A nonprofit agency had been working on their mission for 60 years (way to go, guys!), and had never had any IT staff. Their hardware was outdated, collaboration and mobility of data took the form of phone tag and driving around with flash drives, and their email system was semi-regularly shutdown for spam. They couldn’t afford network infrastructure, but they needed their technology to work for them.

Enter <3IT. The agency’s hardware was brought up to date, email and data storage was migrated to the cloud, and the case managers could now bring a Chromebook with them to visit the people they served – safe in the knowledge that their data was secure, and they could keep fighting the good fight on the go.

There was a new program, an experiment. An executive had a wonderful idea: a computer lab and education program for adults with developmental disabilities, to learn work skills and life skills (and have a little fun.)

What did we do? Build a small fleet of computers with all the technology needed to remove the barriers between the students and the learning they wanted to do. Wheelchairs were fitted with trackball mice, students that couldn’t grip a mouse could paint to their hearts content with their fingers on the touch screens, the curriculum brought new skills, and emails to friends and family began to fly. Technology empowers.

Teen writers and artists had a fantastic community supporting them. They were social media savvy, they just didn’t have the time or energy the technical stuff that could really give their mission a boost. They needed to focus their efforts on growth, not managing their technology.

But how to help, when time and budget are tight? We set up a collaborative platform, and stepped back to provide advice, administrative guidance, and training. Sometimes you just need to be able to do it yourself!

Volunteer efforts had provided excellent, if intermittent, IT care for a local parish. Everything was lovingly documented, but no one was able to commit being solely responsible for the upkeep. Little issues built up, and no one had time to take care of it all.

<3IT stepped in to address connectivity issues, update user accounts and policy, join new machines to the domain, and tackle tricky email delivery issues that had been plaguing the staff for months. We provided an action plan for going forward and improving, but they got what they needed more than anything: dedicated time and talent to make a big push and get things sparkling again.