“One of the most exciting parts of my job is helping organizations think about how they can take advantage of new technologies and put them to great use for customer reasons, to accelerate their business, to save costs, to enhance securities; there are just a ton of opportunities.”

--Frederic Kerrest, COO/Co-Founder, Okta

As global nonprofits, we all aspire to transform our organizations into digitally savvy, agile institutions to accelerate mission delivery and achieve exponential impact. The first half of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the age of computers, radically transformed how we do our work. But that was only the beginning and now NGOs are going through the growing pains of digital transformation, a process that is better described as a journey than something that happens overnight.

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In this, NetHope’s third Destination Digital podcast installment, CEO Lauren Woodman talks with Frederic Kerrest, COO and Co-Founder of Okta, the San Francisco-based identity management company. Okta’s cloud software helps organizations protect and enable employees, contractors and partners as well as build secure experiences, today with thousands of organizations using Okta for single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and embeddeable authentication (via Okta API products).

Okta is also one of the founding partners of NetHope’s Center for the Digital Nonprofit which seeks to help its nearly 60 members and the nonprofit sector as a whole navigate digital transformation. Additionally, NetHope has the distinction of being the first recipient of the Okta for Good annual fund investment. Both demonstrate Okta’s recognition of the value of NetHope’s work in the NGO digital space.

In the podcast, Kerrest outlines the genesis of his career and the beginnings of Okta and details how these sync with the growth of digital transformation in the nonprofit sector today.

“The reality is for any profit or nonprofit organization, if they've been around for a year or two years or five years, they have a lot of legacy technology,” notes Kerrest. “We thought there was a big opportunity to help organizations, both private organizations and the public side as well, to take advantage of modern technologies — cloud computing, mobile technology, etc. —to make their organizations better.”

Kerrest and Woodman discuss the potential synergy of tech working with nonprofits and how NGOs are pivotal in helping provide essential input on future development of both products and processes that inform more efficient humanitarian, development, and conservation work through digital transformation of the sector.


    Filed Under: Collaboration, Digital nonprofit, Faces of NetHope, Organizational Capacity, Practical Innovations, Sector-Wide Change, Technology in Our World, The Center for the Digital Nonprofit, Thought Leadership, Toolkits and Resources, Utilization of Technology