IT Helping Hands

Save to Favorites

AcademIT is a nonprofit. We provide IT support services exclusively to other nonprofits. Our mission is to provide good engineering and excellent work for organizations making a positive impact in the world. We prioritize quality service and meeting members' needs, focusing on empowering nonprofits through reliable technology solutions. Many of our clients are schools and other community organizations.

There is always more work to do than we can accomplish. That's where our volunteers come in, bridging the critical gap between available resources and identified need. Our volunteers engage in a variety of tasks. Not everything is required of everyone, we want volunteers to feel good about the work that they do, which means sometimes they'll do some things and not others.

A lot of our work is done on site, things like installing software, setting up MDM on iPads, or collecting serial numbers of inventory, can only really be done in person. Some of these functions are more technical than others. Volunteers with technical backgrounds and experience might take readily to software and device setup. But anyone who likes organization and order can help with inventory.

A few of these tasks can be done remotely as well, though even then, it can help to be on site occasionally to see what's in use and available. It can be hard to write a guide for how to use a projector, without ever having seen the particular projector, speakers, and so on.

Communication:

We spend a lot of time on clarity and communication. We're supporting people who are teachers, non-profit employees, and always community builders. But they aren't often technical, so it's our job to help them learn and understand their technology better. As such, it's very helpful to be able to write clearly.

We're an IT group, so e-mail and cloud-based documents are the norm. We're happy to teach the specifics of our environment, but volunteers should be comfortable with e-mail, and with systems like Google Workspace, Office 365, or Zoho (we're a Google shop ourselves).

Location:

All our work is in the Chicagoland region. That's a large area, and we know that not everyone will want to go to Orland Park if they live in Waukegan, or vice versa. That's totally fine, there's lots of work to go around, and many hands to make the work light.

Background Checks:

Many of the sites we support are K-12 schools, so we do background check everyone, even volunteers. "Keep the kids safe" is a pretty easy standard for everyone to agree on.

The sort of task we're hoping for help with:

+ Inventory

+ MDM enrollments

+ Device resets

+ Software / TRMM installs and updates

+ Customer Service contacts

+ Custom coding, if they've got that kind of skill set

+ Documentation / Knowledgebase Writing

We look forward to working together to make these worthy community sites even better!