INN has recently compiled a list of tech tools and services that offer special deals to nonprofit organizations. Here are a few of the tools and services from the list that our team uses:
Balsamiq is a tool for creating mockups and wireframes for websites that has some really nice collaborative features to allow you to share your designs and get feedback from your team. They offer free desktop licenses for their software to nonprofit organizations and open source projects or you can get a free year of their cloud-based wireframing tool. Learn more.
Buffer is a tool for scheduling social media posts that is very handy if you want to load up a bunch of posts all at once but have them trickle out over the course of the day. They have a free basic plan but offer nonprofit organizations 50% off of their paid plans which have a number of more advanced features. Learn more.
GitHub is a popular place to share and collaborate on code that is widely used in the open source and journalism community. The service is free to use unless you need to keep repositories private but they also provide free bronze plans (up to 10 private repositories, normally $25/month) for use by non‑profit organizations and charities. To take advantage of this program you must provide proof of 501(c)(3) status. Learn more.
Google offers nonprofits free Google Apps for Business accounts (email, calendar and cloud storage) through their nonprofit program. They also offer a free monthly allowance of search ads (called AdWords) through their Google Grants program and special functionality tailored to nonprofits on YouTube. Learn more.
Hipchat is a simple, but very powerful group chat application that allows you to create private or public chatrooms and also video chat, audio chat and screen share with your team members. It also has a bunch of add-ons that allow you to connect other services to your chat and receive notifications (we like to use it to keep tabs on our github repos. They offer free licenses to charitable organizations. Learn more.
MailChimp is a popular email list management tool that INN and many of our members use for email newsletters. They have a pretty generous free tier (12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers monthly) but once you outgrow that they also offer nonprofits a 15% discount. Learn more.
Those are a few of our favorites, but be sure to check out the complete list and if you know of any others we should add, get in touch and let us know or drop a comment below with the details.