Information technology can get expensive very quickly! From strategy consulting to project management to hardware and software costs, the price is often insurmountable for small- and medium-sized nonprofit agencies, who end up suffering with inferior systems.
IT4Causes helps solve this problem in several ways, so let’s walk through how we do that. We’ve done a number of projects since our inception last year, and we talked to a local for-profit IT shop to get their rates for similar work. Applying those rates to our work, the total commercial value of what we promised to customers through May ’15 would have been about $90,000. This doesn’t include any overheads or the investments we’ve made in developing our common strategy or playbooks.
Of course, since we are a nonprofit, we don’t charge the same rates as our for-profit peers Where the peer organization charges over $150/hr for consulting and project management services, we charge $100/hr and $65/hr for these services, respectively. We also provide most of the hours on our projects with volunteers, which have zero net cost to our nonprofit partners.
We also use community donations, grants, and events to raise funds to cover services provided directly to our partner nonprofit agencies as well as overheads. Gifts from individuals and unrestricted grants from foundations enable us to further reduce what we have to charge for our services. And sometimes, we are able to connect our partner charities to grant sources like Flashpoint Fund, so they don’t have to pay for any of the service directly.
After accounting for all of these factors, our total charges to our nonprofit clients will only total $7,100 for the $90,000+ in services they are getting, representing a 92.1% discount from commercial rates. While we expect these savings to vary based on the amount of funding we can raise, it’s clear that our client agencies are getting a great bargain on the IT services they need to serve their clients and missions.