Welcome to Inside Impact, Temelio's monthly video interview series where we sit down with leaders across the philanthropic space for honest, unfiltered conversations about what's working, what isn't, and where the sector is headed. No sales pitches, no jargon, just real conversations with people doing the work. Each month, we'll be exploring a mix of topics, from technology and operations to broader themes shaping philanthropy today.
For this episode, we're joined by Ben Beisswenger, Chief Technology Officer and Systems Architect at the Doris Duke Foundation, where he leads technology strategy across the foundation's grantmaking programs and its public-facing centers, including Duke Farms and Shangri La. Ben brings over a decade of experience building technology for social impact, having previously led cloud systems platforms and CRM strategy at Emerson Collective and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with earlier experience at Salesforce.org. He holds a degree in engineering from Dartmouth College. Ben holds one of the rarest titles in philanthropy, CTO of a foundation, and brings a mix of systems thinking and cultural fluency to how technology actually gets adopted inside a mission-driven organization.
A CTO seat at the executive table is still rare in philanthropy. Here's why Doris Duke created one.
When Ben joined Doris Duke Foundation, the function he now leads was called IT. The rename wasn't cosmetic. As Ben put it, technology has become "the railroad upon which" a foundation's work runs — every grant delivered, every internal collaboration, every new idea now moves through some technology layer, whether or not that was true a decade ago.
He credits the foundation's CEO and other leaders for recognizing this early and being willing to put a technology leader on the executive team, something Ben still considers unusual for a foundation of Doris Duke's size. When his team was formed, they wrote a charter that reframed the mission entirely: not to keep the internet running fast, but "to enable anyone at Doris Duke Foundation to harness the transformative power of technology."
"It wasn't necessarily about keeping the internet running fast, although that's a necessary part of it. It's really like at a personal level, helping everyone to use technology for whatever their role might be."
The technology function, in three layers.
Ben breaks down what his team actually does into three tiers. The first is foundational: cybersecurity, network infrastructure, and the baseline tools everyone needs to feel safe and equipped at their desk, the layer most people associate with "IT."
The second layer is where it starts to diverge from a traditional IT function: an internal product management practice that builds workflow-driving tools across grantmaking operations, event operations, finance, HR, and even the foundation's public-facing "billboard to the world," its website. The third and final layer is insight: connecting the data generated by all of those systems so people across the foundation can make better next decisions.
"By articulating our technology team's purpose as enabling everyone to harness the power of technology, it's really allowed technology to be distributed amongst the team."
"Everyone is a builder" only works if the culture is built first.
Doris Duke has embraced a mindset where any staff member, not just engineers, can build their own tools using AI. But Ben is clear that the cultural groundwork mattered more than any specific technology. When the foundation was shaping its AI strategy, leadership landed on three principles: lead through attraction rather than a top-down mandate, tell people "we have your back" to experiment without fear of losing their jobs to automation, and acknowledge the technology's ethical tradeoffs head-on rather than avoiding the conversation.
"Rather than doing a top-down mandate... what we tried to do as hard as we could is take examples from peers, people at the organization who had built something that was really useful for themselves, and lift those people up."
Structurally, the other requirement is trustworthy data. Ben's team built connected data feeds, delivered through an internal tool everyone can access, so builders can create new solutions without duplicating a spreadsheet version of information the foundation already has in a system of record.
The DDF App Store: solving for visibility, security, and duplicated work.
As more non-engineers started building their own tools, Doris Duke needed a way to prevent chaos. Their answer was the DDF App Store, an internal catalog, accessible right alongside tools like Okta, where reviewed and approved colleague-built apps live for anyone at the foundation to find and use.
The examples range from playful to mission-critical: an off-site meeting finder built by a team member (which Ben has personally used to help plan his own birthday party), and a security dashboard built by a colleague at Duke Farms that pulls together event bookings, cottage reservations, and staff shifts into a single view for the security team, a tool the team at Shangri La later adapted for their own site.
"We want that to be visible to all of Doris Duke Foundation... we also want to make sure that people's work is honored. We don't want two people working to create the exact same solution to the exact same problem."
Beyond efficiency: technology that makes new things possible.
Ben pointed to a framework from AI writer Allie Miller that distinguishes "pain minimization" from "opportunity maximization." Not just doing existing work faster, but doing things that weren't possible before. At Doris Duke, that shows up in Horizon, an internal goal-setting tool that gives every team visibility into enterprise objectives, who's accountable for what, and which other teams are quietly working on adjacent goals.
One concrete result: a team at Shangri La in Hawaii used Horizon to spot alignment with the foundation's Creative Labor, Creative Conditions initiative, which led to a new partnership and fellowship with Indigenous Hawaiian artists through an existing program called Vehi Vehi. On the operations side, automating a grant-to-finance handoff that used to take 35 steps and eight people freed the grantmaking and finance teams to focus on longer-range questions, like understanding programmatic impact and forecasting budgets years out instead of one.
"These new opportunities come when we fix some of the underlying pieces, which wouldn't have happened in any kind of timely way unless we had these tools."
The most common thing holding foundations back? IT teams that don't think they deserve a seat at the table.
Talking regularly with technology and IT leaders across the sector, Ben sees a recurring, self-fulfilling pattern: technologists who assume their role is to keep the lights on and stay out of strategic conversations about AI and the future of work. He argues that mindset needs to be flipped, by both sides, technologists included, and by program and organizational leaders who still treat IT as a help-desk function rather than a strategic partner.
"I heard this concept, rather than saying 'disagree and commit,' at least say 'disagree and let's see.' On the IT side, people not feeling like they deserve to have their voices heard, I think can actually be an impediment."
The case for investing in a real technology strategy.
Asked what a foundation with a genuine technology strategy gets that others don't, Ben made two arguments. First, technology work forces a kind of structured consensus that most organizations are otherwise avoiding, like finally agreeing on what to call a department after years of finance and HR silently maintaining two different naming conventions. That discipline, applied consistently, compounds.
Second, the pace of change in accessible tools isn't slowing down, and passivity is itself a risk. A foundation without someone translating what that wave of change actually means for the team, in concrete terms, will fall behind organizations that do.
"I think passivity is a risk to a certain extent, with the most advanced technology that's coming around."
Inside Impact is a monthly video series by Temelio featuring candid conversations with leaders across foundations, corporate giving, and philanthropy tech. New episodes every month at trytemelio.com.
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