[SoftTalker]

I've volunteered for and served on the boards of several small, youth-oriented nonprofits. They all had this weird idea that you can't spend any money on operational stuff. Yeah I get that you want to minimize it, and you should. But payments for necessary services should just be part of the budget. There is overhead to running these orgs and not every penny can go straight through to the kids. If you make things a PITA for the volunteers, eventually you won't have any volunteers. People are giving their time freely to help, but most are busy and don't want to f*ck around with complicated solutions that waste that time.

[bzmrgonz]

A strength that is often overlooked at NGO's is their people power, so don't forget to leverage that. For instance, cctv, each unit, each chief and his 4 indians, could simply use wyze to monitor their immediate environment, worst case scenario, the chief leaves in a bad way and someone else has to reprogram the wyze cams to a new chief. Same with passwords, if you don't want to pay for centralized admin, then create multiple self-sufficient micro-environments with one central IT as tier 2 for advise and rescue. Think of it as vlans, but in admin terms. This method, opens up a lot of free tiers out there for each tribe/unit to leverage, as long as IT/CENTRAL, get's informed of the master-pwd (ex. bitwarden etc.).

[Sat_P]

Completely agree. The kind of people I've encountered in non-profits and charities as an IT Sales Professional over 20 years is that they expect great products and services should be as close to free as possible. They don't seem to understand that the tax breaks and incentives are there precisely to help soften the costs of running such an organisation. To expect even MORE than that from vendors is unrealistic. I watched an interview with Naveen Jain (Viome CEO) on a podcast once and he said that a non-profit entrepreneur or CEO is more often than not "just a sh*tty entrepreneur". I couldn't agree more based on my experience selling tech since 2001!

[afavour]

Oh, I totally agree. But I’m in the minority in that view and have come to accept that it’s just the nature of the beast.