Building the Nonprofit Web Back-Office

Facilitated by Ryan Ozimek, PICnet

There are maddeningly many pieces of the nonprofit back-office solution available, but no coherent set of integrated open tools that meet the range of operational requirements for nonprofits. Ryan will discuss the ideal toolset that all orgs need to do their administrative work effectively and easily, including accounting, HR, volunteer management, etc. This will segue into a discussion of the gaps, and what can we all do to help fill them.

WHat problem are we trying to solve: The problem is there are no standardized business processes in the nonprofit world.

- Different at different scales Small 1-10 Excell QB Med 11-200 QB - G.P. (Great Plains) ENT 101++ G.P. - SAP

- Let's focus on small non-profits, $1 million budget and down

Problems: -Calendering and Scheduling - Internal Email - Knowledge Management - HR Management - Case Management - Donor Management - Volunteer Management - Forecasting/Budgeting

Solutions: Google Aps ADP Paycycle RaisersEdge FinancialEdge

No Open Source solutions for any back office problems.

Quickbooks suck because it doesn't talk to other services

Can't deliver a platform to small users, but can deliver a platform to the Fiscal Sponsors, they are organized enough to manage data, and let the small projects have access to parts of that data.

People aren't using standards

Transfer Standards are very important.

You want organizations with similar missions/setups, you want to be able to share their custominizations across the same platform as a template, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel

HR Excel Spreadsheets Filing cabinates Federal/ State regulations force certain formats

PROBLEM: The problem is there are no standardized business processes in the nonprofit world.

In nonprofits turnover is high. Inefficiencies are rampant, quickbooks suck, and when people walk out the door they take a lot of knowledge with them. Highly customized/painful tools make replacing that knowledge expensive.

SOLUTIONS:

Standardize processes where they can be so we can build standard tools.

Assemble a flexible tool to standardize best practices but is easily customizable, while retain the ability to output to commonly used Transfer Standards

Build open source tools that standardize proccesses and then push the data to APIs for data storage/management tools that are already written.