San Francisco, CA – March 21, 2006— Nonprofit assistance provider CompuMentor, Home of TechSoup (www.compumentor.org), today announced that it will act as a fiscal sponsor for community organizing software and services provider CivicSpace (http://civicspacelabs.org) , which will be splitting its operations into a nonprofit and a for-profit unit.

Under the agreement, CompuMentor will provide financial management services for the nonprofit division of CivicSpace, including payroll and benefits processing, as well as office space. By having a financial sponsor, Civic Space will be able to work through CompuMentor to apply for grants that are limited to 501(c)3 organizations. This step will allow Civic Space to focus on essential program development and fundraising activities, without having to invest scarce resources into infrastructure development.

The nonprofit-to-be CivicSpace will focus on the development of the CivicSpace/Drupal community of implementers, vendors, and users. They will also work on expanding the reach of this platform to a very broad spectrum of end-user nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and technology providers. The for-profit entity will focus on paid development work, which will be contributed back to the Drupal core or as Drupal modules.

This is the first-ever fiscal sponsorship for veteran nonprofit technical assistance provider CompuMentor. Daniel Ben-Horin, CompuMentor’s founder and Co-CEO commented on the reasons for taking this step: “We’ve never been and never really wanted to be in the fiscal agent ‘business.’ But we love what CivicSpace is doing too much to say anything but ‘let’s do it’ when they approached us. We share with CivicSpace the goal of bringing innovative communications and collaboration technology to the nonprofit sector. As an open-source solution, easy-to-use, and cost effective, CivicSpace/Drupal closely aligns with our TechSoup NetSquared (www.netsquared.org) initiative and we are already using it for our Consultant Commons (www.consultantcommons.org) and other platforms. We hope we can connect CivicSpace, the platform and organization, with our wide reaching global network of key players in the nonprofit sector to help this new, vital organization grow and become self-sustainable.”

Zack Rosen, co-founder of CivicSpace, added: “CompuMentor is an ideal partner for CivicSpace as we establish ourselves as a sustainable nonprofit project. They stand out as a very well established and proven service provider in the nonprofit technology sector and are poised to make a huge long-term impact. We are excited to learn from CompuMentor and to collaborate directly on projects that fulfill both our missions while allowing us to leverage each other’s core competency.”

About CompuMentor
Based in San Francisco, CA, CompuMentor (www.compumentor.org) is one of the most comprehensive nonprofit technology assistance providers in the U.S. The organization conducts a range of innovative programs on the national international and local level. They enable nonprofits at various stages of technology evolution to enhance near-term productivity and build sustainable, mission-based technology solutions.

CompuMentor powers the nonprofit technology website TechSoup.org (www.techsoup.org), which receives more than 400,000 visits per month from across the globe. Its technology product philanthropy service, TechSoup Stock (www.techsoup.org/stock), has distributed more than 1.7 million technology product donations from companies such as Cisco, Intuit, and Microsoft to over 50,000 nonprofit organizations and freed up over $400 million for other uses.

CompuMentor also backs the TechSoup NetSquared initiative (www.netsquared.org), a cross-sector effort to help nonprofits adopt Web-based social tools to reach and mobilize their constituencies.
CompuMentor’s TechCommons program addresses systemic technology challenges by fostering collaborations between nonprofits and nonprofit technology assistance providers that will result in developing tools and resources.

CompuMentor has 120 staff members and a budget of $13.5 million.

For more information, visit http://compumentor.org

About CivicSpace
CivicSpace is a community organizing platform supported by an ecology of users, developers, and vendors.
It allows you to build communities online and offline that can communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations. CivicSpace enables bottom-up people-powered campaigns to operate on a more level playing field with more traditional top-down organizations, and, similarly, allows top-down organizations to leverage the power of grassroots organizing.

The CivicSpace/Drupal distribution now powers over 2,000 organizations websites. The top six CivicSpace/Drupal servicing firms now employ over 50 engineers total.

For more information, visit http://civicspacelabs.org.