Technology Grantmaking Toolkit: Practical tools for technology grantmaking in Canada's voluntary sector

1. How can not-for-profits use tech strategically?

Objective: Show the potential of using technology strategically to increase the community impact and effectiveness of voluntary organizations.

The following case studies highlight a number of promising practices that demonstrate how voluntary sector organizations can best use technology in support of mission work. These include:

1. Understand what your target audience needs
2. Use technology in service of your mission
3. Do your research before you implement new technology programs
4. Plan to evaluate your technology projects
5. Start small
6. Consider strategic (even unlikely) partnerships
7. Appreciate how technology can support and draw-on staff resources
8. Commit to making a website more than a simple online brochure
9. Invest in online community-building
10. Include marketing outreach in all technology-based projects
11. Use viral marketing and other Internet-specific techniques when appropriate
12. Build on open standards – don’t get sucked into proprietary software

We believe that practices like these contribute to the success of voluntary sector technology projects. These case studies illustrate what this success looks like in action.

Ability Online

Best Practices Highlighted

1. Understand what your target audience needs
2. Use technology in service of mission
9. Invest in online community building
12. Build on open standards – don’t get sucked into proprietary software

Ability Online is a computer friendship network where children and youth with special needs connect to each other, to their friends, family members, caregivers, and supporters.

Launched in 1992, Ability Online was founded by a psychologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who wanted to help hospitalized children overcome the isolation and disruption of their school and social lives by creating a way for them to easily communicate with their peers.

Today, Over 3,000 children a month from around the world are active on the www.abilityonline.org network. Members make friends online, chat and ask questions about things that interest them, share stories and jokes, and discuss their favourite movies and musicians. Best of all, through Ability Online, children find support and friendship online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

For a sick or injured child isolated from friends and sometimes family, technology helps them maintain and build social networks and provides these challenged young people with access to the emotional support they need to aspire to their dreams.

Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Canada

Best Practices Highlighted

1. Understand what your target audience needs
2. Use technology in service of mission
3. Do your research before you implement new technology programs
4. Plan to evaluate your technology projects
6. Consider strategic (even unlikely) partnerships
9. Invest in online community building

Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Canada, www.bbbsc.ca, has built on their traditional one-to-one, regular contact between the mentor and the “little” to create their Digital Heroes program — an electronic version of the traditional Big Brothers / Big Sisters mentoring program that has been proven to have a very positive impact on school attendance, grade achievement, motivation and self-confidence.

Through the Internet, e-mentoring provides young people with unequalled access to volunteer mentors in a convenient communication which is appropriately monitored and evaluated. It allows mentors and “littles” to communicate across long distances, something which would not be possible in a traditional one-to-one mentoring relationship. It allows youth in rural settings who do not always have access to mentoring relationships to benefit from such an experience. Finally, it allows adults whose schedules or life circumstances do not allow for a traditional mentoring relationship to participate in one that accommodates their situation.

To launch the Digital Heroes pilot project, BBBSC partnered with AOL Canada, which provided internet accounts for 100 e-mentoring relationships in 2002, training, and support for promotion and program development. Once the pilot project is evaluated, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Canada plans to develop a packaged program that can be made available to all its member agencies. The Digital Heroes program is a great example of how technology can help a service organization deliver its programming.

Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank

Best Practices Highlighted

1. Understand what your target audience needs
2. Use technology in service of mission
6. Consider strategic (even unlikely) partnerships
7. Appreciate how technology can support and draw-on staff resources
8. Commit to making a website more than a simple online brochure
9. Invest in online community building
10. Include marketing outreach in all technology-based projects

Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank is dedicated to gathering and distributing quality emergency food to some 127,000 Calgarians in need. Like many large charities, they have an online presence.

Originally, the Food Bank’s website, www.calgaryfoodbank.com, was built to educate local residents about the scope of their operations. What they wished for was the ability to collect cash donations online. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, in 2001 they were able to add that feature. But simply having a “donate” button did not translate into many on-line gifts.

Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank leveraged it’s technology upgrade with a good old-fashioned community partnership. One of their allies, a local online grocery store, accepts donations to the Food Bank at their site. Online shoppers of Sunterra Market simply make their food donation selection and delivery is taken care of by the Food Bank.

Other simple applications have helped the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank streamline their volunteer application process and stay in touch with volunteers by email and a regular e-newsletter.

Ludolettre

1. Understand what your target audience needs
2. Use technology in service of mission
9. Invest in online community building

Ludolettre (www.ludolettre.qc.ca) is a Quebec-based literacy organization that effectively uses technology to deliver its programming to adult learners.

Recognizing that illiteracy is a social problem that negatively affects people’s self-esteem, and that the task of handwriting numbers and letters can be difficult for some learners, Ludolettre developed a literacy program using keyboard technology since typing, as opposed to handwriting, helps learners avoid making mistakes, write “neat” text and thus, increases their sense of self-worth.

After 16 years, the program has proven itself to benefit low literacy adult learners. The ongoing challenge for Ludolettre is as simple to understand as it is difficult to stay on top of with dozens of individuals using their computers every day: computer maintenance and repair. Originally, well-meaning but untrained volunteers filled the role of computer technician, however experience taught the staff that budgeting for and hiring trained computer technicians is worth every dollar. Without well-maintained and functioning computers, the Ludolettre mission and clients cannot be served.