Youth & Opportunity
Software
Donation
Nonprofit Technology
Education
Events
Science ,Technology
Engineering , Math
Humanitarian
Response
Working Responsibly
In a land where weather can be as unpredictable as it is unforgiving, residents of Wichita Falls, Texas, are grateful for the help of Interfaith Ministries. This small but nimble nonprofit organization provides short-term financial assistance to families who are feeling squeezed by medical emergencies, loss of employment, car repairs, or other sudden and unexpected expenses.
“Our organization grew out of disaster relief efforts,” says Jean Payne, executive director of the 30-year old emergency center. “Just like a tornado is a disaster for the entire community, huge hospital bills or losing one’s home to foreclosure are disasters for a family.”
Interfaith Ministries helps stabilize households by contributing to things like rent payments, utility bills and prescriptions. Most people learn about the organization through word of mouth or their local utility companies after they’ve fallen behind in their payments. The organization also offers a food pantry stocked with canned and frozen food, sundries, cleaning products and hygiene items for those in need.
Together with Payne, two full-time employees and one part-time staff member help recruit, supervise, and coordinate more than 120 volunteers. These volunteers serve as the organization’s backbone by helping to identify and work directly with people in the community who need assistance.
Interfaith Ministries board members at a “back to school” rally for low-income kids - Photo credit: Interfaith Ministries
Ensuring the organization’s ongoing success requires having the right communication and organizational tools on hand. “We wouldn’t be able to function without Word, PowerPoint, and Publisher,” says Payne, who relies on these Microsoft programs to share news with the media, acknowledge donations, design and write a monthly newsletter, update training manuals, and create presentations for new volunteers and potential funders.
In April 2011, Interfaith Ministries upgraded its seven computers from Office 2007 to Office 2010 after a notice from TechSoup prompted Payne to make the donation request. “We had upgraded our server and operating system in 2007, and now it was time to do the same with our software,” she says. “Without Microsoft’s software donation program, we would not be able to keep our software up to date.”
Now that everyone — including several volunteers who work remotely — is using the same operating system and software, Payne says they are able to function much more effectively and efficiently as an organization. And with everything running like clockwork, that means being able to stretch Interfaith Ministries’ dollars even farther.
College students doing a carhop fundraiser for Interfaith Ministries – Photo credit: Interfaith Ministries
“In 2010, 33% of our funding came from individual donations,” notes Payne. “We want as much of that money to go to serving people in our community as possible. With TechSoup and Microsoft we get it all — we get to keep our technology current and our community healthy.”
Find out how you can get a software donation for your favorite nonprofit.
Skype, a division of Microsoft, has announced a new partnership with DonorsChoose.org to make $250,000 available to support bringing technology into the classroom.
This partnership is part of Skype’s goal to connect one million classrooms with Skype in the Classroom.
Additional information:
Guest post by Shawn Michael, Senior Technical Manager, NPower Northwest
In the decade that I have spent as part of the NPower organization, helping nonprofits make the best use of technology to further their missions and thrive, I have seen countless hours of effort and piles of financial resources directed towards solving the problem of “tracking” data. Data is collected on clients, donors, members, and a variety of other contacts and organizations. While capturing data is a good first step in understanding more about who you serve, it means nothing without ways to “use” that data. Good uses of data include proactively managing relationships and analyzing campaigns that are successful in prompting people to take a specific action, such as donate or volunteer.
That is where Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes in. I remember several years ago when Microsoft began the work to build a solution that is now called the Nonprofit Solution. It is built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform and not only provides nonprofits with forms and fields to capture data, but also reports, dashboards, and much more. From setting automated processes that remind you to send thank you notes, to helping manage tasks to make a campaign run smoothly.
Case in point – Washington STEM was a burgeoning new nonprofit organization building momentum through their connections in the education, nonprofit and philanthropic communities. Core to their strategy for growth was nimble and effective use of technology. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Nonprofit Solution provided a central system for their staff to build and manage relationships with all of their constituencies.
So, how can you use CRM to tame your data? Join us on Thursday, March 22, 11:00am-12:00pm PDT, for a webinar discussion about…
Some of the key features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM are:
- On-premise Dynamics CRM is available through the Microsoft nonprofit software donations program via TechSoup - Hosted Dynamics CRM is currently available at $9.99/user/month for eligible nonprofit organizations
- On-premise Dynamics CRM is available through the Microsoft nonprofit software donations program via TechSoup
- Hosted Dynamics CRM is currently available at $9.99/user/month for eligible nonprofit organizations
Find out more about the nonprofit solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM here.
Editor’s note: This is cross-posted from the Microsoft on the Issues blog. You can find out more about the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit here.
Bill Harmon, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit
The scale of the online child pornography problem and the amount of data associated with these types of investigations is massive. This is why we are proud to announce that we are partnering with NetClean to make our Microsoft PhotoDNA image matching technology available to law enforcement at no cost to help enhance their child sex abuse investigations – empowering them to more efficiently identify and rescue victims and bring abusers to justice.
Since 2002, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reviewed more than 65 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation reported by law enforcement. The images continue to grow increasingly violent and the victims younger, with 10 percent of the images reviewed by NCMEC today being infants and toddlers who can’t tell anyone about their abuse. When child pornography images are shared and viewed amongst predators online, it is not simply the distribution of objectionable content – it is community rape of a child. These crimes turn a single horrific moment of sexual abuse of a child into an unending series of violations of that child. We simply cannot allow people to continue trading these horrifying images online when we have the technology to help do something about it. Microsoft is proud to make PhotoDNA available to law enforcement, to help in their battle to quickly identify and rescue these children.
PhotoDNA is an image-matching technology developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College. It creates a unique signature for a digital image, something like a fingerprint, which can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies of that image. NCMEC and online service providers such as Microsoft and Facebook currently use PhotoDNA to help find, report and eliminate some of the worst known images of child pornography online, helping identify thousands of these horrific images that would previously have gone undetected.
By arming law enforcement with this powerful technology, our goal is to help expedite investigations, limit officer exposure to the corrosive effects of viewing child rape images, and strengthen law enforcement’s ability to quickly identify and rescue victims and get child abusers off the street.
Although initially designed for use by online service providers, law enforcement globally voiced interest in the use of PhotoDNA in child sexual exploitation investigations since the introduction of PhotoDNA in December 2009. Based on the expressed need, Microsoft and NetClean worked together to make PhotoDNA available to law enforcement worldwide through tools that many agencies already use.
PhotoDNA will be available to law enforcement at no charge via:
Although this milestone is the first step in making PhotoDNA available to law enforcement, the fight doesn’t end here – more work needs to be done to stamp out the problem and make the online world a hostile place for sexual abusers of children to hide. While the responsibility for finding and arresting the criminals who exploit and abuse children rests with law enforcement, all parts of society, including the private sector and companies like Microsoft, have an obligation to work together to help protect children and eliminate child pornography.
Everyone can do their part to fight this problem by demanding that the online service providers they use act responsibly. Without innovation and public demand for technology companies and online services to play a more productive and proactive role in the fight against online child exploitation, the technological advantage will remain with the abusers of our children rather than with those working to protect them.
To stay up-to-date on the latest developments on the fight against child sexual exploitation and other forms of cybercrime, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/dcu or follow the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit on Facebook and Twitter.
The Ethisphere Institute, an international think-tank focused on the creation, advancement and sharing of best practices in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, anti-corruption and sustainability has published their 6th annual list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies.
According to Ethisphere, each 2012 honoree was chosen for promoting ethical business standards and practices by exceeding legal minimums for compliance, introducing innovative ideas that benefit the public and forcing their competitors to follow suit.
Ethisphere will celebrate the winning companies at a dinner in New York keynoted by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
You can find the full list on Ethisphere’s web site and check out more coverage on Forbes.