Free and discounted non-profit IT resources
For non-profits with tight budgets, inflexible deadlines and complex problems to solve, making the most of free and discounted resources on offer is key to building healthy and robust IT foundations – and avoiding any costly IT headaches that can affect your participants, mission and teams. We took a look at what resources are on offer and how you can use them to boost the impact of your core mission.
Your starting point
The good news: There is a lot of free and discounted software on offer to charities and non-profits. In the UK, CharityDigital is a pioneering platform that has helped over 38,000 charities save money on their software access. They also write many useful articles whilst putting on some great events to help non-profits boost their knowledge and tech practice. If accessing from outside of the UK, explore the TechSoup site.
When it comes to business basics, eligible charities can receive Microsoft’s Office 365 package as a donation and can qualify for discounted upgrades. There are also a number of non-profit CRM systems, including Salesforce who offer 10 free subscriptions to charities and discounts on anything else through their Power of Us program. To improve your crucially important cyber security foundations, the National Cyber Security Centre has compiled a comprehensive Small Charity Guide.
All of this is encouraging to see and can certainly help anyone needing to upgrade or reinforce their tech on a lean budget.
Bridging the Gap
You may be asking why we, as a provider of managed IT support and non-profit tech projects, might be pushing you towards free options. Well, we understand that some budgets are leaner than others and there are a lot of great resources out there. We aren’t making money out of our work and genuinely want tech to boost your impact however slender the resource.
That said, we truly believe that expert and responsive IT support will help you convert free resources into quality foundations for your work. Working with our team will allow you to spend less time dealing with IT issues and more time on delivering impactful programmes and building relationships with the people that bring your organisation to life.
Our not-for-profit IT services are not free, but they are not profit-making. We are led by a volunteer with over three decades of experience in the IT sector and we have invested in a Zambian team local to many of our non-profit partners. We really believe it is possible to have expert-level IT advice, on par with that in the commercial sector, without passing extra costs on to those who are fighting for change. Learn more about the benefits of working with Clea.
Whether you want to drive through IT improvements independently or whether you work with a tech partner like Clea, we are sure that pencilling in time to think about your IT setup will help boost your overall impact.
What IT would help your team do their work more effectively? What’s not working for you at the moment? Stay in touch, and please let us know if there is an IT guide on a particular topic that we can put together to help you and your teams during this period.