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How We Support INN Members

As a team we exist to support our members.

We help our members become more sustainable by listening carefully to their needs, identifying common problems and then crafting solutions. We will never be a replacement for local investment in technology at member organizations, but we're committed to supporting our member organizations and working on shared challenges together.

This means that we will:

  • Identify common needs that a number of members share. (We are often unable to provide one-on-one assistance for free and instead offer paid consulting services to members at a highly reduced rate.)
  • Build platforms and tools to address these needs but recognize that each member is different and the tools we build need to be customizable to suit these needs. For example, with Largo, we save members time and money by aiming to eliminate 90 percent of the effort typically involved in building a WordPress news website because the needs of sites are very similar, thus freeing you up to spend your time and money on the last 10 percent that is unique to your organization (mostly look and feel, in our experience).
  • Invest in documentation, group training and resources to help members use and get the most out of the tools we build.
  • Negotiate on our members' behalf to get free or reduced pricing for common third-party software and services.

Information on how to become a member, membership standards, dues, etc., can be found on the INN website.

As part of their INN membership our members receive:

For members using Largo (our WordPress framework/platform):

  • Up to 10 hours of complimentary assistance with setup and configuration if they use our shared hosting.
  • Subsidized hosting currently free for one (primary) website in our WordPress multisite network on WP Engine (high-end managed WordPress hosting). We can host additional sites for a fee and reserve the right to pass on some of our hosting and infrastructure costs for members that want to host more than one site with us or that have very high traffic or other special needs.
  • Automatic updates to WordPress core, supported plugins and the Largo framework.
  • Free access to fonts from Adobe's Typekit library.
  • Site licenses for a number of premium WordPress plugins.

For members who want to use the tools we build:

  • Easy to understand documentation to help members get up and running with any tools we build and open source.
  • Individual assistance. We always recommend reading the documentation first (and helping us improve it if we miss something!), but if you get stuck we're happy to provide assistance and answer any questions you might have.
  • We love feedback and wherever possible we will prioritize feature requests from members.

For all members:

  • Discounted rates on paid consulting — currently $85/hr for members, reduced from our regular rate of $175/hr. We're able to help with a variety of tech and design-related issues, including website redesigns, editorial projects, news apps, etc. Get in touch if you want to talk about working with us on an upcoming project.
  • Open office hours every Friday from 2-3 p.m. ET. Anyone can sign up for a 20-minute block to meet with our entire team and get feedback on tech-related issues you might be facing (new project ideas, critique of works in progress, general tech/strategy/design questions, etc.). We know that sometimes 20 minutes will not be enough, so you can sign up for a longer block of time if you clear it with us in advance.
  • General tech help - Typically we try to focus our energies on solving problems best tackled at the network level (i.e. - issues that affect more than one of our members), but we understand that not every member is the same and each faces unique challenges from time to time. If you have questions and want to chat with us about issues specific to your organization, please consider signing up for our open office hours and/or reach out to talk about our paid consulting services, but when time and resources allow we're happy to answer general tech questions as they come up and help in any way we can. Email us anytime at [email protected].
  • Weekly Newsletter - Every Friday morning we send out a newsletter packed with interesting things we've ready that week, member projects, updates about projects we're working on, jobs at member organizations and, of course, GIFs and recipes. Check out the archives and then sign up right over here.

For developers at member organizations:

  • Support for open source projects. As a team we're committed to supporting members' open source projects. If you need help with something feel free to reach out to us and we'll do whatever we can to help out.
  • Help promoting your projects. We're happy to help get the word out about your projects on our team blog, the @INNnerds Twitter account, and via INN's other communication channels. Please share your stuff and pitch us guest blog post ideas anytime you launch a new project.