By Todd Cohen
Seattle

A new nonprofit opened its doors this month with the goal of helping nonprofits in the Puget Sound area make more productive use of information technology to deliver services.

Funded by a handful of local funders spearheaded by Microsoft, the new group - known as NPower - will offer a broad range of services to help nonprofits learn about and use technology in their daily work.

It also will provide technology education and resources for the local nonprofit community and offer specialized help for nonprofits to use technology in their particular fields of interest.

"We want to help other nonprofits use technology to better achieve their mission," says Joan Fanning, the group's executive director. "That's going to look like a lot of different things depending on the nonprofit we're working with."

NPower will be a membership organization whose members will pay dues on a sliding scale. Services will be priced at roughly half the amount that for-profit technology assistance providers charge. NPower expects to cover 25 percent to 30 percent of its costs through dues and fees, and raise philanthropic dollars to cover the remainder of operating and capital expenses.

Target clients will be the 1,360 public charities in a three-county area with annual revenues of $100,000 to $5 million.

NPower will:

* Help nonprofits learn about and integrate technology into their operations. Services include consulting on technology planning and needs assessment; consulting and assistance in putting technology into place and troubleshooting, and software and computer training. * Offer technology education and resources for the community. These will be designed with other more specialized technology assistance providers in the region and will include a technology volunteer matchmaking program; services provided through VISTA and Americorps volunteers; a community database of technology consultants; print and online technology resource libraries; and educational workshops and conferences. * Provide services focused on the technology issues of nonprofits and groups of nonprofits in particular fields of interest. Services include facilitating collaborative technology projects and assistance to foundations, corporations and governments in helping their grantees and contractors make better use of technology.

NPower plans to phase in those services over the first three years, and then to begin offering services throughout Washington state through a "circuit rider" who would assist individual nonprofits.

NPower grew out of research conducted in the fall of 1997 by Jane Meseck Yeager, Microsoft's program manager for community affairs.

"Microsoft was really interested in what technology assistance was," she says, "because we were being asked for it through our grants program."

Microsoft also wanted to know whether software it was donating to nonprofits throughout the U.S. was being used effectively.

Meseck Yeager's research included talking to groups from throughout the U.S. that provide technical assistance to nonprofits, as well as with nonprofits in the Seattle area.

"Both providers of technology assistance and local nonprofits identified the fundamental services of strategic [technology] planning, training and ongoing support as the most critical needs of the sector," she concluded.

She also found a wide gap "between the needs that nonprofit organizations have for technology assistance and the availability of that assistance."

And she found that technology assistance providers themselves also need support. Based on Meseck Yeager's research, Microsoft decided to support creation of a nonprofit organization in Seattle to provide technology assistance to area nonprofits.

The company hired Fanning on a consulting basis to write a business plan for the new entity - she later was hired as executive director - and began to enlist other corporate and foundation support.

So far, NPower has generated $750,000 in philanthropic commitments, including $250,000 a year for three years from Microsoft, $150,000 over three years from Boeing, $100,000 for the first year from the Seattle Foundation and $250,000 for the first year from the Medina Foundation and $30,000 over two years from US Bank for scholarships for small nonprofits. The group's board includes representatives of some of the funders, plus leaders of the nonprofit, high-tech and education communities.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will keep an eye on NPower's experience while studying developments throughout the U.S. involving nonprofits' use of technology. The company will learn from the work being done by the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology, a group working to develop ways to make information technology more accesible to nonprofits.

"We are definitely using the National Strategy to learn what's going on out there and what's needed, but we wouldn't support something that's not locally driven," says Meseck Yeager.

"Probably in a couple of years, once NPower is up and running and the National Strategy is finishing, we'll look at the rest of the nation."

Todd Cohen can be reached at
tcohen@mindspring.com