Can a Not-for-profit organization afford free services?

Not-for-profit organizations are always struggling with paying for the services to manage their business operations.

They are in operation to deliver a service to the community and typically do an excellent job at this, providing essential services. When it comes to business operations, however, they often do poorly. Funding organizations will provide funding for delivery of service, for staring new initiatives, but not for office operations. So many NFPs look to get these services for free. They attempt to get skilled people to contribute their time, so that it does not cost the organization anything.

The services that they get are often hit and miss (they get what the volunteer can give) and inconsistent. Each volunteer will approach the issue differently and often any learning or documentation that is collected is lost or not made available to the next volunteer.

Business operations are no different in small business and NFPs. They need to run their business effectively. A consistent level of service is required in the office as well as to the clients. However, there is often a huge gap between the levels of service delivered. The clients get good service (that is why the organization was started and why people volunteer). The office gets second class service (not a priority for office staff or volunteers).

I see this problem in IT service on a regular basis. Computers are essential to running a business today (as well as NFPs). They can provide excellent value if they function properly. They can create tremendous stress when they don't. One of the major factors in quality of service is consistency of maintenance. If computers are not maintained consistently, they do not perform. The end result is frustration, ongoing service problems and difficulty in maintaining the level of service that the business or NFPs is in operation to provide.

Using volunteers for this type of service will cost an NFP more money that they save in the maintenance of their equipment. Their stress will go up, their productivity will go down, they will spend excessive amounts of time trying to find a good volunteer to maintain their equipment. They will suffer from the inconsistency as each volunteer solves problems a different way, and creates new ones in the process.

If you want to focus on delivering the service that your NFP is in operation to do, look at whether you can afford to get free technical support.

For some ideas on how to do that, check out my website at http://www.thevirtualcio.ca/. I don't fix computers. I help organizations to make more effective use of them.