Joel Oleson's Blog - SharePoint Land

SharePoint and Non Profits an Awesome Mix

When Hurricane Katrina hit, SharePoint was there.  When the Tsunami hit South East Asia, SharePoint was there.  Many non profit and humanitarian services and non governmental organizations (NGOs) are using SharePoint.  For me it gives me a great feeling to know I'm working on something that furthers society and truly helps people. 

<update> Got this WCM SharePoint site "Starlight Childrens Foundation" from a reader: Thanks Peter from Didata, awesome design. </update> 

I had the opportunity recently to help the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with some planning on a SharePoint deployment with BI related questions.  Without sharing details it was going to bring organizations together in a common dashboard and give people information that otherwise would never have taken place.  Very rewarding experience.  Heard of Pro Bono Net? They're a non profit national law firm that work to help low income people get access to legal council.  They use SharePoint as their platform for their Pro Bono Manager.  I've met folks at TechEd from the World Health Organization and happy to hear they have been using it leveraging the platform to help people.

I also had the opportunity a few months ago to help out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with their internal SharePoint deployment.  Simply answering some questions around scale, capacity planning, and information architecture.  They've been a Word Perfect/Novell shop (Groupwise) for a long time.  It was great to see their vision of how it can help them to help their global congregations for various service needs including organizational efficiencies, helping communities, and simply increasing the ease of collaboration.  Allowing things previously not possible, possible and integrating it into processes for helping people serve.  It became very clear how it could help them with their three fold mission.  Since then I heard some metrix on how it has really taken off and adoption has really taken off.  Projects are running faster and people are communicating.  Ben Hutchins, Intranet Product Manager, LDS Church is speaking on SharePoint at the Information Worker conference in Nashville Feb 4-6.  Opryland hotel, huge place.  You'll have to let me know how it goes.  I did some SharePoint consulting down the road from there at Deloitte a few years ago.

Recently I heard about a SharePoint Non Profit Conference through http://www.susqtech.com.  They put together this conference to specifically help non profits to better understand the business and technical side to SharePoint deployments.

2008 SharePoint.Org Conference - "The only SharePoint Conference for Associations and Non-Profits"

I highly recommend donating some of your time, your SharePoint expertise, or SharePoint software donation to a non-profit organization. 

I noticed in a search that FrontPages Hosting offers a 30% discount on their hosting services for SharePoint for Non Profit status.  Good for them.  I'd like to see it at 80%. :)

In my search for Non Profit SharePoint resources I also came across a community/domain dedicated to SharePoint for Non Profits also known as http://www.sp4np.org/.  It includes RSS feeds from the SharePoint Team blog and a forum for Q/A.

How to Donate:

I recently saw this question:

We’re working with a great charity – YearUp (www.yearup.org), which helps urban young adults to get started in technology and professional careers. I recently did a design session with their IT leads in which we determined that MOSS Enterprise Edition would be a good fit for them. The local account team intends to donate the software to this good cause. However nobody can figure out how to purchase Enterprise Edition from MS Market, or otherwise to get them a donation of more than Standard Edition.

Do you know someone who might be able to help us with this kind of thing?

The answer:

Non-profits should be able to buy it off of http://www.techsoup.org.  You would donate to them for the cost and tell them to earmark it for the software purchase.

Here's what I got when I searched on Tech Soup: