Software for Charities and Nonprofits

The funder report is the constraint

Grant funding comes with reporting obligations that are specific to each funder, and most charities assemble those reports by hand from spreadsheets, case notes and memory. It consumes days per report and it is a condition of the money.

The most valuable thing we build in this sector is nearly always the same: capture the activity data in the shape the funder needs, and generate the report.

One charity was spending eleven days a year assembling four funder reports. The data existed; it was in four places and three formats.

Capture once, report many ways

• One record of an activity, session or intervention
• Tagged with the funding streams it counts towards
• Outcome measures captured at the point of delivery
• Demographics collected consistently and stored proportionately
• Reports generated per funder, in their format

The design decision that makes this work is recording the activity once with multiple funding tags, rather than keeping a separate spreadsheet per grant.

Beneficiary data deserves care

Charities often hold sensitive information about vulnerable people. The obligations are the same as anywhere and the consequences of getting it wrong are worse.

• Collect the minimum the service and the funder genuinely require
• Role-based access, so not everyone sees everything
• Audit logging on record access
• Retention limits enforced, not aspirational
• A safe route for a beneficiary to see or delete their data

Volunteers

1. Registration with the checks a role requires
2. Availability and skills recorded
3. Shifts offered and accepted on a phone
4. Hours logged, which is itself a reportable figure for many funders
5. Training and certification tracked with expiry

Spending the budget well

Many major software vendors offer substantial nonprofit discounts or donated licences. We check those before quoting a build, and it has more than once removed the need for one.

Frequently asked questions