Is TechSoup Worthwhile for Non-Profits? - A Charity Spotlight

Dylan Hayes
7月8日
読了時間: 5分

TechSoup is a charity aimed at closing the digital divide in the non-profit and public sectors by improving eligible organizations’ ability to use digital technology to fulfill their various missions. To accomplish this, TechSoup’s main service is providing these organizations with commonly used business software and services, such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, at highly discounted (50-90% off) or free prices compared with the ordinary retail price.

TechSoup collaborates with major software vendors and regional organizations to provide these services in many countries, including Japan. TechSoup also provides direct expert guidance, assistance, and purchasable classes for using these technologies, and they recently launched a premium membership program called TechSoup Plus for organizations seeking more extensive support and guidance. Using TechSoup’s services has enabled many non-profits to save money by reducing technology expenditures, allowing them to pursue their overall goals more efficiently.

The Good: Evolution and Focus

TechSoup was founded in 1987 in California as CompuMentor and originally focused on mentoring schools and non-profits seeking to introduce digital technologies within their organizations. Since then, over 1.6 million organizations worldwide have participated in TechSoup’s programs, receiving goods and services valued at over 27 billion US dollars. Non-profit organizations apply to TechSoup through a simple documentation check to verify their eligibility, after which they can obtain all offered products at a discounted or free cost.

TechSoup’s charity has mainly flowed to small organizations, with 91% of partner organizations having an annual budget of under $2 million, and a particular focus on locally focused community organizations such as libraries and food banks. One specific targeted program that TechSoup has pursued is the Digital Activism Program, which seeks to make civil society organizations worldwide more “digitally resilient” and counteract the rise of misinformation on social media. In Japan, partners have included the Toshima Kodomo WAKUWAKU Network, which aims to combat child poverty, and the Miyagi SELP Conference, which helps people with disabilities find jobs.

Eligibility for an organization to receive discounted or free software/services through TechSoup varies by vendor and country, but a major principle is that organizations must be non-profits focused on some form of public good and practice non-discrimination across categories such as ethnic group, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Some vendors also require that organizations be smaller than a specified size and have no religious or political affiliation.

The Details: Available Software

The table above shows a selection of software offered by TechSoup in Japan, along with their prices compared to the ordinary retail price. These products serve a wide variety of purposes for non-profits, including word processing, accounting, spreadsheets, graphic design, team organizing, communications, and cybersecurity. The discounts offered to these organizations through TechSoup can greatly reduce the cost of using these commonly used practical programs, in turn reducing the cost of doing business.

But can they do better?

The Bad: A Checkered Reputation

However, reviews on Yelp and Trustpilot cast serious doubt on whether TechSoup actually fulfills its mission in practice. Numerous non-profit leaders who have sought TechSoup’s services claim that while the discounts are worth the registration, their support and customer service is of poor quality, that they have been unable to access the products that they ordered, that it is impossible to contact anyone at TechSoup about their issues, or that the administrative fees attached to TechSoup’s services make it not cost-effective in comparison to other non-profit discount programs offered by other charities or directly by major software vendors. This flurry of negative attention calls into question the integrity of not only TechSoup itself, but also its major collaborators: the Big Tech corporations that discount or donate their products in order to support TechSoup.

A Critical Question: Is Paid Software Really Necessary?

One thing that struck me while researching TechSoup is that most software discounts are offered directly by the original vendors, primarily major tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. This made me wonder: what’s in it for them? Why are for-profit, multi-billion-dollar companies clamoring to give away their products just to serve various small non-profits and communities? As a tech-literate person with more than a passing familiarity with the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement, I think major companies seek to acquaint as many people as possible with their proprietary products to present themselves as the ‘default’ option and to curtail awareness of free alternatives.

A discounted sale or giveaway today could lead to another sale tomorrow, enhancing the power of the major vendors. Additionally, the negative reviews many customers have given TechSoup suggest they may not be as different from their for-profit collaborators as they present themselves to be. In particular, the troublesome customer service suggests that serving communities through their non-profit customers may not be TechSoup’s highest priority, as they claim. Given these observations, I am also suspicious of the new “TechSoup Plus” program, which is supposed to provide greater assistance to organizations who want it, at a price. Are they just trying to degrade their existing service to encourage customers to pay the higher price for their new, premium service?

I also question the overall need for most non-profits to use the common proprietary software that TechSoup provides. While many proprietary programs are high-quality, I truly do not believe that most individual consumers or small organizations actually need the advanced features of proprietary programs such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, when decent-quality free alternatives such as LibreOffice or GIMP, collectively developed by programming communities rather than for-profit corporations, exist. I think most users would be hard-pressed to even notice the differences between these programs' features, yet people continue to buy proprietary software, probably because they are used to it and/or are unaware of the alternatives.

I think that some of the services TechSoup purports to provide are valuable, such as their mentorship programs and their discounted access to cloud-based services like AWS, Zoom Pro, and Box cloud storage (which involve physical infrastructure and are thus not easily replaceable for small organizations), but otherwise, I think that the ‘offline’ paid software is usually superfluous for most users. Also, the bad reviews call into question whether TechSoup even provides these services effectively in practice.

I think that TechSoup’s mission of providing technological improvement at a reduced cost could be fulfilled well by encouraging the greater use of open-source software, but yet nothing of the sort seems to be mentioned at all on their websites. Even if they do fulfill a positive mission, I am still rather cynical at the heavy involvement of major for-profit corporations in this charity, and the reviews only reinforce that opinion.

Sources:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/techsoup-san-francisco

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.techsoup.org

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