Corporate benefactors like Microsoft and Boeing are from Mars. Non-profit charities like The Epilepsy Foundation of Washington and ElderHealth Northwest are from Venus. The challenge: how to make sure that the Martian technology and the Martian money that are granted to the Venutian non-profits are being put to effective use. Martian consultants are too expensive and largely unfamiliar with the non-profit world. The solution: NPower. NPower serves as a low-cost consultant to non-profit 501(c) 3 organizations, helping them to leverage the power of technology hardware, software and, increasingly, the Internet, by tapping into people power, AKA gray matter, or human-ware.
And that means NPower can use your help!
On September 14, in conjunction with the United Way, NPower is holding a Day of Caring Tech Fitness Project, matching high-tech volunteers with non-profit organizations to help the dot-orgs shape up their technical fitness. If you’d like to be matched with a deserving charitable organization and help them flex their high-tech muscles, particularly their use of MS Word and Internet Explorer, you’ll be asked to donate one day, Friday, September 14th, to join the NPower volunteer “swat team.”
We sat down with NPower’s Executive Director, Joan Fanning, to learn more about this unique organization and how it is building the prototype for more effective non-profit sponsorship and non-profits’ organizational productivity . We then met up with Jaime Greene, NPower’s Community Resources Director, to fill us in on NPower’s upcoming Tech Fitness day.
Seattle24x7: Joan, how would you describe NPower’s mission in helping non-profits?
Joan Fanning: Our mission is to help other non-profits use technology to really expand the reach and the impact of their services. We all know that technology has changed the way businesses can work. We realized that there’s been a gap in terms of non-profits and other kinds of social change organizations that may not have adopted technology. We were created to help non-profits identify technology opportunities and then implement them.
Seattle24x7: How did NPower get started?
Joan Fanning: About three-and-a-half years ago, the local funding community was seeing a pretty dramatic increase in the amount of grant requests asking for technology-related gifts. Funders wanted to make sure that non-profits had what they needed to implement technology successfully — so Microsoft Corporation, Boeing, The Seattle Foundation, The Medina Foundation— what they did was pull together a focus group of local non-profits and said, ‘Okay, as you’re trying to integrate technology, what are your biggest challenges?’ Out of those focus groups, Microsoft took the lead and wrote a White Paper. What they found was that the hardware and software wasn’t the most significant challenge. It was finding people who understood the non-profit world, and could pull through all of the technology opportunities. They asked me to provide them with a business plan for doing that.
Seattle24x7: What was your relationship at that time?
Joan Fanning: I was working as an independent consultant. The local funders knew me because they had seen my name on a lot of the grant requests, primarily with human service organizations, helping them implement technology in their direct service delivery — whether that was creating computer labs or using technology in literacy programs or doing case management. So Boeing Company, Seattle Foundation, Medina Foundation, Microsoft, had all worked with me in a variety of ways.
Seattle24x7: Are there other local associations that assist non-profits with donations?
Joan Fanning: Seattle has become a hotbed for non-profit technology-related endeavors. We’re here, One Northwest is here. Project Alchemy is here, and Idealist. They are focused on providing assistance to really grassroots progressive social change organizations.
Seattle24x7: You’re helping to provide the talent to go along with the technology?
Joan Fanning: What we found in the business plan was that the major hurdle for non-profits is what we call “human-ware.” Not hardware or software, but folks who understand the concept of the non-profit world and can help them identify their mission — then implement that technology and help transfer the capacity to their organization to be able to support that technology and train on it.
In the business sector, there’s a concept called “total cost of ownership.” There wasn’t a mechanism in the funding world to help with the most critical success factor — the human touch. So the funders were looking at NPower as a way to supplement their funding so they could give grants for hardware and software. They wanted to know that there was an organization that would focus on helping non-profits identify appropriate technology, implement and support technology and would transfer the know-how.
Seattle24x7: How do you stay in business?
Joan Fanning: We are a non-profit organization. Every hour of consulting we give, we actually lose money. And the idea is our main customer is very small to mid size non-profit organizations that would not be able to afford the private sector costs of human help. We provide technology consulting, planning, training services at a sliding scale rate that is tied to an organization’s ability to pay, and we’re able to provide subsidized services as a support of local foundations and corporations.
In addition to that, we have a whole section of no-cost services. One example of that [is] where we match volunteers, we train and place interns, we do large-scale community-based days of service (there’s one coming up).
Seattle24x7: Do you help non-profits with their Websites where that need exists?
Joan Fanning: We look at what their mission is, what their significant challenges are, and then tie technology plans and recommendations back to achieving that mission. So, in many cases, an Internet strategy, be it for online donations or putting the word out, tends to be more of the norm as part of their technology. It does represent a large portion of our work.
We do help build Websites. We also provide a lot of our-know-how for free on the Internet. Our most commonly asked question on the consumer side is about online donations and creating an online donation center. So the Internet is of interest to lots of non-profits.
Similarly, we are testing some of the different ways to deliver our services. We’re testing right now the concept of a non-profit ASP. So we’re constantly working with our customers and asking what are the barriers. For any type of mission-critical task, the non-profits need to be sure that their infrastructure is up and reliable and secure and they have support. These are huge barriers for most non-profits. They can’t talk about using technology in a mission-critical way because they can’t sustain it — it’s not something that they trust. So we’re in the middle of testing the mission-critical software end of service via an ASP model so that we can kick the technology obstacles out of the way, and focus on the strategic application of it, and the learning of it.
Seattle24x7: What kind of application services will you be providing?
Joan Fanning: Right now, we are providing three applications to help our non-profit customers to understand experientially what it means to manage software this way. Then we’re going to be adding about four more applications in partnership with the pilot participants, identifying those needs.
About eighteen months ago, we did a large survey with 170 non-profits in a focus group and the most requested applications were collaborative software, funds development relationship management software, and then it really broke down by the issue area of non-profit. Human services wanted client tracking, legal services wanted case management, advocacy organizations wanted online advocacy. We’re also providing data storage because many non-profits see the coming of a network where they can share, file sharing and data storage.
We’re also providing E-mail, collaborative ListServe capabilities, and we’re working with a private software company called e-Tapestry to provide online donations, grant management, and online funds development. NPower has created some free online tools to help with inventory tracking, management and creating technology plans and that’s being offered right now. In about six months we’ll be adding three more applications. We’re going to determine what those are out of the pilot that’s now underway.
Seattle24x7: How many organizations do you work with?
Joan Fanning: In addition to our membership organizations, we also provide services to the community at large through our volunteer matching and community services. Membership allows people to use consulting and training services at a much more subsidized rate than non-members. In the local Puget Sound, at last count we had 210 members affiliated with us. Almost all of those members actively use our services. In terms of the number of non-profits locally that we touch with volunteer matching, it’s right around 400.
Seattle24x7: Jaime, can you fill us in on the upcoming Day of Caring on September 14th?
Jaime Greene: We call it Tech Fitness. What that entails is a two-pronged approach. One is coaching with staff members who are using technology products like Word and Internet Explorer and giving them the one-on-one coaching they need to help them be more productive, kind of a “personal coach” idea. The fitness piece also involves doing a baseline, taking an inventory of their technology assets. If you were going in to get a physical, you’d know what you’re basic weight is, and what your body fat is, and you’d know where you’re working from — so non-profits will get a chance to better understand the technology they have on hand, and make plans for improving that or taking better advantage of that.
Seattle24x7: What kind of volunteers are you looking for?
Jaime Greene: For coaching, anybody who has their friends and family come to them with technical questions; that means they’re someone who is approachable and enjoys helping people discover new things about the software that they use and really enjoys watching people when that light bulb goes on. They don’t have to be very technical users. They may not know the answer, but they can demonstrate how they would go about finding it out. We’ll also have a centralized help desk going on that day that is reachable by phone so volunteers can call in with questions or issues to keep things running smoothly in the field.
Seattle24x7: Are you doing anything to assist with the Red Code Worm Virus?
Jaime Greene: In the past we’ve done a Virus Vaccination day of service. It was a popular one. A lot of people that took advantage of it the first time learned what they needed to know to keep up to date with it. Once we have a toolkit put together, it’s easy to disseminate that information.
Seattle24x7: Have your volunteers included any Seattle tech luminaries?
Jaime Greene: Yes, we had Jeff Raikes, a Vice President at Microsoft, participate at last year’s day of caring. He went out and coached Washington Works staff in using Word and Outlook. We’ve had other senior managers as well. And we get UW student associations involved so we’re finding people all across the spectrum in different areas of their careers. Even high school kids have come with their parents to volunteer.
Seattle24x7: Best of luck with Tech Fitness Day.
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
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