If you run a not-for-profit, your IT problems are rarely big. They are small, constant, and they land on whoever happens to be in that day.
A phone at one location goes straight to voicemail. A volunteer finishes up and nobody is sure whether their access was closed. The mailbox for your classes stops sending, and the person who set it up left two years ago.
None of that is a project. All of it stops someone losing an afternoon.
The power outage that explains everything
A charity we support lost power. Staff needed the phones redirected so callers were not met with silence.
That took about fifteen minutes, remotely, with nobody on site.
It is worth sitting with why that was possible. A hosted phone system lives in a data centre, so calls can be redirected by someone who is not in the building. A box on the wall of a building without power cannot redirect anything, because the thing that would do the redirecting is off as well.
For an organisation with several locations and no IT staff at any of them, that one difference decides whether a blackout is an inconvenience or a day of missed calls.
People change faster than the paperwork
What goes wrong in not-for-profits is not malice. It is turnover. Volunteers come for a season. Staff move on. Access follows them around unless somebody closes it.
The same charity asked us to remove a volunteer’s access effective immediately. That took five minutes, because there was a record of what the volunteer could reach. Without that record it is a morning of guessing, and the guesses are usually incomplete.
The accounts people forget are rarely the obvious ones. It is the shared mailbox, the group they were added to for one event, the login to the system nobody uses any more.
Three things that matter more than anything technical
It can be fixed without anyone being there. Phones, mailboxes, access. If a fix needs someone on site, it waits until someone is on site, and at a not-for-profit that can be next week.
Access closes the day someone leaves. Not the week after. Not when somebody remembers.
One place keeps track. Which phone is at which location, who can reach what, which supplier to ring. In most not-for-profits that knowledge lives in one long-serving volunteer’s head, which works right up until the day it does not.
Why not-for-profits end up with us
Charities get offered enterprise IT at a discount often enough. That is not the problem.
The problem is that almost nobody wants to own a long run of five and fifteen minute jobs, spread across several locations, for an organisation that cannot justify a full-time IT person. So those jobs pile up on a volunteer who has other things to do.
That work is the job. We do it, we keep the register so it is not in anyone’s head, and we do not need to be in the building to help.
If you run a not-for-profit and want to know what support would look like for you, get in touch.