What is the social sector?

As you may have seen in our very first blog post, I've been very explicit about stating that Avandar is built for the social sector.

So what exactly is the social sector? Who is Avandar built for?

Gina Assaf and Mala Kumar have an excellent definition in their Open Source in the Social Sector report.

Definition
"... the “social sector” is defined as non-governmental organizations that have a primary purpose to actively advance or positively contribute to any pressing societal issue or challenge. International (global) development, disaster risk management and humanitarian response, public health, and human rights are major industries that comprise the social sector."¹

This includes nonprofits, foundations, international NGOs (INGOs), and for-profit social enterprises (i.e. for-profit organizations that explicitly prioritize social good over shareholder profits). Importantly, this does not include for-profit organizations that do not have a primary purpose to "positively contribute to any societal issue."¹ Avandar is a for-profit social enterprise and, as such, we are a part of the social sector.

Often you might see us just refer to "nonprofits" and not the rest of the social sector, but this is just to make our content easier to read. Repeating "mission-driven non-governmental organizations" is just too much of a mouthful. So, unless we make it clear otherwise, when we say "nonprofits," we are referring broadly to social sector organizations.

What may surprise some readers is that this definition excludes governments (which would be considered the "public sector" instead). Of course, a large amount of government agencies have an explicit goal of either funding or otherwise supporting social sector activities, and we hope that these agencies can find our platform useful in their missions. However, the public sector, broadly speaking, has a set of data, software, and hardware needs that are outside of the scope of what Avandar intends to offer. So, if public sector agencies find that Avandar can help solve their problems, we welcome this outcome happily. But it is not an explicit goal of ours to design for government infrastructures. As a simple truth, Avandar cannot serve every single market. The public sector actually does not face a lack of software vendors out there that are attempting to improve government processes. This is not where Avandar is needed most.

Our calling is the social sector. We're here to fight alongside the millions of organizations and communities that feel ignored by private sector solutions that treat their real-world problems as afterthoughts, or that feel abandoned by the public sector procurement processes that continue to reward the same vendors year after year.

We're here to fight alongside the millions of organizations and communities that feel ignored by private sector solutions that treat their real-world problems as afterthoughts, or that feel abandoned by the public sector procurement processes that reward the same vendors year after year.

Accepting early user testers

As I announced two weeks ago, Avandar is now open for alpha user testing. If you are interested in joining our community of early adopters, please reach out to us at earlyadopters@avandarlabs.com. We look forward to working with you.