Back in February, we got told off for banging on too much about how charities should use the internet more without giving constructive advice about how to improve.

There may be some truth in this. Making the most of cutting-edge technology can be expensive. Charities are under constant pressure to reduce their costs, and mucking about with computers can seem like a frivolity. So what’s to be done?

We think we’ve found the answer: iT4Communities.  An initiative of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, it kits out charities with one of its 5,000 professional IT volunteers who can help them get going with all things technological.  According to their newsletter, since their launch they’ve given IT help to charities worth £3million.

iT4Communities is not the most glamorous ways to be charitable - HTML training or integrating spreadsheets will hardly make the headlines.  But iT4Communities is still a brilliant scheme. So brilliant, we asked for a volunteer to help us overhaul our big charity database.

A couple of weeks later and some (fabulously qualified) volunteers have already expressed interest in working with us.  If all goes to plan, we hope to get a database that’s far more sophisticated than anything we could ever produce ourselves, and without diverting our time from our core work.

IG's expectation that charities to adopt new technology and improve their web presence is perfectly legitimate. But it's fair to say that we need to think about how charities, smaller and poorer ones especially, can do this.  As Adam wrote recently, investing in computers can all too easily seem like an expensive distraction.

This makes iT4Communities all the more important. It bridges the gap between expectations and what they can realistically achieve.
 

 

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