I think some of the others have alluded to the potential to suck your time and goodwill dry for not necessarily a lot of gain. If people don't have to pay, they

I think some of the others have alluded to the potential to suck your time and goodwill dry for not necessarily a lot of gain. If people don't have to pay, they could easily expect you to build junk or invest time in something that is never used - same for stakeholders in normal companies right? I think the only time it doesn't feel too galling is when you really believe in the charity and what they do but I would always be careful to set expectations and set a time and duration limit initially so you can get out if it is really not worthwhile and you don't want to seem like a jerk. Truth is that lots of people don't know how difficult technical things can be so they ask you to build a website or "just change this" because they think websites are like Word documents. You might get more engaged employees if instead of donating dev time, you save it up and once a month you spend a few hours together sorting out a park or cleaning rubbish somewhere etc. :-)