How Nonprofit Employees Are Getting Free or Low-Cost Training, Thanks to a Few For-Profit Sponsors

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Eman Quotah

The five employees in TeamChild’s Seattle office knew they could work more efficiently by sharing their electronic files and database records. But no one at the legal-advocacy group, which serves Washington State’s troubled youth, had the skills to make it happen.

So Laura Ewbank, the office manager, took a class in networking basics and set up a file-sharing system for the office. Now staff members have access to a centralized database, templates, and client file forms.

Because the training was subsidized by the telecommunications company Verizon through its corporate foundation in New York, TeamChild didn’t pay a cent for it, nor for additional training Ms. Ewbank received to learn how to use Microsoft Access. Her new proficiency with the database software has produced significant benefits for her group. Staff members now rely less on their $60-per-hour database consultant, and can create portable document format files on their own, rather than paying for the service at the local copy shop.

As donors seek to squeeze more impact from their donations, some corporate foundations, including Verizon, have begun providing free or low-cost training to nonprofit employees — often, they say, prodded by a growing realization that their beneficiaries need help with such tasks as mastering donated software and writing grant proposals. For the charities that take advantage of corporate-sponsored training, the rewards can include not only a store of new knowledge and financial savings, but also more effectiveness in carrying out their missions and even a closer relationship with a grant maker.

The Cost of Training

The need for training, especially in technology skills, is acute at nonprofit organizations, and the obstacles to meeting that need are steep. In a survey of 300 nonprofit groups in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area conducted in February and March by Technology Works for Good, which provides technology services to charities, 67 percent of survey respondents expressed a strong interest in discounted software-training classes. Respondents also noted that they have difficulty budgeting and finding time for staff training.

Costs can indeed be prohibitive: Without sponsorship from a grant maker, a one- to two-day computer literacy course can run several hundred dollars per student, and the travel, lodging, and fees required to attend an out-of-town professional conference can easily cost more than $1,000 per attendee.

In addition, some charities are reluctant to support training because they feel that it improves employees’ career prospects more than it helps their organizations, according to the Technology Works for Good study. Nonprofit groups also may not want to spend money on classes that could be spent providing services to clients, even though they know that training could help their workers carry out their missions more effectively. TeamChild’s budget probably could have stretched to give Ms. Ewbank the training she has gotten free through Verizon scholarships, she says. But not having to pay was a boon, she adds, because it allowed the group to put that money into its services.

Inefficient nonprofit groups diminish the power of grant making — and their learning needs must be met in order to give philanthropy greater impact, say grant makers. Natalie Abatemarco, director of national community relations programs at Citibank, a New York financial company that supports charities and workshops for charity workers nationwide, says that her organization can see the results when it supports nonprofit training. “When we make a nonprofit better,” she says, “the nonprofit makes the community better.”

Building Skills

Hundreds of charity leaders around the country have found some of the help they have needed at Citibank’s annual “nonprofit days,” events that include free workshops on management and fund-raising skills.

The company sponsored the first event in Queens, N.Y., in 1996, and the concept has spread to New York’s other boroughs as well as to about a half-dozen other metropolitan areas. Citibank spends about $100,000 per year to sponsor all of its nonprofit-day events, says Ms. Abatemarco. In each city, the events are run by local nonprofit management-support organizations. Last year, representatives from about 800 nonprofit groups attended the events across the United States.

In addition to the training offered, charity workers come to nonprofit days to make professional contacts. A big draw, says Gail Koelln, development director of Queens Theatre in the Park, is a “meet the grant makers” panel featuring representatives from local foundations, including Citibank’s. “I know that’s a big reason why a lot of people come,” she says. In New York, the nonprofit days are co-sponsored by borough presidents, which gives charity workers a chance to bend the ears of their elected officials.

Attendance at the day’s workshops may most aid nonprofit newcomers and members of smaller organizations, who may be less knowledgeable about fund raising and nonprofit financial management, says Curtis L. Archer, executive director of the Rockaway Development and Revitalization Corporation, in Queens, who has attended three nonprofit days.

But Ms. Koelln, who has attended the Queens nonprofit days both as a nonprofit employee and as an organizer when she worked in the Queens borough president’s office, notes the content of the workshops may be less important than the chance they present for attendees to interrupt their daily routine. “You need that break to step back,” she says, noting how one instructor helped her to “look at the big picture when I was stuck in the details.”

Feedback from participants has helped the event’s corporate sponsor tailor the training it offers in ways designed to more fully serve the needs of nonprofit workers, Ms. Abatemarco says. For instance, at last year’s nonprofit day in Brooklyn, participants expressed interest in acquiring housing-development skills. This past April, Citibank held a free weeklong housing-certification workshop for mortgage counselors and other nonprofit staff members.

The Technology Bind

Nonprofit organizations know that technology can aid their work. However, even when charities receive donated software and hardware, they may lack the time and money to invest in learning how to use them. After Adobe, a software company in Seattle, received inquiries from recipients of its donated products about how to use them, it developed a nonprofit training program to help, says Dyanne Compton , Adobe’s senior manager of worldwide community relations.

The company sponsors low-cost training exclusively on its own products, including Illustrator, PhotoShop, Acrobat, and PageMaker, to nonprofit organizations operating in the two areas where it has its largest offices: Silicon Valley in California and Washington’s Puget Sound area, including Seattle. Backed by grants from Adobe, two nonprofit service providers, CompassPoint, in Silicon Valley, and NPower Seattle, offer subsidized, one-day Adobe courses for administrative fees of no more than $65. By contrast, a two-day Acrobat class at the Seattle-area for-profit trainer Ramco Software Training costs $428.

The Verizon Foundation’s “eTraining” program has a wider reach, both geographically and in terms of the range of technology courses it offers. In 2002, foundation scholarships provided 4,500 hours of training to 375 students in cooperation with 27 training providers across the United States. Topics range from basic word processing to database management to Web design to such nontechnology subjects as grant-proposal writing. Thus far this year, Verizon has spent about $80,000 on eTraining grants. This spring, the foundation also added an online course provider, CyberLearning, to the organizations it subsidizes, in an effort to make the training more widely accessible.

Without the eTraining scholarships, the instruction would be out of reach for some students, such as Sharon Fuller, information technology director for Seattle Midwifery School. Although Ms. Fuller’s organization values technology and training, she says, money it had set aside for training its employees at the beginning of the year dwindled as the result of rising expenses and falling revenue. So she and her colleagues turned to the free offerings at NPower Seattle, Verizon’s training affiliate in that city. She has taken free classes in FrontPage, Outlook, Access, and PageMaker, and seven of the school’s 12 staff members in addition to Ms. Fuller have taken courses free. Ms. Fuller says, “There’s no way I could have sent that many people for training on our budget.”

Putting Training to Work

Technology classes can pay off with immediate benefits. Ms. Fuller says a database class she took helped her office to mechanize its creditor payment system, which used to be maintained by hand. Still, not every lesson learned in free training sessions translates easily into concrete changes back at the office. Although Ms. Fuller recently took a course on administering Microsoft Outlook e-mail software, her organization can’t afford to hire someone to install the already-purchased hard drives her server needs to make a new e-mail network possible. “This is sort of the lesson of nonprofit life,” she says.

Before joining Queens Theatre in the Park, Ms. Koelln had attended a Citibank nonprofit-day workshop on strategic planning. As the theater’s new development director, she wanted to put what she learned into action, but she recalls thinking, “Oh, that would be nice, but we don’t have any money for it.” Eventually the theater raised funds to put together a strategic plan. But, says Ms. Koelln, it still lacks the time to devote to another priority, board development, a topic she also explored at the Citibank nonprofit day.

Ms. Fuller too has faced the problem of not having enough time to use the skills she has gained. She would like to make the midwifery school’s Web site more interactive, allowing online visitors to sign up for a newsletter or register for a class. But the understaffing inherent in a small organization means that revamping the Web site will have to wait. On the other hand, she says, knowing where to start on the project “brings it a lot closer to reality.”

Fringe Benefits

A one-day forum, such as the Citibank nonprofit days, is not a panacea for nonprofit management woes, says Mr. Archer of the Rockaway Development and Revitalization Corporation. But such events can “put the light bulb in your head,” he says, and help nonprofit managers realize what they need to move forward.

Participation in nonprofit days and other training may also help draw charities closer to foundations — and give grant makers a clearer sense of how to support their grantees. The suggestions of nonprofit-day participants have helped Citibank shape its grant making to be more responsive, especially in the area of community development, says Ms. Abatemarco. .

Nonprofit workers who want to locate free or low-cost training should query the grant makers that support them, or their local nonprofit management-support organization, about available programs, say charity managers. In addition, says Ms. Fuller, they should also look for help in corporate workforces. “Many companies have programs that encourage their employees to volunteer with nonprofits,” she notes. “So if you have tech companies in your area — or even large companies that employ computer trainers for their own staff — you might be able to get a volunteer to do trainings.”

Ideally, says Ms. Cirigliano of the Verizon Foundation, corporate-sponsored workshops will beget more instruction: If charities can see the benefits, she says, they may give training a permanent place in their budgets. Her foundation’s goal, she says, is not to train every nonprofit employee, but to give at least one person in an organization knowledge that he or she can share with colleagues and with other local groups.

That may be easier said than done. Ms. Fuller says that although information sharing by trained employees is a goal at her organization, in reality, staff members are too busy to pass on what they have learned.

Although her group has not been able to implement everything its workers have learned via their free training, Ms. Fuller says that the experience has expanded the organization’s vision. “Training gives you the ability to do things,” she says, “but it also gives you the ability to imagine things that you didn’t think you could do before.”

Have you taken advantage of free training sponsored by a corporation? What did you get from the experience? Share your thoughts in the Tools and Training online forum.