Over the past ten years, I've seen the nonprofit tech sector grow by leaps and bounds. We attend conferences, increasingly savvy clients come in already asking for Drupal or CiviCRM, and nonprofit-focused consulting is proving a viable business model for a rapidly growing number of organizations (including ours!). The technology, too, has evolved tremendously; the Drupal-based sites we consider "standard" today would have been impossibly expensive even three years ago.

Ironically, it's still easy to lose sight of the digital divide, even as we help nonprofits bridge it.

Lost in this sea of technical wizardry, we often forget that the vast majority of grassroots organizations and small businesses are, even today, unaware of the tools we take for granted. (How else do you explain the persisting existence of Dreamweaver?)

While dealing with the plethora of issues involved in getting Nonprofitable.org off the ground, I frequently find myself asked to tell a story. Whether it's an email to a new client about work we've done in the past, drafting the first three project summaries for this website's portfolio section, or the best way to describe our project management process in a contract clause, I'm often reflecting on our work these past few years and putting a story into the right words.

The stories I keep coming back to, however, are the ones that aren't usually told. We remember building a one-of-a-kind phonecasting system for Chicago Public Radio, and we remember pulling consecutive all-nighters to launch the number one political blog in Illinois during the election last year. What we don't remember are the organizations that came to us with a couple of thousand dollars, with a thousand dollars, with five hundred dollars, or with no budget at all.

There are a lot of organizations out there that are doing incredible, moving, desperately needed work. Many of them couldn't afford our services, and we couldn't afford to build them that $10k site for $500. Often, these organizations need web technologies to be sustainable themselves.

The technology shifts so rapidly, and every day we seem to be able to build more in less time than yesterday. None of the regular for-profit consulting shops in Chicagoland want to touch projects under $10k; the commonly-held belief is that they'll never be profitable enough to be worthwhile. As Nonprofitable.org gets off the ground, I can't help but wonder...can we sustainably build $1k websites today? Could we build a $500 website tomorrow?

How do we tell that story, and how does it end?