Tech Donations Connect and Strengthen Domestic Violence Organizations
"In nonprofits, we are often taught to deal with inefficiencies because we don't have money. It is frustrating! I'd rather spend my time tending to clients than waiting for a computer to unfreeze," says Huong Le, program systems coordinator at Asian Women's Shelter, a nonprofit that offers culturally competent and language-accessible services for domestic violence survivors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Asian Women's Shelter was one of several domestic violence organizations to receive a Blue Shield technology capacity-building grant.
Managed by TechSoup, the grant seeks to strengthen the domestic violence field's information technology capacity through training, product donations, and a customized technical support infrastructure. TechSoup helped Huong assess AWS's technology needs by utilizing the information offered through technology planning webinars and a technology capacity planning guide. After completing that work, she met with an IT consultant to ensure that the tools and resources she identified were necessary for the organization. Huong obtained a donation of Adobe Creative Suite to improve the design of their website and promotional materials and updated every computer with the same donated Microsoft Office suite in order to minimize version conflicts and work seamlessly with other clients.
"Using technology had always been a challenge. We were less productive because we were unstructured and uninformed. Now we are more efficient, we are better connected, and we know we can count on TechSoup for information and resources. We don't only feel more connected internally, but thanks to this grant, we are connected to other organizations like ours," says Huong. "It is great to see that domestic violence organizations and other nonprofits share the same technology challenges. We are not alone. We too can make it with limited resources."
