How can Charities find Coders that are RIGHT for them?

Est. read time: 3 mins

Problem 1: Communication breakdown

A while back I was attending a Drupal Meetup by SFDUG where an enthusiastic American woman shared how charities and Drupal developers often get frustrated and finally get burnt out after building or revamping a Drupal CMS website during code sprints. During the presentation she had made for us, it became apparent to me that there are lots of charities who are no tech-savvy coders but simply enthusiasts who want to give back to their communities by setting up their own charity organisations. Very commendable but the reality is that these charities often fail and are therefore a waste of their precious time and energy for several reasons:

1. they are usually no entrepreneurs,
2. they usually don’t have a tech-savvy team behind them that are ready and willing to contribute to the cause they stand for, and
3. they usually have a very tight budget if they have a budget at all.

The key message from that woman was that there was often a lack of good communication between the people from the charity and the coders. The message I took away for myself was that if a charity wanted to build a website or platform of some sort to help them with their charity, there should be at least 1 person who is the communicator between the charity organisation and the coders to translate everything from the charity into a language that is easily understood by the coders and from the coders that is easily understood by the charity. To some of you this may sound odd but very often tech-savvy people are not the best of communicators in the world and, as you perhaps all know, non-tech-savvy people just don’t understand all the technical terms, features and processes delivered by coders. So that’s problem 1.

Be A Smarter Drupal Super Hero - Choosing Your Coding Charity-cases Wisely. From the Zoom Meetup of SFDUG on 2021-03-12.

Problem 2: No comparison platform

In moments of altruism I’ve found myself several times googling for platforms and individual charity organisations to help out. I wanted to put some of my free time to good use. I know I’m not the expert in the field in all of coding but I can do SOMETHING and I’m good at least at that something (Drupal, HTML, CSS, jQuery, etc). So why isn’t there a platform for coders or content managers to give back in terms of time. I admit that I couldn’t give back financially because I was struggling financially myself but I was able to make some time. Perhaps only 4 hours a week. Let's imagine for a moment that your Charity has ten coders who have 4 hours per week to spend on the development of a particular part of your charity website. Wouldn’t that be fulfilling for the developer and wouldn’t that be helpful for the charity? It so happened to be that there isn’t such a platform, similar to a job offering platform, where you as a coder could browse through all the different kind of coding jobs or tasks to do for those charities, or charities who are looking for coders with some specific skill or even better, scan charities to work for based on what they stand for, based on their cause and what they need to get done. Therefore I wrote this article to instigate like-minded people so as to setup a platform for Charities to find coders that are the right coders for them. Granted, it won’t work for every coder and it won’t work for every charity. So let’s start there. And if we started such a platform, it could be the sprout for most charities in the future.

Characteristics of a Drupal Super Hero Burnout - Spring-building an incomplete Drupal CMS website ... which took far longer than a day and still making the participating client cry!

Head start

One way to attract charities to that platform is by providing downloadable open source websites or also called “distros” like Bootstrap templates or Starting Drupal sites designed by us or by coders on the platform. This could attract charities and others to come to CharityCoders.com and see us as the authoritative player in the field.

So if you feel that this could be something, that this could deliver great value to other people alike and of at the same time to CharityCoders, get in touch. And if you have ideas or advice that you wish to share as your personal contribution but you don't want to get involved, great too: get in touch.

Posted by Davido VH on November 4, 2021