Meyer Memorial Trust receives many requests in its grants programs from nonprofit organizations for technology upgrades. We are including this information on our website to help organizations understand how these proposals are generally viewed at MMT.
MMT recognizes that technology can be a very useful tool that helps nonprofit organizations do their work more effectively and efficiently and views technology as part of the cost of doing business.
In many cases, MMT feels we can be most strategic in the technology arena by helping increase the capacity of intermediary organizations that assist nonprofits with technology planning and ongoing support, rather than funding individual projects at individual nonprofits. MMT has funded several of these intermediary organizations, including Netcorps, NPower Oregon, Groundwire (formerly OneNW) and Free Geek.
MMT does not encourage requests from individual nonprofit groups to fund the next iteration of hardware and software and/or system upgrades as we expect those would be accounted for as part of an organization's cost of doing business. Many technology requests MMT has funded were for technology expenses that were part of projects or programs that require technology rather than stand-alone requests for hardware and software.
We expect any proposal from a nonprofit seeking support for any technology purchases be based on a holistic technology assessment from one or more unbiased sources (so the recommendations are not written by a vendor who will profit from them). Proposals that are informed by resources like NTEN are usually stronger than those that aren't.
MMT expects that nonprofit organizations seeking its assistance with any technology purchases will take advantage of all opportunities to make the cost of technology affordable and sustainable within the organization's operating budget, including seriously considering the use of Open Source Software.
