Building Software That Makes an Impact: Tech Solutions for Non-Profits

Non-profit organizations are essential for the long-term functioning of our society because they usually work with issues that are not yet obvious to the general population. Many non-profits target social groups not well understood by society, and whose challenges are often unknown.

While legislation adapts to the needs of those groups after some time, protecting them, the path towards legal recognition is often complicated and lengthy (in many cases, it can take 50 or more years).

Our complex technology-based society has solved many problems that seemed eternal to our civilization even 100 years ago. However, those solutions create new challenges and unveil issues that were simply invisible before.

In this light, non-profits now play an extremely vital role as trailblazers and pioneers, which help society target issues that were never before seen in human history. For this reason, the demand for their services is likely to grow; together with this demand, the need for software solutions capable of raising their efficiency is also expected to rise.

In this article, we want to offer some examples of what software developers can do when it comes to helping non-profits.

AI chatbot systems for non-profits

Since many non-profit organizations are trailblazers in their fields, they tend to receive many requests for help and cannot always process all of them on time. These requests can often be split into two types: some are standard, allowing for pre-made responses; others are unique and require expert attention.

While pre-programmed chatbots were often enough to solve this problem, including AI can further decrease the experts workload by applying existing rules to more specific cases. All this should be sufficient to allow non-profit experts to target only the most complex cases, thus maximizing the positive impact of their activities via non-profit software development.

This is vital for many non-profits because they rely greatly on charity and other outside financing. By cutting their expenses this way, they can significantly improve the quality of their services and the number of people they help.

Social media engagement tools for non-profits

Non-profits frequently rely on their ability to deliver information about their core activities to the general population. As mentioned before, many problems they work with tend to be generally unknown to society. For this reason, they need to both tackle those problems efficiently and inform people about them in the first place because many of them may be unknown even to the groups affected by those challenges.

Issues like negative after effects of sedentary lifestyles or social media fatigue are often neglected in our society, and active awareness campaigns are required to show the real negative impacts of those phenomena on everyone.

Modern software development companies can be instrumental in bringing about these positive changes in awareness by offering non-profits tools for effectively managing social media campaigns. These tools can be very diverse: non-profits need general analytical dashboards, instruments for discourse analysis, petition management software, and high-quality apps for information distribution on social media and via emails.

Donor management platforms

Non-profits greatly depend on independent donors. Since those people give funds to non-profits voluntarily, they need to ensure that this experience is at least emotionally rewarding. Software companies can develop donor management platforms specifically for this goal.

These tools enable automated thank-you messages, integrate various payment processors, can form detailed statistics for non-profit experts, and, if integrated with chatbots, can answer the most common questions of potential donors.

Donor management platforms also allow non-profits to distribute their activity reports efficiently and, in some cases, even directly specify the impact of a particular donation. This level of personalization is essential for raising engagement as a common criticism of non-profits is the lack of feedback and the inability of the donors to understand what happens to their money after donations. Donor management platforms can be developed to answer those questions and improve transparency for everyone.

Volunteer and event management tools

A common practice for non-profits is to ask their supporters to donate their time (and not only money), as many of their activities require direct human intervention. For example, awareness campaigns demand a lot of one-to-one communication, even on the Internet. Many non-profits must manage large groups of volunteers to achieve their goals.

Here, the requirements for the relevant software are similar to those of donor management systems; however, they also have some unique features. While there is a need for emotional fulfillment (for example, via the expression of gratitude) or proper dissemination of information, non-profit managers also need to know who participates in their volunteer groups and what tasks can be assigned to them.

Without this knowledge, it may be very hard to mobilize the supporters of a particular non-profit for vital events simply due to the lack of information. Software developers can help non-profits with this administrative task, enabling them to focus more on their core activities instead.

Conclusion

To summarize, we believe that modern software developers are a group that is uniquely positioned to have a broad impact on the functioning of non-profits today.

The efforts of software developers are vital for reducing many purely administrative tasks, such as donor management or communication with citizens, enabling non-profit experts to concentrate on the most impactful activities instead.