Technology at Your Service

New York organization aims to provide low-cost computer support and train new technical workers

As he sits at his desk in midtown Manhattan, William Mejia is providing much-needed help with computer hardware and software to a handful of charities miles away.

Mr. Mejia is basically a geek on call for his charity clients in several boroughs here —

fixing server glitches, reworking incompatible software applications, and taking care of other problems that can be handled by phone or by tapping into the groups’ computers from his office.

He works for NPower NY, a five-year-old affiliate of the national NPower network of nonprofit technology-support organizations, on a new effort to expand the number of groups that have access to low-cost computer help.

But that is only half of the mission that drives NPower NY’s programs. Mr. Mejia, who grew up in a Manhattan neighborhood of poor and working-class families originally from the Dominican Republic, was chosen to train for his position by virtue of his humble beginnings.

Forced to drop out of college, Mr. Mejia applied for admission to NPower NY’s Technology Service Corps after being laid off as a mailroom clerk four years ago. After taking free classes and completing an internship as part of the corps, he was ready to start a new career.

“It’s been a really good thing for me,” says Mr. Mejia, who plans to augment his technical skills with a business degree. “I knew a lot about computers when I started, but this sent me on my way.”

NPower NY’s approach — which marries a low-cost technology program for cash-strapped nonprofit groups with another that focuses on job-skills training for the needy — has earned it a strong reputation among New York City organizations. About 65 groups use its services to get technology help.

NPower NY, which makes about half of its $3.5-million annual budget from fees (the other half comes from foundation and government grants), charges its clients based on a sliding scale starting at $55 per hour for basic support. Fees depend on both the size of the organization and the complexity of the project. Along with helping groups plan for their technology needs and supplying hardware and software, NPower NY, like the other 11 other NPower affiliates across the country, teach workers at organizations how to load software and use databases and Web services.

Expansion Approach

But the cost of providing such services to each of those groups is high. As a result, NPower NY cannot meet the needs of the hundreds of organizations that might want to use technology to better fulfill their missions, but lack the means to hire their own technical staffs.

Barbara Chang, the group’s executive director, says she and her colleagues realized they would never be able to expand their reach unless they came up with a new way to deliver services. The problem, she says, was that staff members were spending much of their days on subways getting from client to client. When they got to their destinations, they would find a dizzying array of systems — young and old ones, different and mismatched brands of machines, several servers.

Not only did it take a lot of time to handle the different types of technology, but it also took people with a broad range of technical knowledge. That meant that it was impossible to send people who learned most of their computer skills through the Technology Service Corps, even though one of NPower’s main goals was to give its corps members real-world experience by sending them to solve technology problems for nonprofit groups.

“In order to scale our work up, we needed to create a hub-and-spoke model using remote technicians who could handle service calls,” Ms.Chang says. “It’s the only way we could grow without hiring more outside people and driving our prices way up.”

Enter the NPower Basic program. Conceived as a way to streamline how NPower NY works, NPower Basic was first presented last April during a competition to design the best business plan held by the Yale School of Management-Goldman Sachs Foundation Partnership on Nonprofit Venture. NPower NY beat out 500 organizations to become one of four organizations that won $100,000.

The plan came about both because of NPower NY’s desire to expand and because nonprofit officials surveyed by NPower told the organization that they wanted technology “that would be like turning on the lights,” says Ms. Chang.

“They want instant service, for things to work when they need them,” she says. “By gaining remote access to their systems, we can provide that.”

To make it possible for NPower to provide remote service, the group insists on installing hardware and software at each of its charity clients so that it is not dealing with an array of different technology problems. Much of the equipment has been donated by Cisco Systems and Microsoft, one of the NPower national network’s founding supporters. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which was formed by the president of Dell Computers and his wife, also made a grant of $200,000 to the new program last year.

Once the computers are installed, workers at the charities served by NPower Basic can call Technology Service Corps graduates and other NPower employees whenever they have a problem with the hardware or software they received.

NPower also provides organizations with advice on how they can plan for technology needs. In as little as one week, NPower NY provides an assessment of an organization’s needs, orders hardware and software, installs a system, gets it running, monitors how it is working, and organizes “help desk” support.

Organizations are generally charged $100 per personal computer per month, plus $150 for Internet server and network connections. Ms. Chang says fees typically run $600 per month for a small organization.

Beyond the prize money from the competition, NPower Basic gets money from a handful of New York grant makers, including the Starr Foundation, which contributed $200,000 in start-up money. Microsoft and Accenture, an international consulting firm with an office here, also have made large donations.

Understanding Charities

Foundation leaders say they believe NPower Basic will succeed because the organization has come to understand charities and their often technology-averse thinking.

“Nonprofits can hire people as consultants who understand information technology,” says Courtney O’Malley, vice president at the Starr Foundation. “But what you often can’t hire is people who understand that executive directors at organizations might not know how necessary and how helpful technology is. NPower knows that nonprofit people might not be as attuned to technology as they should be and works to take care of some of these things for them.”

By providing organizations with technology at a lower cost than they could get by managing systems themselves, NPower NY frees organizations to focus more of their resources on their missions, says David Saltzman, executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation, in New York, a grant maker that has hired NPower NY to provide technology help to its grantees.

“Lives are being saved because certain groups don’t have to worry about technology issues,” says Mr. Saltzman, who also sits on NPower NY’s board.

Scott Schaffer, executive director of NPower’s national headquarters, in Seattle, says that NPower Basic might catch on at affiliates elsewhere.

NPower NY leaders report that affiliates in Atlanta, Boston, and Washington have begun to ask how to create similar programs in their cities.

Mr. Schaffer suggests that the Basic program might be elastic enough for many uses. “For example, we’re working with NPower NY on a project that will help dozens of organizations crippled by Hurricane Katrina get back on their feet,” he says. “We aim to use NPower Basic as a platform as these groups rebuild their technology infrastructure.”

But Ms. Chang concedes that some bugs remain in the fledgling program.

For one thing, getting nonprofit groups to discard old machines has been difficult. Most groups feel it would be wasteful to get rid of usable, if not exactly optimal, technology, so they haven’t jumped at NPower NY’s offer to supply them with new equipment. That is one reason that so far just 10 nonprofit groups are using the NPower Basic approach, not the 15 or so that NPower NY expected by this point, she says.

Another issue for organizations has been the lack of regular face-to-face contact with technicians. Ms. Chang says she worries “that clients might not think we’re working for them if they don’t see us,” she says. “Actually, we’ll be working a lot more for them if we can help them from our offices.”

Price of Service

The price can also be an obstacle for some groups. The 55 clients that use NPower’s regular service — where technicians go to a charity’s offices — typically pay about $300 for four hours of scheduled service per month, half as much as the group might pay for NPower Basic.

“We tell prospective clients that the difference is worth it,” says Theresa A. Stroisch, senior manager of services and training for the NPower Basic program. “You’re comparing four hours of on-site service visits per month with 40 hours of support per week. We’re offering organizations a lot more for the money.”

One group that uses NPower Basic agrees. IMentor, a charity based in the Wall Street area that links needy youngsters with adult role models via e-mail, hired NPower NY to help set up its new offices last spring.

NPower NY aided iMentor in plugging in computer and Web systems, gave advice on how to route wiring, and introduced the charity to NPower Basic.

“We’re in our sixth year, but we hadn’t developed our own technology plan until NPower NY helped us do it,” says Caroline Kim Oh, executive director at iMentor, which matches adults with 2,000 New York-area students. “Technology is very central to our mission. We can’t have e-mail that doesn’t work. NPower Basic gives us a triage person at the help-desk level, plus a guarantee that a person will come on-site if they can’t handle a problem over the phone.”

Ms. Stroisch says NPower NY is moving ahead “as aggressively but as realistically as we can” to recruit more small groups like iMentor.

NPower NY has set a goal of bringing 50 new organizations into the NPower Basic fold by the end of this year.

But Ms. Chang says the group will probably begin courting organizations with annual budgets of $3-million, in part to create more internship and job-placement opportunities for Technology Service Corps graduates.

Museum Internships

One large group that is already providing internship work for Technology Service Corps graduates is the Museum of Modern Art, which moved into a refurbished space in 2004.

Outfitted with a new and complex computer system, the museum does not need help from NPower Basic. But it did seek to work with NPower NY after James Gara, its chief operations officer, sat in on a Technology Service Corps session.

Students in the service corps spend eight weeks in NPower’s classrooms, then work as interns for four additional weeks. Impressed with what he saw in the classroom, Mr. Gara asked four corps members to do their internships at the museum.

One of the museum interns, Shondell R. Scott, 21, who grew up in the Bronx, followed a friend who “bragged about fixing computers” in a class at NPower. Like Mr. Mejia, college costs forced Mr. Scott to abandon his studies. Now he learns about how to comport himself in an office, set up networks, trouble-shoot, and work on computerized cash registers in the museum gift shop.

Yvette Johnson, 24, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, also heard about the program from a corps graduate. She previously worked in a day-care job and says she is delighted to open up computers and figure out how they work.

“This really is a rare opportunity,” she says. “If I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to take care of children, who are way more complicated than computers.”

Ms. Chang says that people such as Mr. Scott and Ms. Johnson are what drive her organization’s mission. But to train more people like them — and to send them out to help a large number nonprofit groups — NPower NY will need to line up more money to expand the Technology Service Corps.

“This is a watershed moment for us,” she says. “We’re still playing in territory that has not yet been discovered, but we think this can work here and elsewhere.”