The Community Platform

1. Comprehensive Mapping Tools for community and advanced users to compare available resources and needs at a zip code, census tract, county or other locally defined neighborhood or geography (including wards, police precincts and school boundaries).
2. Comprehensive financial data on organizations from IRS data and Financial Analysis Tools for exploring the finances of individual organizations, groups of organizations or the nonprofit sector as a whole.
3. Comprehensive small-geography Census data
4. Shared Resources: A “Craigslist” for nonprofits, including the option to post and manage Volunteer Opportunities as well, as part of the Shared Resources or as a distinct section.
5. Customizable “Landing Pages” for different issues areas, umbrella associations, neighborhoods, and communities that can be co-branded and administered by local partners.
6. The ability to create Custom Lists of organizations for using in mapping or other analyses
7. KnowledgeBase or Library of community information resources
8. Tools for tracking “point” community needs and volunteer opportunities — e.g., potholes that need filling, playgrounds that need help, etc.
9. A highly customized look and feel and URL for each Platform.
10. Community Project Management tools to help student or neighborhood groups manage tasks, projects and information
11. The Schools Module and Neighborhood School Dashboard for linking schools to community organizations and mapping and tracking school needs in relationship to resources. Each school can customize its own dashboard.
12. The ability to integrate other “point data” (informal organizations, government agency locations, 2-1-1 information or whatever a local partner wants to include) in a Comprehensive Resource Directory that can be link to other directories in the community.
13. The ability to add locally-generated Community Indicators or geographic boundaries such as police or school system data and to place the Indicators on maps or on the Community Indicator Dashboard.
14. Neighborhood “Storytelling”: The ability for neighborhoods or communities to define their boundaries, upload point data, and indicators and to add stories or photos to accompany the data on maps.
15. Blogs: admins can update one or more blogs on the platform
    
16. Event Calendar:   Sites can have multiple event calendars for all events in a community as well as “sub-calendars” filtered for specific topics or locations.  Calendars can also be set up to sync with Google Calendars.
17.  The University-Community Engagement Module to help universities track student and faculty volunteering and community projects on desktop and smart phones for reporting university-wide, by department, center or on a student “co-curricular CV.” (Planned for late 2016; there may be an additional fee for this module.)

User Scenarios

Scenario 1: Nonprofit financial managers

In the District of Columbia, CFOs of child welfare organizations meet periodically to discuss government contracting and other financial issues. If they don’t already exist, similar “peer learning groups” could be established in Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network or other formal or ad hoc nonprofit associations. A member of one of the groups could prepare a report using the Community Platform showing the key financial ratios of the peer group of participating organizations and use that as the basis for a discussion about what strategies are working for dealing with cash flow problems, generating new earned and contributed income, or budgeting.

Financial advisors, such as CPA firms, could provide comparative analyses using the Community Platform for their clients to help them understand if their financial strengths and weaknesses are unique to them or are field-wide.  (If they are field-wide, the solutions may be very different then if they are unique to an individual organization.)

Financial managers can click on a graph to copy and save it for use in a Powerpoint presentation for board members, bankers, or others who may want to get a snapshot of an organization’s financial performance.

Scenario 2: Private and government funders and policymakers.

Funders and policymakers often struggle to understand if their grantees and their communities are best served by general operating support or program-specific funding. Analysis of the financial health of grantees can help shed light on this question.  Funders can create custom lists of grantees and map them in relation to other organizations.  Are they distributed consistent with the goals of the funder? Do some neighborhoods receive a disproportionate number of grants?  These are among the questions the tool can help with.

Other questions include:

• If grants are reduced or eliminated due to endowment losses or a decline in state revenue, do grantees have the wherewithal to survive?
• Do grantees or potential grantees have balance sheets that can support bank loans or lines of credit to cover slow payments by government funders or make needed investments in IT or other infrastructure?

Options for encouraging use of the tool:

• Training sessions for nonprofit umbrella organizations.  They, in turn, could use the system to report on trends in their fields.
• Train-the-trainer sessions with umbrella organizations and consultants who could then work with their members and clients.

Scenario 3: “Gap Analysis” to identify gaps between resources and needs

In Brevard County, Florida, the Community Foundation is working with the Second Harvest Food Bank, United Way, Brevard 2-1-1, Brevard Interfaith Coalition, Leadership Brevard, the Harris Corporation (a Fortune 500 company), Feeding America, and others to map “food deserts,” food pantries and other food resources, and indicators of need by census tract.   The Interfaith Coalition plans to recruit new congregations to provide food pantries where gaps in coverage are found.  A custom landing page on Connect Brevard is being created so policymakers and residents interested in this issue can quickly jump to a map to see where the resources are in relationship to needs and get access to other resources and information on the issue.

Scenario 4:   Shared Goods and Services

The first step is outreach through state and local nonprofit associations and funders to encourage their members to take advantage of the system.

Once we have a few users, we will find and document (possibly with a short video as well as in writing) examples of organizations that are sharing resources successfully.  Our sense is that many organizations would find sharing resources and personnel valuable if they were to try it. However, busy schedules, inertia, and a bit of trepidation about the potential for problems means that sharing doesn’t happen as often as it ought to.  Providing an easy-to-use system and a gentle nudge from umbrella associations and funders seems likely to encourage more organizations to try it.

Scenario 5:   Creating a community nonprofit network

The nonprofit sector appears fragmented in many communities.  The staff and volunteers of small grassroots organizations – as well as many larger organizations – are often preoccupied with their core missions or financial survival and have had scant opportunity to connect to other organizations—especially those outside their immediate area of activities.  Yet there are often opportunities for collaboration that benefit both the collaborating organizations as well as the broader community.

For example, in the Pleasant Plains neighborhood of Washington, DC, this year, a small coalition of nonprofit organizations came together to create the Pleasant Plains Neighborhood Network and produced a monthly newsletter.  The arts organization has primary responsibility for producing the newsletter while the students who participate with the local mentoring and tutoring program hand deliver the newsletter to every home in the neighborhood, since many of the residents lack access to the internet.

The Community Platform facilitates the creation of these networks by providing organizations with access to lists and maps of all the nonprofit organizations in their community and descriptions of their programs and activities.  Registered teams of users can also assign team members to contact individual organizations and track information on the contacts in private team notes.   The teams can then create a custom list of network members that can be tracked and mapped separately from the other organizations in the community.

Scenario 6:   Linking a community nonprofit network to the neighborhood

In Washington DC’s Ward 1, a diverse and gentrifying area immediately north of the city’s downtown area, 70 people from approximately 50 local nonprofit organizations met to create Strengthening Ward One Together (SWOT).  The lead organization is the ward’s family support collaborative, a ten-year old organization created by the city council which has become a major human service provider in its own right.  The members of SWOT are planning to canvass the community (although activities around the U.S. Census may delay the project).  The goals are several:

• Identify the needs of residents and projects that nonprofits and the community can take on to strengthen the community.
• Identify people who are interested in volunteering or contributing in other ways to local nonprofit organizations and efforts to improve the community.
• Communicate to residents through the act of canvassing that there are people and organizations in the community actively working to make it a better place.
• Link residents to nonprofits or government agencies that can help meet individual needs.
• Bring members of the network together around a concrete project that will benefit the whole community and strengthen each individual organization by, we hope, finding new volunteers and sources of support, and increasing the community’s awareness of its activities.

The Community Inventory can serve several purposes in developing projects like this.  The Individuals module, when completed, will permit the system to be used for tracking individuals’ views on their neighborhoods, their role as volunteers, and their self-identified needs. It will also give organizations the ability to track contacts with or services provided.

Scenario 7:  Creating place-based initiative to support young people or senior citizens

With the addition of the Individuals module, the system could provide a basic platform for organizations to share information on the services that young people and their families are receiving from a tutoring program, a community center, and an anti-violence program that are working together to lower dropout rates in a community.  The Harlem Children’s Zone model, which provides comprehensive wrap-around services for young people ranging from its charter school to health and human services could be facilitated by our platform.  Alternatively, we have built APIs to permit sharing of data with other web-based systems and this same approach could be used to integrate with existing case management systems such as Efforts-to-Outcomes or with new products more narrowly tailored to providing community-wide shared case management services.

Scenario 8:  Supporting a university-based community research project

Campus-community programs like those affiliated with Campus Compact or classes in community sociology or community development can use the Community Platform for a number of different types of projects:

• Map community needs and resources on a block-by-block basis.
• Survey residents about their civic engagement, willingness to volunteer, and involvement with local nonprofit organizations.
• Assess the financial health of local nonprofit organizations.
• Use Community Platform as the basis for a survey of organizations.

Scenario 9:  Providing a community resources database or directory

Many but not all communities are served by information and referral services such as the “211” systems run by many United Way agencies.   Our system has the data collection, classification and search tools to support these sorts of efforts.  Ideally, in communities that have existing systems, we would like to exchange data.  For example, we can easily create a real-time feed of our program and organization data for a directory service.  For all but the best funded, this would provide them with some new organizations that they don’t have in their files.  We, in turn, could benefit from the highly detailed program data that these services often collect.

Scenario 10:  Neighborhood School Dashboard

A PTA, Communities in Schools (CIS) school resource director, or other staff or volunteers working with the school decide to systematically map the local resources and needs of the school area and to tie that to school performance, volunteer opportunities, and more. The Schools Module provides a way to do that.