
Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations? - theneck
Lately I&#x27;ve been thinking about doing programming for nonprofits, both because I want to help out with what I&#x27;m good at but also to hone my skills and potentially get some open source credit.<p>So far I&#x27;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.<p>Isn&#x27;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?
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mtmail
Similar question two weeks ago with 60 comments "Ask HN: Improving the world
as a software developer"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948427)

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bigredhdl
I would be interested in ideas for this as well.

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westurner
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](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/](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"?

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westurner
... 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.

