacity for continuous content development. We trained people on the software. We didn't redesign the workflows.

The tools sit alongside the organization's actual operations, used when convenient or required, ignored when neither applies.

This will keep happening as long as digital transformation is treated as a project - something you do, complete, and check off - rather than as institutional infrastructure that gets continuously built, maintained, and evolved.

A Final Observation

I no longer tell organizations they need digital transformation. The phrase has become meaningless. It suggests a definable endpoint, a state you reach and then maintain.

What I've learned is this: organizations that successfully integrate technology into how they operate don't usually call it digital transformation. They call it organizational redesign. They call it operational efficiency. They call it strategic repositioning. They call it knowledge management. They call it communications infrastructure.

The technology is the tool that makes those things possible, not the thing itself.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade won't be the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They'll be the ones who redesigned their operations around digital infrastructure, not because it was innovative but because it was necessary.

We keep building digital projects. We never build digital organizations.

Until we do, the patterns will continue. The tools will keep being adopted. The grants will keep being spent. The trainings will keep happening. And when it's all over, the organization will return to operating the way it always has.

Not because the technology failed. Because the institution never actually changed.