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Your First Two Weeks as an FFC Technical Volunteer

Welcome! Your most motivated weeks are your first ones, so this guide gets you from “accepted” to “shipped something for a real charity” fast. It complements the proving-ground competency modules (the what-to-learn); this is the how-things-work.

Week 1 — accounts and the lay of the land

  • GitHub:you’ll be added to the FreeForCharity organization. Everything ships through pull requests — nothing lands on main directly.
  • The repo landscape: the main site (freeforcharity.org), the charity site templates(single-page and footer-only — the starting point for every new charity site), and the automation repo (infrastructure workflows). Each repo’s README and CONTRIBUTING tell you its rules.
  • Conventions that reviewers will hold you to: Conventional Commit messages (feat:, fix:, docs:…), kebab-case folder names, accessibility checks passing, and CI green before merge.

How a charity site actually goes live

  1. A charity finishes validation and onboarding (a PM owns this).
  2. The template repo is instantiated for the charity.
  3. You customize content, imagery, and branding via PRs.
  4. The site deploys automatically to static hosting; DNS points the charity’s domain at it.
  5. Handoff: the charity learns how to request changes; you may stay its webmaster.

Communication norms

  • Work coordination happens in GitHub issues — decisions belong in writing, on the issue.
  • Say what you’re picking up before you start (comment on the issue), and un-claim loudly if life happens. Silence is the only real failure mode.
  • Charity contact goes through the PM/coordinator unless you’re told otherwise.

Your guaranteed first task

Look for issues labeled good first issuein the FreeForCharity repositories — they’re real, scoped, and reviewed kindly. The contribute page explains the label convention and links to the repos. Ship one small PR in week one, even a documentation fix: the point is to walk the whole path (branch → PR → review → merge) while stakes are low.

Week 2 — take a real slice

  • Pair with the volunteer who onboarded you on one charity task end-to-end.
  • Pick your track: webmaster, M365 admin, PM (see roles) — and tell us, so training (including sponsored certification exams) points the right way.
  • Add yourself where volunteers are credited, if you wish — recognition is opt-in.

Stuck on anything — access, tooling, or just “what now?” — say so early. Unblocking volunteers is the fastest charity-serving work we do.