All eligible nonprofits or organizations must be able to present documents officiating their status as any of the following:
- U.S.-based nonprofits: letters of determination indicating proof of registration as a nonprofit
- Non-U.S.-based nonprofits: proof of registered charity/nonprofit status in home country
- Governing agencies/international organizations: proof of status
Although we resonate with the missions of social good start-ups and companies, we cannot match volunteer developers and designers with for-profit organizations under the Fair Labor Standards Act. If you are a for-profit group interested in recruiting our university talent, please reach out to us at team@developforgood.org!
At the end of the program, we make sure to document all work before the handover.
Your student team will organize and deliver all design and research assets and, if applicable, guide you through how to maintain the build-out low/no-code website product to make edits in the future.
Each and every one of the student and mentor volunteers matched to your project team is carefully evaluated by our management team. First, our Product Leads manually review each candidate's application materials and score them across Technical, Passion, Resilience, and Leadership categories. Candidates who pass this evaluation are fed into our in-house matching algorithm. Taking into account your constraints and preferences, our proprietary algorithm matches your project with the best-fit candidates from our talent pool based on technical and social impact interest compatibility. The skills of your volunteer student team will be based on the technologies you selected in the services menu of your project proposal application.
If your project team experiences re-staffing or additional staffing needs throughout the 16 weeks, Develop for Good is happy to provide available new talent as needed for free upon request. Requests for contributors with skills outside of what is listed in our services menu may or may not be feasible.
We directly recruit some of the most talented, diverse, and high-potential university product and design students in the world for your project. Additionally, many of our industry professional mentors hail from Fortune 500 companies and rising startups.
At the same time, all members of our project teams are either part-time college student volunteers or part-time industry professional volunteers. That said, our volunteers are likely juggling other high-priority commitments, including coursework, internships, full-time jobs, and personal matters. Although we require our students to allot 5-10 hours and mentors 1-2 hours of work per week to your project by signed agreement, we instruct our volunteers to proactively communicate to you and each other about unavoidable conflicts that may arise during the engagement.
Sometimes, as often happens in industry, projects are blocked due to unexpected factors or circumstances that arise. While you and your student team will create project scoping documents together, these documents are not contracts or statements of work, and not all features described may be completed. Develop for Good is not liable for the outcome of your project, and we cannot contractually guarantee or obligate our volunteers to fully meet your expectations or complete the targeted deliverable(s) and expectations of a workable product, and you will not be entitled to any refunds as a result of failure.
Additionally, volunteer industry Team Mentor and 1:1 Mentors may or may not also be matched to your team to provide further support based on mentor availability.
If at any point you or Develop for Good decides to cancel the partnership, you may be eligible for a full or partial refund. A full refund will be administered if the partnership is canceled before our project team-matching period. After that point, prorated partial refunds are issued based on which week out of our 16-week engagement the partnership is canceled. You will not be refunded for any time that has passed before our engagement is terminated.
We will do our best to maximize chances of project success by rigorously selecting the most talented and passionate candidates, maintaining a 4-month program structure conducive to creating quality output, and equipping teams with curated tools, resources, community, and support. Our model has been intentionally structured this way because it has a proven track record of success. Please visit our Our work page for client testimonials and case studies of past successful projects!
After you click 'Submit' on our nonprofit project application, our Product Leads manually screen your proposal to ensure that your project utilizes technologies our community is familiar with (namely, the options listed on our application) and that there are no budgetary, legal, or ethical concerns with your proposal. Nonprofits that pass this initial review are accepted into our program.
The project scoping phase takes place during the first month of our engagement. During this time, your project team will work with you to mutually decide on a tangible technical deliverable to be completed by the end of the program. There is a possibility the deliverable may not be exactly what you described in your proposal, whether it's because the team identifies a more optimal solution, or because the team determines only a phase of the larger product can be feasibly completed in the given time frame. Once a mutual agreement is met, a Product Requirements Document is created before the project development phase begins.
Currently, our engineering services focus on delivering custom frontend code and setting up third-party tool and service integrations for Content Management Systems like Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix. Our students can incorporate these engineering elements while helping you craft robust, research-backed designs for your web product.
Should you require further engineering support, we’re happy to share a list of other organizations that can potentially better support more complex engineering needs.
Your nonprofit must have point-of-contact(s) dedicated to meet with our project teams for a ~1 hour sync every week throughout the 16-week engagement. This session is an opportunity for the point-of-contact to provide feedback on progress, answer questions, and ensure that the project team's work is aligned with your vision every step of the way. Team meetings occur weekly between Sunday - Tuesday. The point-of-contact will be able to indicate which days/times you're available on the nonprofit project proposal application.
Timely project progress also depends on your nonprofit's ability to provide your Develop for Good team with adequate materials and information. This includes things like brand standards, official color palettes and typography, existing CMS integration documentation, methodologies, etc.
Finally, we expect nonprofit clients to acknowledge or confirm receipt of messages on a timely basis (within 48 business hours). The success of the project depends heavily on everyone's ability to respond quickly and communicate clearly throughout the duration of the engagement.
Absolutely! Although Develop for Good is not responsible for maintaining or updating your project after the batch ends, we would still absolutely love to engage repeatedly with you. If you have a larger, multi-phase project, we would be eager to dedicate as many 16-week batches as you would like to work with us. Keep in mind that if you apply for subsequent project batches with Develop for Good to continue progress on your project, new project service fees of $1,000 will apply for each batch. We are also excited to take on multiple projects from the same organization concurrently. Think of us as your subscription team!
