A long time ago, Microsoft used to make donations to non-profit organizations and schools that needed things like raffle prizes or software for special projects.
The problem was that after a while, I was told that some of this software that was donated was used for purposes other than what was permitted by our contribution guidelines. In other cases, I heard that our contributions got us in trouble with certain other organizations that "competed" with the non-profits we’d contributed to. There was a lot of petty politics that made the process of ‘giving’ depressing. I’m sure a lot of other corporations have run into the same problem. We ended up HALTING all formal corporate donations to non-profit organizations because of the issues involved. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that an organization called Compumentor in San Francisco came along and acted as a central hub for issuing donations from companies like Symantec, Cisco, Intuit, Adobe, Business Objects, Macromedia, Lotus, BEA, Verifone, ULead and of course Microsoft. They manage who gets what, while corporations simply contribute to Compumentor’s stock of technology to donate. This provides the necessary separation between the non-profits and the corporations that wish to donate to them.
So if you have a non-profit organization and would like to get our products (or other technology) at a discount that would be palatable to a non-profit’s budget, and you have a readily available 509.3c filed (official non-profit status filing with the government) then all you need to do is go to:
There you will find a way to get technology donated, including our products.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 