<aside> 📌 Find impactful and exciting projects to work on in collaboration with social impact organizations

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The process for finding nonprofits or social impact organizations to work with can seem a bit intimidating but with the tools in this document you can feel more prepared in making connections to your local organizations! Most often, you will be cold emailing but you can also ask your members, teachers, past employers, etc for contacts if they know anyone.

Here’s some things to keep in mind when contacting nonprofits!

  1. Small to mid sized nonprofits tend to be more likely to partner with you
  2. Create an email template that explains what Hack4Impact is and asks for a follow-up conversation about any problems they may be experiencing
  3. Plan to reach out to at least 3 times the number of nonprofits you plan to work with
  4. Keep a detailed list of those who you have contacted and who responded. You may be able to reach back out to them in the future!

The Initial Nonprofit Interview

Most nonprofits will not have an idea in mind for what kind of tech solution they need and you should not expect them to! Your job in the first meeting is to:

  1. Explain a bit about what Hack4Impact if
  2. Learn about their organizations mission and problems they are facing
  3. Inform them about the time commitment of working with a Hack4Impact team (Usually one semester with occasional check-ins between the project team and the nonprofit)
  4. Ask if they have anyone in their organization who would be able to dedicate this time to meeting with your chapter. If not, have them think about it and get back to you.
  5. The general project timeline (When should they expect the project to be delivered?)
  6. Brainstorm some potential technical solutions to the problems they are facing
  7. Make sure to tell them when they should expect to hear back from you

Requirements Engineering

<aside> ❓ Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process.

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During this initial meeting with the nonprofit you are going to engage in something called requirements engineering where you (the product or project sourcing lead) will ask the following types of questions to outline the requirements of the solution that you will be building.