This year, PASS is introducing scholarships to support individuals who might not typically have the opportunity to attend the PASS Data Community Summit. These scholarships are available to two different groups, people working for charitable organizations (the Charitable Organization Scholarship, which includes a ticket to the conference) and another for students in software or mathematics related fields (this is the Futures Scholarship and includes a ticket to the conference and $2000 to help with the extra costs).

If you believe you fit in either of these groups, take a look and consider filling in an application, and this may be your chance to go to the PASS Summit this year.

As someone who has experienced both situations, I understand the challenges. Students often struggle to afford the costs of large technical conferences, making this scholarship a great opportunity.

For charitable organizations, sending staff for training can be a complex equation. Thes organizations typically work off donations and don’t generate profit. Of course, economically it is a remarkably similar concept to for-profit businesses. Organizations need to bring in enough income to be cover operational costs. The significant difference is what happens with other income.

In a for-profit company, part of your profits may be ear-marked for L&D (Learning and Development). If the company performs well enough, conferences and training is often possible, even likely. Of course there are a lot of factors, but let’s keep this simple. Make enough money, training is possible.

Charitable organizations work in a very similar way. The big difference is that by definition: no profits. Oversimplifying perhaps, but the next big chunk of their spending goes to their cause. And that cause is never going to be “send their IT staff to a conference.” Not even if they are a non-profit, organized around helping other organizations send people to conferences will internal people be more important than the external cause.

So, when a charity is deciding how much to invest in their staff training budget, it can be a pretty complex thing. That charity needs to be thriving, or they have weighed the costs of not training their staff. So, it isn’t unheard of to send employees of charities to conferences and training, but it is typically quite limited, and always weighed heavily against doing more charitable work.

And no matter the charitable cause, it never going to be trivial for the organization to say “instead of doing this more charitable work, let’s send our staff to a conference.” It just isn’t.