I would suggest that technical persons with education and non-profit clients in SL take a crash-course in OpenSim starting at OpenSimulator.org. Last week, I loaded the new version 0.7 of OpenSim on my laptop and was pleasantly surprised. Read about my experiences in my blog. It takes about a hour to create a simple world.
Note that there is a small community of service providers around OpenSim. Anyone know a good list of these folks? And, thanks Troy for reminding us of all the contributions from non-profit groups in SL.