Weak Websites? Dull Databases? Let ESCH and UH Help Your Organization

Since 2004, ESCH has collaborated with the University of Houston to provide nonprofits with the opportunity to receive free assistance with their information technology projects. The program provides the students with the opportunity to work to solve real life problems and lets the nonprofits gain valuable improvements to their infrastructure.

Opportunity
For the Spring 2011 semester, the University will have around 80 students who, when teamed with an ESCH mentor, can work on about 16 projects covering such items as:

• Creating or improving your web presence and e-commerce capabilities
• Establishing your organization on social media such as Facebook
• Increasing web traffic by optimizing your site for search engines such as Google
  
• Creating or improving your database capabilities to manage donors, clients, etc.
• Selecting and installing new hardware and software
• Implementing accounting tools such as Quickbooks

The teams, typically made up of 5 students, have about two months to understand, design, develop and implement a solution and are expected to support and maintain it for a month after that. Consequently successful projects are small, focused deployments.

Action
We invite you to take advantage of this opportunity and submit a project for consideration.
To receive an application, please email our offices. If you are interested please either email or fax the form to the ESCH offices no later than Friday, January 14, 2011.

There are some constraints on what projects will be accepted:

• The project has to be of a sufficient size to be completed in two months. You may consider breaking a project into phases.
• You must have the people available to support the project. The teams will perform the analysis, design and development but they will need folks who can answer questions, make decisions, review the design and sign-off the deliverables for the life of the project.
  
• Students are not available to enter information or setup data in the systems. They cannot enter legal transactions and will not be part of a financial audit

Two additional things to be aware of is that we normally get more requests than available places, and the students are the ones that pick the projects so the more appealing they sound the more chance of being chosen!

Again, forms should be emailed to esch@eschouston.org or faxed to ESCH at 713-780-7764 before January 14, 2011.