Being A Responsible Nonprofit IT Volunteer

The Baltimore area’s approximately 1800 nonprofit organizations act as the caretakers of our region. They promote the wellbeing of our citizens through their programs in education, health, arts, children and families, employment, community development, and civic engagement. If it were not for assistance from IT volunteers, many nonprofits would have little or no technology at all. IT volunteers find and install hardware, set up networks, develop databases, create and host websites and provide countless hours of technology handholding. A nonprofit organization is a business with a strong bottom-line focus on carrying out its mission, rather than on netting a financial profit. By law, nonprofits cannot distribute profits to members, directors or officers and are exempt from taxes.

To fund their operations, many nonprofits depend on donations and grants from individual, private and public sources. However, it is common for these contributions to come with restrictions on the amount of funds recipients can spend on administrative functions like technology. You can learn more about the unique issues of nonprofit management at Nonprofit Genie.

To keep administrative costs low, a nonprofit must run efficiently. But, with limited funding available for operations, nonprofits are challenged to find the resources (funds and expertise) to get and use the up-to-date tools and processes that profit-making organizations frequently use to improve their efficiency. For nonprofits, volunteers fill critical gaps between what they need and what they can afford to get.

How can your volunteer technology assistance work yield long-lasting benefits to the nonprofit you work with? For starters, commit our list of IT Volunteer’s Dos and Don’ts to heart. Also, give us a call. We won’t try to tell you how to do your job, but we can point out some common pitfalls we’ve seen before and direct you to any resources we know to be helpful. For example, there are great collaborative resources for people who provide IT assistance to nonprofits on the Consultant Commons website.

If you have skills, but no one deserving of them, we can connect you with some wonderful organizations doing good work. When we make a match, we guide and support the relationship between you and the nonprofit, helping to define the project and your investment. We make our tools and templates available to you. You can work with a team of people who can help you see your ideas through and help the organization find the support it needs when your work is finished. To find out more about volunteer opportunities with Baltimore-area nonprofits, contact us

Get in touch

Do you have questions? Comments? We’d love to hear from you.
email: ccts@ubalt.edu
phone: (410) 837-6741