Alistair Forbes: Using tech skills for good

Big technology firms usually get a bad rep, but for Alistair Forbes, the talent held inside those companies is a goldmine. 

Forbes is the chief executive of the Scottish Tech Army (STA), a tech charity that focuses on using technology for good by utilising volunteers from across the sector.  

“In 2020 the pandemic hit and that was the point at which we came up with the idea for the Scottish Tech Army,” says Forbes. “Initially it was very much a response to the challenges that the pandemic was throwing up for charities and non-profit organisations. We had the idea that we could get people who are from the tech sector to put their technology skills to work in the time that they had on their hands to try and help with the response to the pandemic.” 

Forbes came to the idea of the founding the STA came after realising that many charities have volunteers willing to give up their time to help in their community, but don’t have volunteers who can set up and run the complex technical systems needed to facilitate efficient charity work. His past connections around the tech industry in Scotland, as an investor and founder, kickstarted the organisation's initial volunteer recruitment drive. 

Since its founding the STA has worked with over 500 organisations, recruiting a wide range of volunteers with different skill sets to provide valuable tech expertise to the charity sector in Scotland and beyond.  

“We've been able to use technology to create some really great impact in society and communities,” says Forbes. “Very early on we worked with an organisation called Voluntary Services Aberdeen that runs about 20 health and social care facilities around Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. The challenge they came to us with was, that while they had been pretty proactive in securing supplies of PPE (personal protective equipment), the challenge they faced was managing what was needed where and who was going to acquire what kind of PPE across all their facilities.” 

This problem, where small and medium-sized charities and organisations don’t have the systems in place to coordinate across different operating systems and departments is a commonplace one, says Forbes.  

“We had a team of volunteers who worked with them and within six weeks they had set up a system for them to manage all of that PPE inventory and distribution,” says Forbes. “We moved them on from using e-mails and spreadsheets which became pretty chaotic to a system that's just like shopping on Amazon.” 

This work allowed Voluntary Services Aberdeen to coordinate their response to the pandemic, using a system that their own volunteers would have been unable to implement and operate without significant cost to the organisation.  

Since its inception, the charity has pulled from a rotating pool of over a thousand volunteers that offer their tech expertise and time free of charge. Forbes says that the charity pulls in an average of 40 new volunteers a month, who respond to calls for help on projects around Scotland and the UK.  

“It's really important that we get a strong continuing influx of new volunteers to make sure that we can continue to have the capacity to carry out these projects,” says Forbes. “It was clear that there was never going to be a shortage of organisations that would be looking for help. But we had to be confident that we would be able to continue to recruit the volunteers who could actually carry out that work and that has proved to be pretty robust.” 

The STA are helped in this by an initiative that the charity started in 2022 called the Tech For Good Alliance. This alliance encourages large companies to direct skilled tech employees into using their company-provided volunteering time to support the work of the STA.  

A recent study from the Centre for Economics and Business Research highlighted that over 140m volunteering hours currently go unused in the UK, with researchers claiming that if these schemes were utilised fully, the work conducted could add £32.5bn in productivity gains to the UK economy.  

"Even the people who do take up those opportuities, often they're doing pretty low-skilled things and not actually using the specialist skills that they have." says Forbes.

"But when you do offer people that chance, the reaction you get is just phenomenal. It's amazing. People really love doing this because they get so interested in what the see the charity doing, the work that they're doing and the impact they're having."