Tech Checkup

The DemNerds Tech Checkup is a structured walk-through of your organizations' goals and activities referenced with the tools, platforms, and digital habits you are using. It exists because technology is now unavoidable, increasingly risky, and—despite everyone’s best intentions—often doing real damage to the work organizations are trying to do. Simultaneously, the internet is an indespensible asset for organizing, advocacy, and communication.

The right use of the appropriate tech can make you more effective at achieving your organization's goals, but if you get it wrong it can jepordize your work or even those you work with. It would be convenient to just try and turn your back on all technology, but it would hamstring your efforts at building a better world.

The goal of this Tech checkup isn’t perfection, best-in-class software, or theoretical security. It’s to be safer, clearer, and more deliberate than you were before, without turning everything into a months-long project or burning your budget for the year.

No hype. No shame. No 40-page PDF that nobody reads.

Who this is for

The Tech Checkup is for small to mid-sized nonprofit organizations working on democracy, human rights, or the rule of law— especially teams without dedicated security staff, and teams operating in environments that are becoming more hostile, more surveilled, and less forgiving over time.

If technology feels essential to your work, vaguely dangerous, and harder to reason about than it used to be, you’re probably not imagining things—and you’re probably in the right place.

What the process looks like

A typical Tech Checkup runs over several weeks and is intentionally lightweight. It usually includes:

• A kickoff conversation to understand your mission, constraints, and concerns
• A short questionnaire about how your organization actually uses technology (not how it appears on paper)
• One or more structured conversations with organizational and technical leadership
• A written assessment with pragmatic, prioritized recommendations tailored to your resources
• A follow-up conversation to talk through tradeoffs, answer questions, and refine next steps

Throughout the process, the emphasis is on judgment, not compliance—and on choices you can realistically make without burning out your team or pretending risk doesn’t exist.

What we ask of partners

Participating organizations should expect to spend roughly 15–20 hours, spread across several people, over the course of the assessment. The Tech Checkup works best when partners are willing to be candid about constraints, surface uncomfortable realities, and treat digital risk as a shared organizational issue rather than something that can be quietly delegated.

You don’t need to have everything figured out. You do need to be willing to look at things honestly.

What this is not

• An emergency response service
• An incident-response hotline
• Ongoing managed IT or security support
• A vendor bake-off or procurement exercise

What happens next

This work is volunteer-supported, which means availability is limited and scheduling reflects the fact that everyone involved has other responsibilities, too. If you’d like to talk about whether a Tech Checkup might be a good fit for your organization, you can reach us at help@demnerds.org.

If you’re dealing with an active security incident or immediate risk, this is not the right starting point. In those moments, speed and direct support matter more than reflection.