As digital media and mobile tools become crucial for almost any community engagement effort, you'll need tech allies in your corner. Fortunately you have lots of options to foster valuable relationships with your local tech community. In an upcoming KDMC webinar, Lisa Williams will explain how to make and grow these connections. Here's a sneak peak of her advice.

"I think many local nonprofits, community groups, and community foundations already know hat they need tech allies in their corner -- but often they have little experience hiring programmers or other tech help," said Lisa Williams of Data for Radicals. "So often they can't make a decent evaluation of people's tech skills or feel confident about their hiring or contracting choices."

Her free Aug. 7 KDMC webinar Finding Geeks For Good: Connecting With Your Local Tech Community to Create Social Change aims to alleviate such anxiety and uncertainty, by encouraging local organizations to leverage one of their most valuable existing skills: network building.

"It's important to expand your social and professional circles to include techies. Programmers, web designers and other techies are already part of your community. And they can help you with your projects, or advise you in your hiring or project design processes.

"But the thing is, generally techies are shy. You have to reach out to them and go where they are; don't expect them to come to you."

Attend tech events. Fortunately it's usually not too hard to find local techies. In many communities and regions they frequently hold their own events -- meetup groups, hack days, and even local tech-community festivals or conferences.

"You should go to their events, even if you don't understand the topics," said Williams. "Don't worry that you might feel stupid or out of place. Techies are mostly friendly people, they'll appreciate your interest and willingness to learn about them. Just introduce yourself and say, 'I'm with a local mission-driven organization, and we don't know as much about tech as we should, so I'm here to learn. What do you do?' No one will kick you out. "

There are some nuances to this simple strategy. For instance, when you join local tech meetup groups on Meetup.com, look for events where the titles seem more project focused, where people are showing off their work -- rather than skills-focused, such as learning to implement some specific feature of a programming language or development tool.

The Code for America civic technology program has local Brigades (social and networking groups) in many cities. If there's one near you, be sure to join and attend their events. Similarly, if there's a Startup Weekend planned for your city, or a festival-type event series (such as Philly Tech Week), or other more regular meetups for the local startup community (such as Denver Open Coffee Club), chances are good that many tech companies and practitioners will be represented.

Supporting local hackathons by offering prize money, sponsorship, or meeting space can be a great way to gain attention and goodwill from the tech community.

Be useful. "Don't go hat in hand to tech events. You probably have a lot to offer that techies will value -- especially access to data, familiarity with the grantmaking process, and access to local people and organizations," said Williams. "Get familiar with the local datasets you have, or know about, and be prepared to help techies get access to data that interests them.

Approach techies as collaborators. "Networking with techies is a bit different from networking with other professionals such as lawyers and accountants. It's not really that you're hiring people to perform a service. Rather, your seeking to engage their enthusiasm, creativity, and insight to improve your projects and community," said Williams. "So talk to them about your long-term goals and early-stage ideas, and let them influence your plans. Don't just try to pigeonhole them as on-demand tech-support."

Seek and support diversity in the local tech community. Diversity is a core value for many mission-driven local organizations and philanthropic organizations. While much of the tech community is comprised of younger white males, there are many talented techies who are people of color, female, older, living with disability, etc. And there are organizations, programs, and events geared toward helping such people develop tech skills, find tech jobs, or otherwise put their tech talents to use.

Williams recommends supporting programs and organizations such as Black Girls Code, Hack the Hood, PyLadies, SheSays, and more.

Become a learning organization. Fostering connections with your local tech community can be part of an important aspect of your organization's culture. Williams recommends adopting the "learning organization" mindset: "Where everyone in your organization, from the janitors to the executive director, has access to the resources they need to develop skills to enhance their knowledge and skills while benefitting the organization."

This doesn't mean that everyone in your organization needs to learn to code. But it can mean that within your organization everyone understands the value of coding and learns something about the local tech community. And that if they desire to learn more about technology or build more connections with the tech community, your organization will support such efforts.

According to Williams, the goal of the webinar is to empower program managers, organizational leaders, and others with specific skills and tips for building useful connections with their local tech community. "You'll walk away prepared to explain why networking with local techies is a good thing to do and worth doing. You'll know how to talk to your peers and team about how you will get your digital act together. You'll learn how valuable it is to be the cool person who knows about tech and has all the geeky friends.

"You already know how to reach out and build strong connections for your community. But this time you'll be doing that with an aspect of your community -- the techies -- that you may have overlooked before."

REGISTER NOW for Finding Geeks For Good: Connecting With Your Local Tech Community to Create Social Change, Aug. 7, 11 am PT (2 pm ET).