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Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations?

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Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations?

#1
Lately I've been thinking about doing programming for nonprofits, both because I want to help out with what I'm good at but also to hone my skills and potentially get some open source credit.

So far I've had a hard time finding nonprofit projects where I can just pick up something and start programming. I know about freecodecamp.org, but they force you to go through their courses, and as I already have multiple years of experience as a developer, I feel like that would be a waste of time.

Isn't there a way to contribute to nonprofit organization in a more direct and simple manner like how you would contribute to an open source project on GitHub?

Re: Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations?

#4
There are lots of project management systems with issue tracking and kanban boards with swimlanes. Because it's unreasonable to expect all volunteers to have a GH account or even understand what GH is for, support for external identity management and SSO may be essential to getting people to actually log in and change their password regularly.

Sidling a nonprofit with custom built software with no other maintainers is not what they need. Build (and pay for development, maintenance, timely security upgrades and security review) or Buy (where is our data? who backs it up? how much does it cost for a month or a few years? Is it open source with a hosted option; so that we can pay a developer to add or fix what we need?)

"Solutions architect" may be a more helpful objective title for what's needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_architecture

What are their needs? Marketing, accounting, operations, HR

Marketing: web site, maps service, directions, active social media presence that speaks to their defined audience

Accounting: Revenue and expenses, payroll/benefits/HR, projections, "How can we afford to do more?", handle donations and send receipts for tax purposes, reports to e.g. https://charitynavigator.org/ and infographics for wealth-savvy donors

Operations: Asset inventory, project management, volunteer scheduling

HR: payroll, benefits, volunteer scheduling, training, turnover, retaining selfless and enlightenedly-self-interested volunteers

Create a spreadsheet. Rows: needs/features/business processes. Columns: essential, nice to have, software products and services.

Create another spreadsheet. Rows: APIs. Columns: APIs.

Training: what are the [information systems] processes/workflows/checklists? How can I suggest a change? How do we reach consensus that there's a better way to do this? Is there a wiki? Is there a Q&A system?

"How much did you sink on that? Probably seemed like the best option according to the information available at the time, huh? Do you have a formal systems acquisition process? Who votes according to what type of prepared analysis? How much would it cost to switch? What do we need to do to ETL (extract, transform, and load) into a newer better system?"

When estimating TCO for a nonprofit, turnover is a very real consideration. People move. Chances are, as with most organizations TBH, there's a patchwork of partially-integrated and maybe-integrable systems that it may or may not be more cost-effective and maintainable to replace with a cloud ERP specifically designed for nonprofits.

Who has access rights to manually update which parts of the website? How can we include dynamic ([other] database-backed) content in our website? What is a CMS? What is an ERP? What is a CRM? Are these customers, constituents, or both? When did we last speak with those guys? How can people share our asks with social media networks?

If you're not willing or able to make a long-term commitment, the more responsible thing to do is probably to disclose any conflicts of interest recommend a SaaS solution hosted in a compliant data center.

q="nonprofit erp"

q="nonprofit crm"

q="nonprofit cms" + donation campaign visibility

What time of day are social media posts most likely to get maximum engagement from which segments of our audience? What is our ~ARPU "average revenue per user/follower"?

Re: Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations?

#5

There are lots of project management systems with issue tracking and kanban boards with swimlanes. Because it's unreasonable to expect all volunteers to have a GH account or even understand what GH is for, support for external identity management and SSO may be essential to getting people to actually log in and change their password regularly. Sidling a nonprofit with custom built software with no other maintainers i…

... As a volunteer and not a FTE, it may be a worthwhile exercise to build a prototype of the new functionality with whatever tools you happen to be familiar with with the expectation that they'll figure out a way to accomplish the same objectives with their existing systems. If that's not possible, there may be a business opportunity: are there other organizations with the same need? Is there a sustainable market for such a solution? You may be building to be acquired.