TechSoup – The Go To Source for Your Nonprofit Tech Needs
TechSoup offers technology solutions to nonprofits through in-house resources as well as partnerships with some of the largest technology companies out there. If you learn about only one source of discounts, make it TechSoup – this is low hanging fruit that can really save your organization some significant cash!
We’ll look at some of the offerings TechSoup has in more detail in future posts, but for now here are a few of the more awesome offers you’ll find:
- Microsoft Office 365 – The basic packages, which include web-based versions of Microsoft’s popular office suite along with a number of other resources, are free. Pay a few bucks a month per user and you can add tons of extras like 1 TB of data storage using OneDrive (and that’s a LOT of storage!) and the full versions of Microsoft Office.
- Adobe Creative Cloud – Adobe makes a fine suite of creative software including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and InDesign – but they aren’t inexpensive. Thankfully, Adobe has a generous discount program for nonprofits which allows NPOs to secure suites on a per user basis for $20/month.
- Intuit QuickBooks – Intuit offers several of their QuickBooks products, including an online version, at significantly reduced prices for NPOs. For example, a single user license to QuickBooks Premier Edition is only $50.
- Cisco – Cisco has a stellar reputation for network equipment – routers, security appliances (firewalls), switches, wireless, and so on. They offer a number of these products at massive discounts; for example, the Cisco 2960-X (Model WS-C2960X-24PS-L) might run around $1k retail but is available on TechSoup for $320.
We haven’t even touched on offers from ADP, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Asana, Autodesk, Blackbaud, and scores of other companies!
On the downside, some of the offers have quite a few restrictions regarding what sorts of nonprofit organization they will assist, so your organization may not qualify (Microsoft is pretty generous, Cisco is more particular) and while they offer refurbished computers I haven’t been particularly impressed by the pricing discounts.
Point being, go check them out. If you have hardware or software needs they should be one of the first places you look.
Photo courtesy of Fotis Fotopoulos and Unsplash.