Managed service provider Envizion IT is gearing up to award a grant including IT equipment and services to a nonprofit organization in its western Michigan area.
The Envizion IT Technology Grant, now in its second year, was formed by the MSP as a way to give back to the western Michigan community, said Mark Veldhoff, CEO and founder of the Zeeland, Mich.-based MSP.
“Our organization is just over three years old, so we’re kind of a new startup,” Veldhoff told CRN. “But we were looking for the best ways for us to give back to the community, and a team came up with this concept of doing a technology grant. And it originally started out as, OK, let’s see what the nonprofit community needs.”
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At first, Envizion IT wasn’t sure what a nonprofit would want to invest in terms of their IT needs, Veldhoff said.ADVERTISEMENT
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“But really, the need comes down to the fact that there are so many nonprofit organizations out there that are just so far behind on their IT investment,” he said. “They’re just not putting money into IT. And that’s not because they don’t believe in IT. All MSPs have come across those customers where they just don’t believe in investing in IT. These organizations are just so busy putting all of their money into their mission and spending the money on the people that they’re helping. And so they just end up running out of money to actually spend on healthy IT.”
Envizion IT is an MSP servicing everything from user support to cloud environments, networking, and business analysis. The company partners with ConnectWise on the RMM (remote monitoring and management) side, as well as Microsoft Intune cloud-based endpoint management technology.
Envizion IT has just started accepting applications for its 2023 grant to a nonprofit. The winning organization will receive $29,000 in cash to be spent on IT, along with 75 hours of volunteer time from the company’s employees, Veldhoff said.
“Those hours are actually donated by the Envizion team,” he said. “They will work those hours over the next 12 months of the grant to do projects that are in their line of work, whether that’s something like Microsoft 365 migration, computer deployment, MDM (mobile device management) deployment, anything like that. They actually donate their own time to work on those projects. That was an idea that they came up with.”
In total, that’s about $49,000 can be used for hardware licensing or additional hours, Veldhoff said.
“If they need any additional hours from us that the 75 hours doesn’t cover, then we’ll start billing them for that,” he said.
This is the second year for the Envizion IT Technology Grant. The grant last year went to Community Action House, a Holland, Mich.-based organization providing area families with food, clothing, shelter, and the opportunity to build skills.
“Community Action House has a really unique approach to food bank,” Veldhoff said. “When people donate food, the organization boxed it up according to the different ethnicities. So they had an American or Asian or Hispanic food box. And people may not like it, or not use all of it, based on their style of cooking, leading to a lot of waste. They now have a full ‘grocery store’ that their members can come into and spend points instead of dollars. They get a certain amount of points per month that they can spend at this grocery store, and get the food that they actually want to eat. Stuff like vegetables, fruits, some of those healthier foods go for fewer points than boxed foods like cereal or other less healthy food.”
For the Community Action House, Envizion IT’s staff originally envisioned a “big bang” project, but that didn’t turn out to be the case, Veldhoff said.
“There was never just one project that just got us this big bang,” he said. “What ended up happening was, over the past 10 months, we’ve just slowly implemented IT efficiency and maintenance projects and just modernized their old IT. So there wasn’t one thing that you could pinpoint and say, ‘Oh, this saves them a bunch of time and money.’ It was the accumulation of all these projects over a year that really got them to the state that they’re in now.”
One big change for the Community Action House was the ability to improve staff efficiency to focus on their core mission, Veldhoff said.
“They had an IT guy that was working part-time,” he said. “He has now shifted all of his time into other parts of the organization actually are working on development projects for their mission.”
The Envizion IT Technology Grant is a one-year project for the winning organization. After that, the nonprofit organization can continue working with Envizion IT for managed services at a nonprofit discount rate, or is free to work with another provider, Veldhoff said.
“While they don’t have to stay with us, the grant has written so that the organization has to maintain anything that we implement,” he said. “The benefits of the RMM and the EDR (endpoint detection and response) that we’ve put in place, any new equipment, they have to continue to maintain those. That doesn’t have to be with us. They can get services from elsewhere or do it internally. Signing a services contract is not necessarily our goal. But if they want to continue to use our services, they can do so at our nonprofit pricing.”
The application process for the grant is open to nonprofit organizations in Allegan, Ottawa, and Kent Counties in western Michigan. The application deadline is April 30, with finalists scheduled to be selected by May 5. The final selection of the organization to receive the grant is scheduled for June 2, and that organization must use the cash, hardware, software, and volunteer hours between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024.LEARN MORE: Cybersecurity | Managed Security
Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor and reporter for the storage and the non-tech-focused channel beats for CRN. He keeps readers abreast of the latest issues related to such areas as data life-cycle, business continuity and disaster recovery, and data centers, along with related services and software, while highlighting some of the key trends that impact the IT channel overall. He can be reached at [email protected].
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