Free For Charity

While in the technical process of setting up free charity hosting we discovered than many small or new organizations are stuck well below the need for full web hosting. As an example assistance with setting up a charity email address with Microsoft at the charities domain name is needed as a first step. FFC is has refactored our charity on-boarding process to address email and other basic communication needs with free guides and hosted on our project site ffcdomains.org

As a follow on need we identified that most charities and pre 501c3 non profits do not create an email because they fear buying the wrong domain name or do not want to pay for a domain name. We now cover these costs and help with buying the domain name for supported charities.

FFC assists by paying the full cost of the .org domain name if available. This reduces a charity direct hard cost instantly and increases adoption of many other formal IT systems as a very low cost per charity (~$16.50 per year)

FFC is also employing a premium subscription to volunteer match to source additional IT project managers, IT Webmasters, and Graphic designers to expand how many charities we can support at one time. as well as working on partnerships with other charities and technology vendors for additional services not offered by Free For Charity.

We already have the accounts set up in eNOM to provide enterprise level domain procurement and by using WHMCS with coupon codes specifically for our 501c3 and pre 501c3 organizations we can provision full hosting and domain names automatically without staff input.

For our training programs we help charities navigate through the MS-900 Microsoft training and certification program while pursuing their "Microsoft 365 Grants". We further provide access to the Divi and WPMUDEV website design and maintenance product that each come with their own vendor provided training.

While a lot has been accomplished on the IT hosting side and to a certain degree the IT project management and consulting side, one element of FFC has not even been started. The Free For Charity directory showing services by category that are actually entirely free to non-profits has not been developed yet. There are on the market a number of regional consulting directories traditionally where the consultant is a for-profit entity and pays money to be marketed to other nonprofits. We seek to produce an entirely free directory with unbiased empirical metrics showing what resources are available to nonprofits. By reducing the high cost often several hundred dollars a year to be listed in these directories a broader suite of available high-quality professionals can be made available to the nonprofit community at a national level. However to accomplish this will require additional code and hosting resources that have a hard cost not currently budgeted within the freeforcharity budget. We are seeking grant opportunities to overcome these issues.