July, 2011

Today we’re announcing updates to our nonprofit software donations program to enable more nonprofits around the world to get easier access to the technology they need, when they need it.

While we currently provide software donations to over 40,000 nonprofits each year, we’re just getting started and we need your help.

Many nonprofit organizations, including some in your local community, are not aware that they can request a donation of Microsoft software.  Help us spread the word.   Together, we can ensure nonprofits have access to affordable technology to help them do more with their limited resources.

There are two ways you can help:

1)      Share the video (below) with your colleagues, friends and family to raise awareness of a great resource available to nonprofits.

2)      Make your cause our cause: Reach out to your favorite nonprofit and make sure they’re aware of the Microsoft donations program.  To make it as easy as possible, we’ve drafted a note below that you can use.

To those who have already helped, a big thank you from everyone at Microsoft!

To my favorite nonprofit:

I think the work you do in our community is amazing.  I know how challenging it is to try and do more with less.   

So how can you boost productivity, raise more funds, increase your reach, and deliver new or better services in our community? How about a donation of software from Microsoft? I wanted to make sure you know that eligible nonprofit organizations can request a software donation.  There are still many nonprofits that don’t know about the donations program.  Do you?

Eligible nonprofit organizations can choose from a wide range of Microsoft desktop and server products (including Office and Windows).  Check out www.microsoft.com/nonprofit to see what’s available and learn how to apply.  In fact, if you are in one of these 35 countries with a local TechSoup program, you may be able to get technology donations from other companies too, like Cisco, Symantec, or Adobe.

Maybe you already knew all this.  If so, that’s great.  I want you to keep doing good stuff in our community, and know that access to the latest technology can help.  It would be great if you could share this note with other nonprofits too.

By spreading the word, together, we can help millions of nonprofits get access to the technology they need to best serve communities worldwide.

Sincerely,

Your supporter

 
More information:

• Learn more about the updates to the software donations program.
• Review nonprofit eligibility guidelines and how to apply for a Microsoft software donation.
• Tell us more about your favorite nonprofit by tweeting @msftcitizenshipwith the hashtag #mycause
  • What’s your cause? #Mycause is @nonprofitname – http://bit.ly/NPOlet  @msftcitizenship
  • Tell your favorite nonprofit they can get software donations from @msftcitizenship: http://bit.ly/NPOlet

Today we are making a number of updates to our global software donations program designed to give more nonprofit organizations access to the technology they need, when they need it.  We’re currently reaching more than 40,000 organizations around the world each year – translating into over $3.9 billion of donated software since 1998 - but we know there’s a great opportunity to reach even more nonprofits and communities.

The updates to the program are part of our commitment to bring the benefits of software to more nonprofits to support positive social and economic development in local communities around the world.  Every day we see first-hand how software is helping nonprofits reduce their costs, boost productivity, raise more funds, and ultimately deliver new and improved services in their local communities.

There are a number of updates we’re announcing today, including:

• Increasing the allotment of different Microsoft software products that can be requested by each nonprofit from six to 10 titles, enabling nonprofit organizations to get the software they need such as Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, etc.
• Adding three new categories of nonprofit organizations eligible for software donations (assuming they have proper nonprofit status as defined in their countries), including: medical research organizations, private foundations and amateur sports and recreational organizations.
• Including a new Get Genuine offering so nonprofits can ensure their existing computers are running genuine versions of Microsoft operating systems to help keep their software up-to-date and secure.

In addition to these changes which apply to over 100 countries, we are also adding additional changes for the 35 countries who are served by the TechSoup Global Network including Australia, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Rep., Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, and the United States:

• Nonprofits can now request a software donation from Microsoft through the TechSoup Global Network whenever they need it instead of the previous limit of only one request per year.
• Nonprofit organizations ordering their donations through the TechSoup Global Network can now easily get key donations details in one place with the Microsoft Donation Center, a new section of the TechSoup Web site where organizations can review their donation history and identify products their organization can request.

These new updates are effective immediately.

If you work in a nonprofit organization, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/nonprofit to review eligibility guidelines and learn how to apply.

You can also read more about the program changes in detail on TechSoup’s site: Overview of Microsoft Software Donations, and you can review our Frequently Asked Questions.

If you don’t work in a nonprofit, take a minute to look at the video below and tell your favorite nonprofit how they can get a software donation from Microsoft. We’ve created some text you can use that makes it simple.

Please help us spread the word, and make your cause, our cause.

Akhtar Badshah, senior director of community affairs, Microsoft.

Edward G. Happ, Global CIO of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Editor’s note: Ed Happ, CIO of the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is one of the key individuals we at Microsoft look to for guidance and feedback on our work the NGO community. We think his blog post below offers some terrific insight and reflection for anyone considering work with, or already engaged with community organizations on their IT needs and so we are cross-posting from his blog. Enjoy!

I recently attended the launch of the Microsoft and AIESEC Tech Talent 4 Good student intern programme at the Microsoft Executive Briefing center in Brussels. I had proposed a similar programme to Microsoft a year ago, and so was asked to speak to the initial class of students and participate in a "Day in the Life of an NGO" panel. Here is a brief outline of my remarks:

What are the qualities needed for working in an NGO?

1. Passion - you have to believe in the mission
2. Triage - not all the good can be done
3. Patience - on decisions; consensus is messy and takes time
4. Forgiveness - rather than permission
5. Openness - immerse yourselves in the conversations

Others mentioned listening skills, relationship skills and sense of humor.

What were my career choices that brought me to the nonprofit word?

1. I'm on my 3rd of 5 careers (See Charles Handy on careers in the post-modern era)
2. Why? A shift from success to significance

What is strategic IT for nonprofits?

1. The Relevant IT Manifesto; technology more for:

a) delivering program scale than support

b) as the glue for communities

c) working together more than solo

d) the field than for HQ

1. The IT Strategy Pyramid: Get out (of lights-on tech), get in (to beneficiary tech), move up (to more mission-moving tech.)

Where has there been progress?

1. Wiring the Village – we have taken the connections out the countries where we work, now to the branches and project areas
2. Collaboration – we are working together on projects, and trusting centers of tech leadership
3. Emergency Response – we have taken ICT from rapid connecting of relief workers, to shared networks and connecting survivors

What is possible and exciting about the future?

1. Everyone is less than 2 degrees from being connected – world population of 6.9B, 5B cell phones with 20-30% as two phone users, means 4.4B mobile users
2. The mobile users in emerging and emergency relief countries are the new connectors – In Haiti 10% reach 100%
3. Consumer tech as more relevant than corporate tech for the vulnerable, and the organizations who work with them

My Advice for students?

1. Go to the far country, a hotbed of innovation – the IFRC App Inventory case: discovering 53 volunteer management applications in our national societies, not in HQ
2. Your experience is not the world’s experience – Why? Imagine Cup case: No sense of limitation
3. No rules, no limits: get it done – the case of Shawn Ahmed: free agent philanthropy

What are the relevant stories?

1. Naomi Fils-Aime in Haiti – “Life is very difficult: [cholera and hurricane] messages help me protect my family” – the IFRC SMS program
2. The starfish story revisited – think big, start small, but get started!

Disclaimer: The opinions in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated.

Edward G. Happ is the Global CIO of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and Chairman of NetHope (www.nethope.org), a U.S. based consortium of 34 leading international relief, development and conservation nonprofits focused on information and communications technology (ICT) and collaboration.

Guest Post by TechSoup Global founder and co-CEO, Daniel Ben-Horin

Back in 1989, TechSoup Global (then called “CompuMentor”) was two years old and pioneering our notion of matching high level tech-savvy volunteers with nonprofits. I'd neglected to invent the World Wide Web at the same time as starting CompuMentor, so organizing this new form of volunteerism turned out to be rather challenging, but that's another story.

In this story, we are in year two of getting to know the nonprofit sector and its technology needs and are realizing two things. First, no one in the nonprofit world, at least back then, is having any fun with technology. It is universally perceived as grim stuff. You know, the computer might explode.

Second, no one has any money for anything but the hardware, and even that is out of reach for most (remember, desktop machines were prohibitively expensive then). So commonly, nonprofits are using antiquated software or just the wrong stuff entirely.

My own background had been in journalism, and a bunch of my pals had migrated to the computer press. In those days, software came in big boxes, and software publishers would send a big box of their latest software to journalists, hoping for a review. Maybe one copy would get reviewed, and the others would get trashed.

Trashed! I found that offensive. This software was valuable. It deserved better. Nonprofits deserved better. So the idea was hatched to send an underemployed, world-famous avant-garde jazz saxophonist named Bruce Ackley in his pickup truck to various computer magazines to offload whatever software was deemed expendable.

We'd end up with an inventory of a couple of hundred titles, usually one of each, or sometimes two. Then we'd send a newsletter to our nonprofit friends, listing the software we had available at $5 a pop, first-come, first-served. Nonprofits wrote back to ask if they were first. If they were, we sent them some software. But mostly they weren’t, so we spent a lot of time saying "try again."

Not all the software was serious productivity software. Some was along the lines of "Play Chess with Your Dog." But part of our message was, "have a little fun with this stuff." That's still a big part of our message.

Looking back, it was all very primitive, but it served our mission. The same mission that the donation program serves today: to make technology available to the organizations that are working so hard to support our communities.

We amped up a little with support from Lotus, but it was still mostly one or two titles of software at a time. Then, in 1994, Microsoft gave us a shot, and the whole dynamic changed. Microsoft gave us enough copies of its software to go around. We could stop saying "try again" and start concentrating on how nonprofits could use the software for social benefit. With Microsoft as our anchor tenant, our online donations “mall” became much more credible to other technology companies. Adobe, Cisco, Intuit, and Symantec are just a few of the companies that have since joined the donation program.

Overnight, we had a good-sized fulfillment program on our hands. Microsoft even gave us a grant to build new shelves to hold our inventory, but – all the while – encouraged us to think bigger. Remember, back then Microsoft Office Suite came in a box with licenses, and each package contained a bunch of installation diskettes and weighed about 5 pounds. Microsoft used to send giant shipments to our offices in a little Victorian house in San Francisco. We'd organize bucket brigades of our small staff to get the boxes into our basement storeroom.

The obvious question we asked ourselves (and others asked us) was: Why is Microsoft partnering with us rather than doing this itself? I think the answer has several parts. We're not just a technology nonprofit, but an organization that has always seen itself as a social change organization. Our mission is to support the use of technology by nonprofits, NGOs, and other civil society organizations to accomplish their missions, not just because it’s “cool”.  Microsoft shared that mission (still does!), and wanted to help us build a “one stop shop” where nonprofit organizations could request donations from all different technology vendors, rather than having to chase down donations from Cisco, Symantec, Adobe, Microsoft and others separately. Also, Microsoft didn't want to give away expensive doorstops (remember, 5 pounds of Office Suite!). It wanted the products to be effectively used to better our communities, and we were committed to providing nonprofits with the knowledge necessary to actually use these technologies. Technology needs to be supported, and people need training, so we engage in a range of other activities like webinars, blogs, and forums to help nonprofits effectively use these donations. Microsoft saw that it could reach more nonprofits with more software and the support to adopt it by partnering with us, and at the same time could build the capacity of the nonprofit sector.

Lastly, Microsoft didn't get to be Microsoft by being unfocused. It didn't want to take on a new business if it could identify a partner that could effectively reach the nonprofit sector. We contended we could be that partner, and now we're 18 years into doing so, and in 35 countries to boot.

Microsoft’s initial agreement with us was to distribute $100,000 worth of software in Northern California. By 1998, we were serving the entire U.S. In 2006, with Microsoft’s support, we began operating internationally in five countries. And last fiscal year, we distributed more than US$545 million worth of Microsoft software donations to nearly 44,000 nonprofits in 35 countries.

Looking to the future, we know we are functioning in a very rapidly evolving space and that our program won't look the same in 2015 as it does today. So much more software will live in the cloud, for example. So much more productivity will be based on mobile devices. But we feel very good about what’s ahead, and about our continued relationship with partners like Microsoft. For 18 years, it has been a close partner in the truest sense of the word.

Microsoft has a very creative citizenship team, and we work together to figure out ways to support the sector. For example, we have a project right now to get Microsoft development teams even more involved with the nonprofits we’re jointly serving, and we're going to use that as a basis of engagements with technologists at other companies. I can’t wait to see where that goes since – in many ways – it represents a return to our CompuMentor roots, which was all about harnessing the human capital of socially conscious technologists. There are other ideas in the hopper too. We are excited to build on our rich past, but also to embrace current trends and future possibilities.

And that avant-garde jazz saxophonist? Still with us, now as a standards and process analyst, and still blowing his horn.

Daniel Ben-Horin is the Founder and Co-CEO of TechSoup Global. He created TechSoup Global as "CompuMentor" in 1987 by tapping volunteer resources on the WELL, one of the first online communities. Over the past two decades, he has guided TechSoup Global from a small, local nonprofit to a globally respected organization.  In his book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken writes that the "...hybridization of business, philanthropy technology and nonprofit activity is exemplified in the work of Daniel Ben-Horin..." In 2009, Ben-Horin received the  "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) and Ashoka named Ben-Horin as one of its Senior Fellows. He has been named by the Nonprofit Times to its annual list of the 50 most influential leaders in the U.S. nonprofit sector four times.

To learn more about requesting a software donation or to tell your cause about software donations please see:

Blog: Help your nonprofit get a software donation

or visit: 

http://www.microsoft.com/nonprofit

Twitter: @msftcitizenship

Facebook.com/MicrosoftCitizenship

Yesterday in New York student teams from over 70 countries celebrated the winners of the 2011 Imagine Cup – a competition that challenges students to use technology to solve the world’s toughest problems. This is the ninth year of the Imagine Cup and the innovation, ingenuity and creativity of these students is just incredible - over 350,000 students from every corner of the world participated in this year’s competition.

The 2011 Imagine Cup winner was Team Hermes from Ireland who designed a device that plugs into a car and monitors dangerous driving behavior and road conditions, providing instant feedback to both the driver and the car owner. The runner-up was Team Note Taker from the United States who created a portable device that increases note-taking speeds and is particularly useful for people who are visually impaired.

Team Hermes celebrating at the Imagine Cup finals in New York yesterday (Photo courtesy of the Microsoft News Center)

The socially-focused solutions we see in the Imagine Cup, from around the world, have made us think. 

Here are all these incredible projects, incredible ideas.  They are all focused on solving pressing social issues. So how can we help the students turn those ideas from projects into real world solutions?

Yesterday Microsoft announced a new initiative.  We are committing $3 million over the next three years to provide a small number of teams from the finals with grants of cash, software, training, consulting and other support to bring their Imagine Cup project from the campus into the real world.

We’ve already seen a number of Imagine Cup projects have real-world impact.  A great example is Team GINA from the Czech Republic who were a finalist in last year’s competition in Poland and created a system using smart phones to help emergency workers coordinate and deliver aid to where it’s needed. They didn’t win, but based on their belief in their idea, they created a company and their system was deployed in the aftermath of Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami.

These students and their innovation can have real-world impact.

We are incredibly excited with this new commitment.  We are looking forward to working with the students and helping some of the teams to take the next step, bringing the benefits of their imagination to local communities and having real social impact.

Watch this space.