Many of us do work for non-profits on the side and I heard two things lately that warrant me at least commenting on how technology can be used to help these organizations. The first it that Google announced yesterday a special package of services for non-profits. Click here to go to the site. It looks like what they have done is assemble a number of tools that could be used to help the back office of a non-profit and grouped them so that they can be accessed for free. I think this is a nice thing for them to do and certainly fits in their mantra of “Do no evil.” I suppose the jaded among us would say that Googles model is to give things away for free just to sell the advertising, but in this case, they are forgoing some small bit of subscription revenue for a couple of a the products. If nothing else, this is a nice gesture.
For what this is worth, I one time investigated hosted software applications that manage and do the fundraising for non-profits and found lots of good ones on the market. They were all over the place in price range, but I remember thinking that it made no sense to build your own Web based application with all these prebuilt systems available. Check out solutions like z2systems and Blackbaud. Even more interesting is that there is an open source movement to gather software that can be used for free, click here for the NOSI.net site.
The coolest thing I have heard of concerning non-profits comes from a friend of ours that is gathering programming teams together for a weekend code-fest to benefit non-profits. The plan is to gather a number of teams from different companies, and then match them with non-profits organizations. Before the specific code-off weekend, the non-profits will provide a list of things they would like to have software wise and the teams will spend the weekend slinging code and assembling as much as they can for the non-profits. I love this idea and share it because I would love to see it become a national movement. The other thing I love is it gets programmers out into the world using their skills for the greater good. They are excited about doing that, and the non-profits always need the help. Please take this idea and run with it in your community!!
Scott