Help a Charity

We provide mentors to help charities and community groups in Greater Manchester think about how they can use technology to provide better services to the communities they work with.

Charities know a lot about the social and environmental issues we need to solve to make the world a better place. Our mentors want to use their skills to help charities embed digital ways of working so they can reach more people and improve their impact. . We put them together so great things can happen.

So if you’re someone who wants to use your digital skills for good, or a charity that wants help understanding how to use technology, take a look below and see how Help a Charity can help.

Become a mentor

How does mentoring work?

  1. We’ll pair you up with a charity that’s looking for help

  2. You have a call with the charity to unpick the problem they’re facing

  3. If needed, you can work with the charity over more sessions to help them identify what resources they may need and explore possible solutions

As a mentor, you won’t be building or designing anything for the charity that you’re working with. Your role is to help them clearly define the problem that they’re facing and offer tools and guidance to help them approach it.

You’ll need to be able to commit to at least one hour of mentoring per fortnight.

The charities and groups that we support are based in the Greater Manchester area, but mentors can be based anywhere.


The benefits of being a mentor

As a mentor, you will get to:

  • Explore and work on complex social problems

  • Improve your skills and get practical experience of strategic coaching

  • Learn about how charities work and the challenges they face

  • Become part of a community of experienced mentors, make connections and get peer support

  • Help charities deliver greater social impact


Tech mentoring skills

Most of our mentors come from the tech field, but you don’t have to have in-depth technical knowledge to be a tech mentor. It may also be helpful if you have experience in:

  • Service design

  • Project management

  • Coaching/mentoring


Apply to become a tech mentor

If you’re interested in becoming a tech mentor, complete our form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

You can also join our Slack community to get more involved in the work that we do and share your thoughts and ideas about using tech for good.

Get a mentor

We help projects, groups or organisations with a social purpose in Greater Manchester work out how they can use tech to increase their social impact. This includes charities, community groups, social enterprises and CICs.


How it works

  1. We’ll pair you up with a tech mentor, who is a volunteer with digital experience

  2. You’ll have a call with your mentor to discuss the problem you’re facing

  3. If you think we can help you, you and your mentor will work through the problem over several calls

  4. You will need to carry out tasks between sessions to make decisions and gather the information you need to solve your problem

  5. By the end of this process, you should have a good idea of how to proceed in order to solve your problem

Your mentor will:

  • Help you clearly define the problem that you’re trying to solve

  • Offer guidance on how to approach the problem

  • Identify what resources you may need to solve the problem

  • Identify possible solutions and next steps

Your mentor won’t:

  • Build or design things for you

  • Tell you what to do (though they will help you explore your options)


What we need from you

It’s really important that you can commit the time and resources to work through your problem with your mentor.

Please make sure you remember to turn up for your appointments. We may not be able to help you if you miss more than one.


Apply to get a tech mentor

If you think that your organisation could benefit from working with a tech mentor, complete our form and we’ll get in touch.

We have lots of people who may be able to help but we can’t promise we will be able to solve your problem. We are mostly volunteers so we may take a while to get back to you.

 

Share this page far and wide! We want to make sure we can help as many people as possible.

Supported by: 10GM, Bolton – Bolton CVS, Manchester – Macc, Oldham – Action Together, Rochdale – Action Together, Salford – Salford CVS, Tameside Action Together, The Federation, Co-op Foundation.