About SmallSpark
Reliable technology should not be available only to people and organizations large enough to maintain an internal IT department.
SmallSpark was created to help close that gap. We provide accessible, dependable technology support to nonprofits, underserved small businesses, seniors, families, and community-serving organizations whose ability to operate, grow, and participate increasingly depends on technology.
Our model brings together direct IT services, strategic technology guidance, digital-access initiatives, and pathways into the technology workforce. We aim to provide the expertise of an internal IT department, the perspective of a trusted technology advisor, and the commitment of a long-term community partner.
SmallSpark began operating on a limited basis in 2024. We are now building the relationships, systems, and community presence required to become an established and enduring technology resource.
The Opportunity
SmallSpark is seeking a part-time Community Outreach Technician to help people and organizations understand their technology needs, discover how SmallSpark can help, and move confidently from an initial conversation toward meaningful support.
This is a technical, relationship-centered position combining:
- Community outreach and relationship development.
- Onsite technology discovery and assessment.
- Clear, consultative communication.
- Lead qualification and organized follow-through.
- CRM and opportunity management.
- Selected direct technical support.
The person in this role will often be the first meaningful interaction someone has with SmallSpark. That makes this one of the organization’s most important positions.
The right person will bring genuine technical understanding—not simply a memorized pitch. They should be able to walk into a small business or nonprofit, ask intelligent questions, notice risks or inefficiencies, distinguish symptoms from underlying issues, and explain what they find in language that earns trust.
They must be equally comfortable with technology and people.
This is not a traditional salesperson who passes every technical question to someone else. It is also not a technician who waits for a ticket to arrive. It is a hybrid role for someone who can create the conversation, understand the environment, recognize where help is needed, and carry the relationship through its next steps.
What You Will Do
Conduct Initial Technology Assessments
- Offer and conduct introductory onsite or remote technology assessments for prospective SmallSpark clients.
- Learn how an organization currently uses technology, what is working, what is creating friction, and what concerns may have gone unrecognized.
- Ask informed questions about areas such as:
- Devices, operating systems, and user access.
- Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and business applications.
- Email, identity management, passwords, and multifactor authentication.
- Networks, Wi-Fi, firewalls, internet service, and remote access.
- Backups, data storage, recovery readiness, and business continuity.
- Endpoint protection, patching, cybersecurity practices, and vendor management.
- Recurring support issues, workflows, technology costs, and future needs.
- Observe the environment carefully and identify potential risks, gaps, inefficiencies, or opportunities for improvement.
- Listen to the problems a client describes, investigate beyond the immediate symptom, and identify the probable issue at its core.
- Explain technical findings accurately in language appropriate to the person receiving them.
- Document findings clearly and recommend an appropriate next step.
- Recognize when deeper investigation or specialized expertise is required and coordinate the appropriate handoff.
- Avoid overstating certainty, promising unsupported outcomes, or recommending services that are not genuinely useful.
These assessments are intended to create clarity and establish whether SmallSpark can help. They are not intrusive security audits, and no system access, testing, configuration change, or remediation should occur without proper authorization.
Build Community and Client Relationships
- Identify nonprofits, small businesses, community organizations, professional networks, and other prospective clients or partners that may benefit from SmallSpark’s work.
- Research organizations before contacting them and approach each conversation with a meaningful reason for reaching out.
- Initiate contact through in-person visits, phone calls, email, referrals, networking, community events, and other appropriate channels.
- Introduce SmallSpark’s services and mission in a clear, natural, and credible way.
- Build relationships with people who may become clients, refer others, collaborate on programs, support the mission, or strengthen SmallSpark’s presence in the community.
- Represent SmallSpark at selected conferences, resource fairs, networking events, and community gatherings.
- Serve as a responsive and knowledgeable first point of contact for prospective clients and partners.
- Help people feel understood rather than sold to.
Qualify and Develop Opportunities
- Determine whether a prospective relationship represents a genuine fit for SmallSpark’s services, mission, or partnership goals.
- Help prospective clients move from initial interest through discovery, assessment, recommendation, proposal, engagement, referral, or another appropriate outcome.
- Identify the decision-makers, needs, priorities, constraints, timing, and next steps associated with each opportunity.
- Follow up thoughtfully and consistently without creating pressure.
- Coordinate internal technical input when a prospective engagement requires deeper expertise.
- Help translate technical needs into a sufficiently clear scope for SmallSpark to evaluate and respond.
- Contribute insight about recurring needs, objections, service gaps, and opportunities emerging from the community.
This role is expected to generate and advance qualified opportunities. Success will be based on relevance, trust, technical accuracy, follow-through, and resulting impact—not the raw number of names collected or messages sent.
Maintain the CRM and Follow Through
- Record outreach, conversations, assessments, findings, commitments, and next steps accurately in SmallSpark’s CRM.
- Maintain a current and useful view of prospective clients, referral relationships, community contacts, and active opportunities.
- Ensure that promising conversations do not disappear because of inconsistent documentation or follow-up.
- Coordinate scheduling, reminders, information gathering, and early-stage handoffs.
- Close out opportunities appropriately when there is no current fit while preserving the relationship respectfully.
- Provide concise updates on outreach activity, completed assessments, pipeline movement, recurring needs, and areas requiring additional support.
The CRM should support relationships rather than replace them. Accurate records matter because they allow SmallSpark to follow through, learn, and serve people consistently.
Provide Appropriate Technical Support
Depending on experience and the needs of a particular engagement, the Community Outreach Technician may also:
- Resolve clearly scoped, lower-complexity technical issues.
- Assist with device, account, application, or service setup.
- Support client onboarding and documentation.
- Help implement approved security and operational improvements.
- Gather technical information for more advanced work.
- Coordinate with other technicians, vendors, or organizational leadership.
The person in this role will not be expected to know everything. They will be expected to understand their limits, communicate them honestly, protect the client, and involve the right person when necessary.
Support SmallSpark’s Mission
- Participate in selected outreach efforts serving nonprofits, seniors, families, and underserved small businesses.
- Help connect people with appropriate services, resources, programs, or community partners.
- Support mission-focused events, workshops, assessments, and digital-access initiatives when mutually scheduled.
- Listen carefully to the communities SmallSpark serves and bring those insights back into the organization.
- Treat every person with patience, dignity, discretion, and respect—regardless of their technical confidence, resources, or ability to become a paying client.
- Help SmallSpark connect the sustainability of its direct IT services with its broader community purpose.
What This Role Is—and Is Not
This role carries real responsibility for helping SmallSpark develop relationships, identify needs, create qualified opportunities, and convert early conversations into meaningful outcomes.
The Community Outreach Technician will not be expected to:
- Use aggressive or high-pressure sales tactics.
- Pursue every possible contact regardless of fit.
- Promise services, timelines, prices, or outcomes without authorization.
- Diagnose complex environments with false certainty.
- Perform advanced work beyond their experience or approved scope.
- Carry SmallSpark’s entire growth strategy or revenue responsibility alone.
- Treat community relationships as transactions.
The strongest person for this role will combine initiative with restraint. They will know when to move an opportunity forward, when to ask another question, when to bring in deeper expertise, and when the most responsible answer is that SmallSpark is not the right fit.
What Success Looks Like
During the first six to twelve months, this person will help SmallSpark:
- Establish a consistent and credible community outreach presence.
- Complete useful introductory technology assessments that reveal real needs and appropriate next steps.
- Build a growing pipeline of qualified client, referral, partnership, and mission opportunities.
- Convert promising conversations into assessments, proposals, service engagements, referrals, or community relationships.
- Maintain accurate and actionable CRM records.
- Improve follow-through between initial contact and service delivery.
- Increase awareness of SmallSpark among nonprofits, small businesses, community organizations, and professional networks.
- Develop a clearer picture of the technology needs present across the communities SmallSpark serves.
- Earn a reputation as a responsive, technically capable, and people-centered technology partner.
- Strengthen the relationship between SmallSpark’s direct services, organizational sustainability, and community impact.
Who We Are Looking For
There is no single required professional path for this position. Strong candidates may come from IT support, managed services, field services, systems administration, technical consulting, customer success, community outreach, or another client-facing technology role.
Technical capability is essential. Outreach or sales experience is valuable, but it does not replace the ability to understand and discuss a real technology environment.
Strong candidates will bring:
- Practical experience diagnosing and resolving common technology problems.
- A working understanding of identity and access, multifactor authentication, endpoints, business applications, networking, backups, cybersecurity fundamentals, and cloud productivity systems.
- The ability to hear a loosely described problem and ask the questions needed to identify its likely cause.
- The ability to explain technical concerns accurately without overwhelming or talking down to someone.
- Confidence initiating conversations and building relationships with people they do not already know.
- A warm, credible communication style that does not feel scripted or transactional.
- Strong organization, documentation, judgment, and follow-through.
- Comfort using—or quickly learning—a CRM and maintaining accurate records.
- The initiative to identify appropriate prospects and develop an outreach approach.
- The maturity to know what they understand, what they need to investigate, and when to involve someone with deeper expertise.
- Genuine alignment with SmallSpark’s mission and respect for the people and organizations it serves.
- Comfort contributing to an early-stage organization where important systems and practices are still being refined.
Experience supporting small businesses or nonprofits, working in a managed-service environment, conducting technology discovery, qualifying service opportunities, or representing an organization in the community would be especially valuable.
A degree or specific certification is not required. Demonstrated technical judgment, communication ability, integrity, and follow-through matter more than credentials alone.
Contractor Structure and Working Relationship
This is an independent-contractor engagement anticipated to involve approximately 5–20 hours per week, depending on current opportunities, project needs, and the contractor’s availability. No minimum number of hours is guaranteed.
Within agreed responsibilities and service standards, the contractor will have substantial discretion over:
- Their working schedule.
- How they organize and sequence their outreach.
- Which appropriate prospective relationships they identify.
- How they develop those relationships.
- The route and timing of local outreach.
- The methods they use to achieve agreed outcomes.
There is no fixed daily shift. Some meetings, assessments, events, and client interactions will require coordination around another person’s availability.
The contractor must use SmallSpark’s approved systems where required for secure communication, CRM documentation, assessments, service coordination, and protection of client information. They must also follow SmallSpark’s technical, ethical, privacy, security, and brand standards when representing the organization.
Regular in-person outreach and client visits within an agreed Colorado service area will be part of the engagement. The contractor must have reliable transportation or another dependable way to reach local sites.
The contractor may provide services to other organizations, subject to confidentiality, data-security, and conflict-of-interest obligations.
Compensation
- $20 per hour, paid for approved and documented contract time.
- Approximately 5–20 hours per week, with no guaranteed minimum.
- Preapproved project expenses will be reimbursed according to the independent-contractor agreement.
- As an independent contractor, the selected individual is responsible for applicable taxes, insurance, equipment, and other business obligations except where expressly stated in the agreement.
- This engagement does not include employee health, retirement, paid-leave, unemployment, or workers’ compensation benefits.
Growth & Impact Incentive
In addition to hourly contract fees, the Community Outreach Technician will be eligible for a quarterly Growth & Impact Incentive of up to 10% of the hourly contract fees earned during that quarter.
The incentive will be based on a written scorecard agreed upon in advance. Considerations may include:
- Completion of useful, well-qualified technology assessments.
- Qualified opportunities progressing into proposals, service engagements, referrals, or partnerships.
- Quality and mission alignment of the relationships developed.
- Technical accuracy and responsible identification of client needs.
- Consistent follow-through and reliable CRM stewardship.
- Professional representation of SmallSpark.
- Meaningful contributions to community service and mission outcomes.
The incentive is not paid simply for collecting names or producing unqualified leads. No one will be rewarded for pressuring a prospective client, overstating a concern, recommending unnecessary work, or pursuing an engagement that is not in the client’s or SmallSpark’s best interest.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis through September.
SmallSpark welcomes applicants whose professional backgrounds, community connections, and lived experiences deepen our understanding of the people and organizations we serve. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.
SmallSpark is a Colorado-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Learn more at smallspark.org.
Pay: From $20.00 per hour
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Denver, CO 80202
