More for the nonprofits

Last Friday I had a good meeting with Billy Bicket of
CompuMentor. Billy was referred to me by Randy Moss. Randy met Billy when he
was working for Meetup.com. CompuMentor is a nonprofit technology assistance
service that’s been around the Bay Area since ’87. The big thing they do is
manage the distribution to nonprofits of software and hardware from the
philanthropy programs of major companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec and
others. Here’s the deal: nonprofits that meet the program’s criteria of size and
budget may be eligible for software and equipment through CompuMentor
dirt-cheap. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it) ACS
has budgets too big to qualify for the deep discounts of these companies; but
for smaller NPOs it’s quite an opportunity. They also have a website with
technical information specifically for nonprofits: www.techsoup.org Check it out.

Billy and I discussed the work ACS and other agencies are
doing about understanding the “social software” movement, it’s implications for
nonprofits and how nonprofits can utilize the trend. The NVHA conference Randy
and Mike Mitchell organized and our subsequent work resonated with Billy
because of his days with Meet Up. He’s been thinking of getting together some
of the social software providers here in the Bay Area (and there are many of
them) for a discussion of how the benefits of their services might be brought
to NPOs. Sounds good to me, so I said I’d be glad to join in, and we have
tentative plans to work together on the project. We might even drag Randy and
Mike out here to see what we pull off.