Giving back to charities with valued IT expertise
Optimation’s Barry Burke contributed his outstanding development and business analysis skills to a great cause at this month’s Charity-IT Hackathon in Wellington. The event gives cash-strapped charities access to much-needed IT expertise for free. Along with 40 other skilled volunteers, Barry spent a weekend delivering projects for four local charities, Able Pet Care, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Kiwi Community Assistance, and Nature Through Arts Collective.
Barry has helped organise the Charity-IT events since 2013. As the scheme’s principal BA, he helped facilitate all four projects delivered this year. His role was critical as he guided the groups of IT volunteers and charity representatives in developing business cases and creating solutions. He also mentored two students and showed them the ropes in a working environment.
The Hackthon team at work
The results were impressive. Nature Through Arts Collective started from scratch and got a complete web presence and online education, including a whole new website, social media tools and a fully designed logo. Able Pet Care had an automated payroll system built for their disabled employees, Big Brothers Big Sisters now have an alumni sign-up system for prospective donations and past volunteers, and Kiwi Community Assistance moved onto a more robust website back end. The three charities with existing websites also enjoyed the benefits of website refreshes and tune-ups.
The charities say this assistance is invaluable to their work: ‘The donation of pro-bono time and expertise for a charity is of immense value but is something we cannot purchase,’ says Dave from Big Brothers Big Sisters.
Charity-IT was founded in 2013 by Mel Bourke and Althea Carbon when they were looking for a way to give back to the community in response to their volunteer experiences working for charities whose operations could have been greatly improved through IT. The organisation is comprised of 8 co-ordinators and is based out of Wellington.
This year's Hackathon was hosted at Servcorp and sponsored by Snapper, Psoda, and Hell Pizza.
Find out more about Charity-IT in this video.
