Community Tech Consulting

Need Tech Training to Scale your Business?

Community Tech Consultants (CTCs) offer FREE one-on-one training to help Detroit businesses get more comfortable with and use technology to improve their business. The Community Tech Consulting program is a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Jefferson East, Inc. and Live6 Alliance.

Local Community Tech Consultants at JEI and Live6 are self-taught, tech-savvy Detroiters who have demonstrated that they have the resourcefulness needed to figure out solutions to business’ technology challenges, and the patience to teach business owners—or their staff—how to use technology in a supportive way.

University of Michigan Community Tech Consultants are trained by the Local CTCs and by U-M staff and faculty. They offer specialty services that they learned as part of their coursework at the University, but may not have experience implementing yet. The result is a powerful exchange of social capital that builds Detroit’s digital infrastructure and keeps knowledge in the community.

Services

Community Tech Consultants increase Detroit entrepreneurs’ digital abilities and comfort with technology by providing you with free, one-on-one training in a relaxed, accessible space. There is no limit to the number of appointments you can make, so long as you keep your appointments and complete the in-between work needed to advance the work.

Some of the most popular things that Community Tech Consultants can teach you to do:

• Update websites, by changing text, adding images, or improving Search Engine Optimization
• Create social media images 
• Automate social media posts
• Set up automated templates in Gmail or other systems
• Retrieve data from an app or platform and organize it in a way you can find
• Use DocuSign to sign loan documents
• Use ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM, or other AI agents
• Improve User Experience (UX) on your website

How it Works

There’s no upselling. Services are grant-funded as part of the larger research project, and offered at no-cost to businesses.

1. Schedule Online. Book an intake appointment with:
   • Martina or Donovan for an in-person meeting at Live6 Alliance, or
   • Diamond at Jefferson East, Inc.
     
2. Intake Meeting. Before or during your first meeting, you will complete a Business Intake Form (to get you set up as a client in our system) and do a comprehensive diagnostic interview (kind of like the 30-point inspection from your mechanic). At the end of this interview, your CTC will collaborate with you to establish a scope of work and prioritize that work. If what you need is a one-time fix, they will take care of it. If it’s something that will come up again, they are going to teach you how to do it yourself in the moment (if it’s easy) or at a follow-up meeting (if they need to create documentation to teach you how to do it again).
   
3. Recommendations and Implementation. Before your second meeting, your CTC will do enough research to give you options about how to resolve your tech challenge and prepare recommendations or create how-to materials to teach you how to do it yourself. Depending on the complexity of the challenge, you might resolve the issue with them in that second meeting, or you might have a follow up meeting so they can develop the teaching materials you will need to handle this issue again on your own.