March 6, 2008

By Stephanie Walker, National Administrator USASA

Nonprofits today are faced with significant funding and operating challenges, especially in the soccer community. At the USASA National Office, we are always seeking ways to help the organization prosper but in a cost effective way.

Several months ago I discovered a company that caters strictly to the non-profit sector called TechSoup. They work with thousands of organizations to ensure that they have the ability to obtain technology product donations and implement them successfully with minimum cost.

The intelligent use of technology is helping organizations better accomplish their missions by serving more of their target populations or furthering their missions. To date they have obtained more than $160M in technology product donations available to the non-profit sector at a fraction of their cost from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco and many others.

Benefits to Non-profits:

- Increase capacity and efficiency through the proper use of technology products.

- Substantially shorten the time it would normally take to obtain a corporate donation thanks to a Web-based order and fulfillment process.

- Gain access to multiple product philanthropy programs in one place. There are currently 240 products from 25 providers. TechSoup Stock is the exclusive distributor for Microsoft product donations in the U.S.

- Make informed decisions about products by utilizing product and provider information, customer service assistance by phone and e-mail, and TechSoup’s educational resources.

- Reduce line items for technology products. Our administrative fees, set to cover the costs of administering the donation programs, are as low as 4% of retail value. There is no membership fee to use the service.

- Devote funding to direct service. This means more dollars spent on programs within your state.

How to join:

Go to www.techsoup.org and click on the join TechSoup tab on the upper far right corner. Organizations can join and have access to valuable non-profit information without registering your organization. However, if you wish to order products you must complete the entire registration process which is very simple and only takes a few minutes.

About TechSoup

TechSoup Stock is the technology product philanthropy service just for nonprofits. Launched in January 2002 (as DiscounTech), this service is a unique collaboration with corporate and nonprofit technology providers. Thanks to our partners’ generous product donations and discounts, TechSoup Stock is able to facilitate and distribute multiple product philanthropy programs in a centralized, Web-based platform.

Our mission is to foster social change in two ways: by helping nonprofits to save money for mission-critical work when acquiring technology, and by helping nonprofits use this technology even more effectively.

TechSoup Stock was created by the people at TechSoup, a trusted and popular technology resource for the nonprofit sector. TechSoup and TechSoup Stock are projects of CompuMentor, a San Francisco technology support organization for nonprofits founded in 1987.