About Teplitsa

Our team uses an ecosystem approach. What does it mean? We analyse the civil society via its connections, resources and competences. Our goals are as follows: 1) to build a strong connection among civil initiatives, NGOs, activists and creative professionals; 2) to show all the tools and resources to achieve their goals and missions 3) to widen IT competences and similar civic spheres (digital security, advocacy and what not).

We have our website, our educational online-platform and free IT-tools,;implement programmes of IT-help and connection with IT specialists; we organise events. We assist NGOs and grassroots initiatives to develop themselves more sustainably to effectively achieve their audience and solve problems together.

Project history

We launched the project in 2012. The story began earlier in 2010 when Central Russia was on fire. Aleksei Sidorenko and his colleagues created a map to help in fire, which connected volunteers and hundreds of people who were suffering. The team was awarded the Runet Prize in 2010. This project showed how technologies could help people and what its potential was.

Teplitsa was launched as the answer to the question: "What if we create an independent initiative which can help hundreds and thousands of social projects?". Teplitsa started to research the problems in NGOs and build technological and intellectual infrastructure to developNGOs and independent initiatives complexly. We saw that for activists it was not so easy to launch online tools.

So, having analysed Russian civil society needs, we saw the main directions: 1) educational and inspiring publications; 2) public events; 3) specialized software; 4) networks . In 2019 we collaborated with foreign social TechSoup for nonprofits and helped Russian NGOs to get programs for a special price. Inspite of TeploDigital has stopped in Russia We are trying continue our partnership.

Our strengths

1. Sustainability — management and financial resources needed for development;
2. Consciousness, meaningfulness and data — the science approach and understanding difficulties are extremely important in nonprofits;
3. Efficiency — new technologies open new opportunities to increase the social impact of the projects;
4. Security — we need to figure out some risk factors;
5. Communication — effective ways to communicate help to see the problem for wider audience and get more support;
6. Ethical approach — technologies change every time, they create new decisions and new challenges. We need to remember they are always the result of human decisions. We believe that technologies must be ethical in their design step. Only in such a case can they fill in the gaps in inequality of social and economic relations, present a good balance between nature and society restrictions, make the life of people with special needs and other insecure groups more bearable;