Non-profit web companies for experience?

I'm currently in college and trying to find a way to get some real life experience in web development. I figure there has to be some type of non-profit web development company that helps organizations get their sites up and running. With my time constraints and only being able to work from home or very near to my place, I can't think of another way to start getting experience - an actual job just wouldn't be possible right now (and I doubt I could get hired anyways given my lack of experience and/or degree).

Does anything like I'm thinking of exist?

 

Its not so much a question about getting "experience", web-development is a thriving field on its own, and dose pretty well without the otherwise irrelevant "experience" many people gather throughout their life's.

When it comes to web-development/design, then we got many really experienced people on one hand, who often struggle to pay their own bills. On the other hand we got the unskillful, they may or may not be well educated, but that's irrelevant to the subject. What's important to note about them, is that the quality of their solutions is notably low, often showing itself in invalid non-standard code, as well as badly optimized and impractical code.

The keyword is marketing. In other words, your business is only going to succeed, if either you hit a gold vain, or if you promote it the right way. That works almost regardless of the quality of your services. Even more so, if you got the right connections; the clients who recommend you; the clients who keep coming back. Etc. Its not hard to tell what it dose to the authority impression of your buisness, if you combine quality services, with good marketing.

On one hand, I've seen highly educated people, who doesn't appear to know anything about what they are doing. On the other hand I've seen teenagers, with perhaps nothing but a few days worth of coding experience, do a far better job then the educated.

If you aim to "become" a web developer, then don't start looking at the things you cant do. You should consider the things you can do, a good developer/designer is not only able to provide solutions, they are also able to expand beyond their educational level to some degree. The experience of a web-developer or web-designer for that matter, is relative. Likely even the most experienced still have something to learn. So you should always keep in mind that your current skills is valuable, otherwise you just never get to the point of making your first sale, for a reasonable price.

Working for free is just a chain around the foot, which is going to really slow down either your own, or the potential of your buisness. Unless of cause, you have some other reason to do so. You shouldn't be doing it just to get "experience", or to get something you can show to clients. Because you can easily create a few CMS solutions, (or layouts as a web-designer) to show off for clients.

Those who are really skilled, don't look for work, they simply start working, and ultimately let their clients come to them.

 

if you can do joomla, there are several high-end development companies that that does work with non-profits.
for example, http://www.cedc.org/tag/joomla is just one I found on the fly.

I imagine drupal and other cms organizations have like. there was one group that did al gore's campaign and after wards went on to do non-profits. in fact, i have seen a few political campaign web development teams do this.

and most political campaign sites are smokin' and high quality.

 

Even I heard google offers free PPC ads for non profit organization..
is it true?