The mission of Technology Works is to help community-based nonprofit organizations in the Washington-DC area use information technology to deliver their services more effectively and efficiently.

Project Description
[Note to community leader: Change to reflect your services.]

Technology Works is an effort to strengthen and create quality technology support resources for DC-area nonprofit organizations. Technology Works will identify and map existing local technical resources and make technology more accessible and affordable to nonprofit organizations. Local and national foundations are supporting this effort.

Technology Works is dedicated to helping organizations with the often overwhelming (and therefore ignored) work of integrating information technology into planning, communicating and implementing their mission and services.

The goal of Technology Works is to create a trusted easily accessible continuum of services.

Today's Charge

Our Question to you today is What Should Those Services Be? Again, there are no right or wrong answers. We will ask you to review three service ideas and give us your honest feedback. We will probably end up with a combination of services so please don't feel that liking one service precludes liking the others.

Introductions of all Participants (20 minutes)

What is your name, title, how long have you worked for your current organization? and what did you do before that?

Warm Up

What is a major technology challenge at your organization?

Services (1 hour and 20 minutes)

Please read the following service description. [Note to community leaders: A description of needed services identified from previous research should be attached here.] Take a moment to jot down your initial reactions to the service. Then circle the features you especially like, and put a line through the features you especially don't like. Then,

• Please describe the service. What is it? (This is to see if they understand what the paragraph says.)
• What do you like about this concept?
• What do you dislike about the concept?
• Are you interested in this service for your organization? Why/why not? If YES, what do you think it would do for your organization?
• Who is it most relevant to? (i.e. sort of colleagues, sorts of organizations)
• Is there anything hard to believe about this? What? Why?
• Is there anything you found confusing or hard to understand about this? What? Why?
• How much would your organization be willing to pay for this service? (on a monthly or annual basis)
• Do you see it coming out of your operating budget, or would you need to raise separate funds?
• What if foundations made this available to you for free and made participation mandatory as part of their grant to you?
• What length of time should training be in terms of time for one session, time for course of series?
• Does location of the training matter? What if trainings were held at a local technology corporation? Would that be incentive for you to go?

Next: Appendix 2- Resource Mapping Questions

Last updated: 1 August 2001 mff
www.benton.org/Practice/TA/commkitappen1.html