Canteen Australia’s pursuit of a greater good through tech

Cathy O’Sullivan, CIO editor-in-chief for APAC and host of CIO Leadership Live Australia, sat with Raul Caceres, executive director of operations at Canteen Australia to discuss how the non-profit has developed a donor prediction model, creates value from data, and is actively exploring GenAI to help give teens with cancer more access to information.

Even though he first studied chemical engineering, Raul Caceres always had an interest in computers — databases in particular — and how working in the FMCG sector revealed that data was going to help large multinationals improve operations. “I started doing some work for the United Nations through their online volunteering, and at that time, the concept of online communities was beginning to emerge,” he says. “One project I did then was help bring together an online community of volunteers from all over the world to help a beekeeping enterprise thrive in Sierra Leone. That’s how I got the connection between operations, technology, and my interest in volunteering.”

Caceres saw this as an opportunity to continue evolving the idea that technology could be used in ways that could really benefit different communities he and his colleagues were trying to serve at the time. As services and technology grew, he found himself working for nonprofits all over the world, which ultimately led him to Canteen, the only charity in Australia that supports teens and young adults impacted by cancer.

“We’re trying everything to help young people impacted by cancer,” he says. “Everything from psychosocial support services to leadership programs, camps, clinical trials — anything that could help improve their lives. This particular age group has specific challenges we’re really trying to help solve in the long term.”

And this is where technology comes in. Especially over the last few years, Caceres’ approach to the work has evolved, imagining how data and technology can help advance the mission more directly. “It’s a team of about 14 in the data and tech space who make sure we can create value from the data we haul,” he says. “We have all the information from the services we provide, as well as our digital infrastructure, so that’s everything externally facing our websites and our app. There are a lot of digital assets on that side, including our online community, online counseling, tax counseling, and telepresence with robots, so young people still in hospital or having to receive treatment from home who can’t attend school, are still able to attend classes by using a telepresence robot.”

O’Sullivan recently spoke with Caceres about using technology for social good, fostering a culture of collaboration, and supporting other non-profits with their data and tech strategies. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the digitalization journey: What I’ve found historically is that when I applied for different tech positions in non-profits, I ended up applying for the more traditional IT roles since that’s what they were looking for at that time. So for me, it’s always about how do we ensure we can keep the lights on and build on top of that by going back to basics and try to help the organization think about what the key questions are. So it’s a combination of getting really technical, then talking to the stakeholders about their concerns, and then slowly building a roadmap to democratize the data held in databases. That’s the conversation, so everyone in the organization can understand what the data tells them. And we’re seen as more of an internal consulting group, so people can come to us early in the process as they think about ways to use data or technology in different ways. Then we can work together on how to create value.

On in-house vs. partnerships: In the non-profit space, we have to be so responsible with every dollar our supporters give us. It’s always about ways to reallocate resources so we can create value while keeping costs at a similar level, or if the value we create makes it worthwhile to invest a little more. So it’s critical to have very trusted partners. And considering what we do, there are areas that are better to bring in house, so anything using data or technology in a way that’s going to impact our communities more directly. Then we could continue working with some of our trusted partners on some of the stuff that’s more removed, like our networks and key pieces of software. So what’s happening in the public-facing side is already integrated into what’s happening in the back office, which becomes a little harder when you’re having to work with lots of external parties that need to be brought together. But we’re a lot more efficient in how we use data, and we’ve now fully automated every pipeline. As a fundraising organization, you have to do so many little things to raise the resources to support young people. You need to work with a lot of different platforms and bring all that data in almost real time and create value from it. It felt critical for me to be able to create those capabilities in house.

On gen AI: Seeing how things were quickly emerging, we needed to look into ways we could start using it. I was very open to tell the team how we could use gen AI to make us more productive. So people were using Copilot very early on, for example. And that’s been helping them be a little more productive. But we haven’t removed anything, or said we’re going to replace a human with a regenerator. Instead, we’re helping people explore ways to become more efficient, which gives us more confidence in some of the work we do. We’ve also been exploring ways to help people get services where we may not be able to talk to them directly because it might be after hours. We did some research on people who care for cancer patients and they’re so busy the day so when they’re able to go online to check for things after hours, we were able to organize information and create models that show the data has been approved by us. But we still have to go through the process of building confidence, because the biggest fear people have is from AI providing inaccurate information.

On data security: Last year was big for cybersecurity, which helped unlock more resources to work on the space and make sure we keep information secure. One thing has been expanding the number of AI models we use to predict the best people for us to target for different campaigns. In the past, most non-profits had to send portions or entire databases to external suppliers to be able to run some of their own tools to decide whom to target. So it helped us accelerate some of that. Now we’re not sending data externally, apart from some very small data sets for specific purposes. And we’re able to do the rest of the work in house. We’ve also seen how we can use technology to mitigate a lot of risks that, in the past, have created opportunities for cyber attacks. Of course, we also have the human element to keep people more aware of things they need to need to watch out for. So for us, particularly because a good proportion of our staff are clinicians, it’s harder to have them think about the things they have to do to stay safe, including moving into hybrid working. So it’s been about updating all our tools so we can have more integrated ways to protect our users. We felt we needed to elevate some approaches we used to detect how much we were getting targeted. Before, only around three out of every 100 emails were filtered for spam, and now it’s gone up to about one in 10, so we’ve had to restrict access to some of our critical resources. With a little bit of monitoring, we get an alert whenever anyone is trying to download particular fields, or a particularly large file. We also talk to people just to understand the process they’re doing, and how we can help do it in a different way rather than downloading so much information about someone. I feel people are really on board.

On leadership: It’s important to embrace who you are as a leader. There’s not just one way of being a leader. I was recently talking to someone from the Mindful CIO Community about leaders who go beyond their technical capabilities. It really resonated with me, to try to be much more holistic in the way we look at leadership. So identify what your strengths are and focus on those to slowly grow as a leader, working through gaps you may have identified, and start becoming more confident and comfortable with the type of leader you want to be. I think there’s always that thinking IT leaders tend to be introverted and not committed, but this way I feel tech leaders will be seen as more holistic people trying to be open to more styles of leadership to bring in more different types of people into leadership positions. I feel there’s an opportunity to improve the diversity of the leadership space in the technology world.