By Neal Broverman
Altruism takes many forms—take Daniel Ben-Horin’s nonprofit, TechSoup Global. While fledgling organizations like Crowdrise and Jumo focus on donations of money or skills, Ben-Horin’s well-established 501(c)(3) facilitates donations of essential information technology to other nonprofits and NGOs. The beneficiaries—everything from local libraries to foreign organizations aiding women and children—can purchase hardware and software at about five percent of retail value, enabling them to function with greater efficiency at very little cost. Speaking from his San Francisco headquarters, the former journalist told us how TechSoup works, its genesis, and where he plans to take it in its 25th year.
Tell us more about TechSoup and what you do.
We consider ourselves a social change organization and our mission is to support the use of technology by nonprofits, NGOs and other civil organizations to accomplish their missions. We’ve served more than 133,000 nonprofit NGOs and distributed more than 6.6 million individual pieces of software and hardware. The technology donations we’ve helped get into the hands of NGOs represent about $2 billion in IT savings. We’re able to not depend on grant cycles, which can be tremendously enervating for nonprofits.
How does it work?
This system is an Amazon-like e-commerce site where nonprofits come and shop for the products they want. We have 40 participating companies in the United States, including Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Symantec and Intuit. It’s quite a sophisticated array of goods, but that software and hardware can’t achieve impact unless people know how to work with it. Technology needs to be supported and people need training, so we engage in a range of other activities like webinars, blogs and forums to help nonprofits use these donations in a way that supports their mission.
Do companies like Microsoft donate products directly to you?
They donate through us, not to us—we don’t take possession of the goods. On our website (techsoup.org) there’s a shopping cart and nonprofits walk through it and order what they qualify for and want.
Do you have longstanding relationships with these technology companies?
With many, but we’re always looking for new donors. That said, we started working with Microsoft in the mid-’90s, and most of the big companies we work with have been with us for 10 years or more. The longevity of the relationship is a big selling point when we reach out to new donors.
How did you come up with the idea?
The original idea in 1986 that got me going had nothing to do with products. The Whole Earth people had an online network called The Well, and I was really impressed with how these people were sharing technology. It was refreshing to see this information trying to be free, so to speak—people aiding and abetting the quest for freedom. [I thought] these people on The Well could be terrific mentors for nonprofit groups. I set up a technology mentoring system for nonprofits—CompuMentor—that some local funders invested in; we had a working program and somewhere in the early years, my media friends who had migrated to computer magazines were telling me about review copies of software—extra copies no one wanted. I said, “We’ll send around someone with a truck and collect these extra copies and give them to nonprofits.” We had about 200 titles and one of each—that kind of stock. Then we got a couple small companies that got more involved and then Microsoft gave us a shot. Our selling point to them was that they had a different system in place but weren’t happy with it. We said, ‘We work with nonprofits, we think like nonprofits, our identity is a nonprofit . . . all our interests coincide. You wouldn’t have to handle fulfillment, nonprofits will get software, and they’ll get access to Microsoft by using it.’
Have you noticed more requests from nonprofits during the down economy?
I don’t think so. I think our concern was actually the reverse. The average buy on our site is about $230 and for most nonprofits that represents 10 packages of software or more. For a small nonprofit that’s real money; even for a medium-sized nonprofit, it’s noted savings. We were concerned that people might say, “We don’t really need that latest version.” That didn’t turn out to be the case. Given the need to economize, the fact that our distribution continues to increase suggests there was greater awareness of cost-saving, and we’re certainly a prime vehicle for that.
What are some initiatives you’re embarking on?
We’re starting a project aimed at helping to create a much more resilient and resourced civil society sector in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake, and now the storm and cholera epidemic. Tremendous disasters have hit that country and when disasters hit, the first thing you need is not a Microsoft Windows license. Nevertheless, if you are going to do more than just stop the bleeding, you want to create mechanisms that weren’t in place before the disaster and will serve the society well in the not unlikely event of another disaster in the future. You need a strong civil society sector, strong nonprofits, organizations that can sustain themselves. That wasn’t present in Haiti; there’s very little infrastructure in the civil sector, and what there was had not obtained legitimacy on the international level. Our thought is that we can combine making in-kind donations available, gathering data about civil society, and making the data visible and freely available, and tap into people who are living in Haiti and, in many cases, are very technology-adept.
How do those people find each other and find projects that motivate them?
We have experience with that and there are ways of taking advantage of the human capital, which in many ways is the same thing that motivated me in 1987 with The Well. There’s this desire and willingness to share knowledge that resides in people, and with technology we can create the channels for human services and human capital.
